Hello, Oxide team! I'm Josh, a graduate student at Northwestern studying web development and researching programming languages. Before doing that, I worked as a UI engineer; you can check out my personal website here and a few technical blog posts here. After looking at the source code for this project, I thought of some exciting but significant changes, so I thought I should check to see whether they're welcome before moving too far ahead.
If the goal of this challenge is to submit one small, tasteful patch, then I'd probably focus on cleaning up the time travel feature a bit. Some of the links generated by the existing code seem to point to non-existent places right now, so I'd probably address the comments in timetravel.js and add a few unit tests. In the context of maintaining an existing codebase, these types of adjustments seem like the most appropriate starting point.
However, given complete freedom to let my imagination run wild, I'd love to try refactoring the styles on the site to reflect Pentagram's redesign and switching from Hugo to nextjs. Since Oxide uses React elsewhere, such a change could help unify the frontend toolset if the company continues to maintain this project. We could even potentially use next's build-time hooks to query GitHub's API for pull requests and contributors instead of relying on the flat JSON files committed directly into the project. Implementing some suggestions from Lighthouse along the way for performance, accessibility, and SEO seems like a wise idea, too.
These changes would involve writing a fair amount of code, and I don't want to create a maintenance burden when none needs to exist. I'm happy to scrap these ideas entirely if this challenge is closed.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope to hear from you soon.
joshuaharry
commented
2 years ago
Hello, Oxide team! I'm Josh, a graduate student at Northwestern studying web development and researching programming languages. Before doing that, I worked as a UI engineer; you can check out my personal website here and a few technical blog posts here. After looking at the source code for this project, I thought of some exciting but significant changes, so I thought I should check to see whether they're welcome before moving too far ahead.
If the goal of this challenge is to submit one small, tasteful patch, then I'd probably focus on cleaning up the time travel feature a bit. Some of the links generated by the existing code seem to point to non-existent places right now, so I'd probably address the comments in timetravel.js and add a few unit tests. In the context of maintaining an existing codebase, these types of adjustments seem like the most appropriate starting point.
However, given complete freedom to let my imagination run wild, I'd love to try refactoring the styles on the site to reflect Pentagram's redesign and switching from Hugo to nextjs. Since Oxide uses React elsewhere, such a change could help unify the frontend toolset if the company continues to maintain this project. We could even potentially use next's build-time hooks to query GitHub's API for pull requests and contributors instead of relying on the flat JSON files committed directly into the project. Implementing some suggestions from Lighthouse along the way for performance, accessibility, and SEO seems like a wise idea, too.
These changes would involve writing a fair amount of code, and I don't want to create a maintenance burden when none needs to exist. I'm happy to scrap these ideas entirely if this challenge is closed.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope to hear from you soon.