It is that time of the year again, friends!

October has begun, and that means it's time to crack your knuckles and start contributing to your favorite open-source projects with full force!

As you all know, we at Team XenoX are kind of obsessed with great open-source products, and our mission is to leverage the power of open-source development to build tech that improves the everyday lives of people. To that end, we have built more than 12 great products over the past year and a half, and they've received a lot of support from the community!

This October, we want to rekindle the fire for community-driven development and work on some of our old products to take them to even greater heights! So let me tell you about two of the projects we will be focusing on for Hacktoberfest.

Caligator

Caligator is a simple but powerful app that lets you calculate anything and do easy unit conversions for measurements like length , weight , currency , and more. We've made Caligator super easy to use so you don't have to type in perfect equations. Caligator thinks the way you do, so it can interpret what you're trying to calculate and give you the desired result as you're typing!

Check out what Caligator is capable of in action.

We launched Caligator last year and everyone here loved it. It got a great response on ProductHunt as well. Here's what we promised was on the roadmap:

1. Font size preferences
2. Export options
3. Click to copy
4. More themes
5. Implementing Math.js

We've already worked on some of these things and added more to the plan for Caligator as well! October is going to be a big month for Caligator and we're going to build a lot of cool features as well as fix a lot of issues. Here are a few of the biggest issues in the app currently:

1. Letters before numbers
2. Support for variables
3. Others

Check out the project repo

$ npm install && npm start

$ npm run release

Ovuli

Ovuli started out as a terminal-based utility which we called Ovuli-CLI. It starts with collecting knowledge about your average cycle, last period date, etc. The output gives you the details about the next period dates, fertility window, approximate ovulation, and Pregnancy Tests day.

Then we decided to build it further as a full-fledged React Native app that would support 20+ official Indian languages. Ovuli was one of the flagship projects during GirlScript Summer of Code 2020 earlier this year. I, along with a bunch of fellow coders, mentored a lot of youngsters and we built the app over a period of 2 months. It was a really fun and fulfilling experience. One of my mentees wrote about the experience in detail. You can read it here.

Check out some of the mockups below:

Now it's time to make it even bigger and better. Here's what we have planned for Ovuli next:

1. Historical Data
2. Settings Page
3. Prediction Section

And here's a quick list of the biggest issues that we need to fix:

1. Select Language Issue
2. Fixing Navigation Problem
3. Improvements in Design

We are also looking for contributors who can help us translate the app to other languages (especially Indian languages), as making it a truly multilingual tool is one of our main goals here. So even if your PR only contains translations, we'll be more than happy to accept it.

Check out the project repo

yarn install

expo start

So are you guys excited to contribute to these kickass open-source products and be a part of building something great with Team XenoX?

Join us!

There are two ways you can contribute to Team XenoX projects.
1. Direct PR: If you only wish to contribute a few times, mainly during this October for the event, you can shoot us a PR directly on the relevant repo. It will be reviewed by me or someone from the team, and if everything looks good, we'll accept it!
2. Join the squad: If you want to contribute to our projects long-term and be a part of the core team, we'd love to have you as a member of Team XenoX! Our primary channels of collaboration are a Telegram group and a Notion wiki. Apply here!

Hope you're as excited about Hacktoberfest as I am.
See you there!

P.S. No spam please!

Hacktoberfest invites a lot of spam PRs from people who just want a free t-shirt. Don't be that person. Read this for more info on the rampant spam, and please follow the guidelines on what is appropriate conduct for the event. Make sure to go through these posts before you start contributing!

Happy Hacktoberfest!

Jess Lee (she/her) Oct 2 4 min read

#hacktoberfest #opensource #meta #contributorswanted

An Update on Hacktoberfest

Jess Lee (she/her) Oct 1 2 min read

#hacktoberfest #opensource #meta

Let's keep it clean and fun for everyone. Open-source maintainers work hard to keep their repos clean. Don't make our jobs harder. We'll report you hard. Make sure all your PRs are meaningful and add something of actual value to the projects. If you're a beginner and don't know how/what you could contribute, talk to me or any of my teammates. My Twitter is @sarthology.