Release 0.4 Defined and Colourblindness
Tags: opensource
Published: 2020-11-21 20:12:03

This blog post is a living document of sorts, where I'm going to document my journey to finding the right issue to work on for Release 0.4. So, to that end, I'm going to take a look at all the projects David linked me and try to find something important to work on.

##The Start
This week we got our first glimpse of what Release 0.4 would look like. 

Due December 11th, the requirements for Release 0.4 are simple: do something larger than we've ever done before. Examples were a feature, a number of bug fixes (like 3), or a large bug fix in a large repo.

That's a lot to choose from and I think it's a great way to step up to another level in our open source journey.

##What would I want to work on?

Ideally, I want to make a meaningful contribution in the form of a feature to a project. I think that's the next step that makes the most sense to me.

So far my experience in working on open source projects has been in fixing bugs or adding a feature that was meant to already be there like in MHTimer, cleaning up code, or moving from one type of authentication rule to another like in Telescope. I don't feel like I've contributed to a project in a way that I can be really proud of. Not to say I don't think my contributions so far have been good - I think they've helped me learn to get immersed in different code bases and styles and trace sequences of code through different modules and all that. And that's useful! But I really think adding a feature would round out my knowledge and give me something I can be really proud of, which is what I want to get out of this class.

This brings us to colorblindness, weirdly enough.

##The idea
![release0.4b1p1](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/iwvaf1gdc8yfs12l8fn0.png)

![release0.4b1p2](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/hf5jnnra0xzs30nsrcov.png)
 
I don't find colorblindness to be a thing that defines me and I think acting like it is would be in poor taste toward people with more inhibitive accessibility issues, but I think as someone who's affected by deuteranopia, I can give some insight into how some IDEs highlight their code and how it can be exclusionary to colourblind people. And how to fix it!

For example, I can't tell the difference between these two colours unless they're blown up.
![release0.4b1p3](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/zpktv1a2yi4n1n66s1vs.png)

A high contrast vscode theme would greatly help someone like me - unfortunately, there's little to no extensions that do this.

If you're also colourblind, please check out https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=PedroFonsecaDEV.dark-plus-colorblind&ssr=false#overview and give him all your feedback.

##The first issue

So, keeping in mind that I want to work ona  feature for an app, I thought I would go through some of the old repos that I've worked on in the past. I found this issue in the MHTimerBot

{% github https://github.com/AardWolf/MHTimerBot/issues/212 %}

While I'd like to work on it, and it's not labeled a bug, I think I would consider this a bug and would therefore probably not be in my purview of work. However, I think if I really wanted to, I could work on this and be fulfilled in some way. so it's an option.

{% github https://github.com/AardWolf/MHTimerBot/issues/63 %}

The issue above is another one I'm thinking of taking up, but I think it's already being worked on? Or perhaps in on hold - it's from 2018 after all. I wouldn't want to step on any toes but it's been so long that I think maybe it could be something I work on.