Introduction

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Hi everyone, welcome to my blog. My name is Joel Azwar and I'm a student/amateur programmer studying Computer Programming and Analysis in Seneca College in Toronto.

I've taken up an Open Source Development course this semester and this blog is going to be dedicated to my ventures into open source technology and the progress that comes along with learning about it. So it's going to be my personal developer journal. 

Open Source technology is something that's always intrigued me about the field of programming. I think it's quite fascinating how programmers all around the world can combine each other's efforts to improve, fix, or change something very drastically. Regardless of what they do, it helps advance the project one way or another which is a positive all around. 

The scale of it is also quite captivating. There are millions of developers all around the world and they can contribute to any open source projects. I truly believe open source technology is a quite unique concept/method in programming and am very excited to learn more about it throughout this course.

I'm currently located in Jakarta, Indonesia, as of now since I had to relocate back home due to COVID this past March. But that has no effect in my efforts to contribute towards open source development because the communal and global aspect of it is what drives it, and therefore where I am in the world doesn't affect my ability to work on open source technology.

Throughout the term, I'm hoping to be able to contribute to open source projects through increasingly more complex fixes, starting from the most basics such as typos or syntax errors, or even simple tasks like improving documentation. But by the end I hope to be confident enough to attempt more daring things such as code improvements or even feature addition even though as of now it seems a daunting task. I'm also hoping to be able to work on software/apps that I use or related to what I use in my daily life like VLC media player, Firefox, etc. Though I would also be happy to contribute to smaller projects that I may be interested in as I learn about more open source projects.

For my trending github repository I chose a search engine written in Rust called MeiliSearch. I chose this project because a search engine seemed like a very practical tool and analysing the project may help me gain useful knowledge for that type of technology.

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