This is a mid-internship blog post. Wait. what!? Already? Let's glance over my progress, shall we?

Vocabulary Site Updates (Edition 2/many more to come)

Oh boy! 1.5 months have passed since I've been investing time in building a landing site & usage guide for CC Vocabulary. A lot has changed since the time of posting my last blog post. A lot.

Hitting "the point of no return" has never been this exciting! Time to step on the throttle! Source: Cliply

What I've been up to

Designing ⇨ Drafting ⇨ Developing ⇨ Debugging ⇨ Deploying

And the cycle contrinues. I guess it sums it all up very nicely. Can somebody appreciate the alliteration though?

Here's a gist of what I've achieved so far:

• I've gone through 2 iterations of the design. I'm happy with how the new site looks (and I genuinely hope the design team does too!).
• I've drafted around 5+ writeups dealing with Monorepo Migration, Getting Started guide, Vocabulary Overview and of course these blog posts.
• My branch on the vocabulary repository now has over 50+ commits & over 13,000 lines of code (not that I've written all of them, but you know, just for the stats)
• The first draft of the vocabulary site is now live! I'm expecting a whole bunch of changes still, but here it is if you want to have a sneak peek: https://cc-vocab-draft.surge.sh
• I've consumed the Github API to get live release history, forks and starrers count. I think it adds a really nice touch to the site in general.
• I've used surge.sh to deploy the draft site. I believe it's a really simple tool to have your site deployed within seconds!

My github contribution chart is filling up!

What I've learnt

Some say it's hard to learn through virtual internships. Well, let me prove you wrong. Here are my leanings in the past few weeks:

• It's surprising how subjective (& yet objective) designing really is.
• Vue.js is fantastic. Maybe I'm a Vue.js fan now. Should I remain loyal to React? I don't know.
• Making a site responsive isn't the easiest of tasks, but it's certainly doable after a lot of stretching & compressing; lets say that.
• "Code formatting is essential" would be an understatement to make.
• Monorepo's have their own pro's and con's. But in our case the con's were negligible, thankfully!
• I'll be following up with some performance & accessibility testing this coming week, so let's see how that plays out!
• A mentor plays a vital role in any project. My mentor @dhruvkb has been very supportive and has made sure I stick to my timeline!

Other community work tidbits

I believe apart from the internship work that I'm engaged in, I should also help around with some community PR work. I've been told I'm always welcome to, which is great!

• I got the opportunity to speak at a CCOS event alongwith fellow speakers dhruvkb & dhruvi16. I had a blast talking to budding students from DSC-IIT Surat & DSC-RIT.
• The dark mode (as promised) should be out before my next blog post.
• Deployed the vocabulary storybook on Chromatic and compared & contrasted the pros & cons. Snapshot testing in the near future maybe?
• Completed the hacktoberfest challenge.

Bonus content

Not many of you may know this, but this site uses the Lektor CMS. I needed to have it installed on my system (windows 10 OS) to run the code in our site repository. Lektor suggests running the following code in powershell as an installation step:

(new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://www.getlektor.com/installer.py') | python

I just didn't think this is a very elegant way. Being an ardent chocolatey.org fan, I just had to have it up on there! Now the installation step for lektor is simply:

choco install lektor

on the Windows PowerShell!

Have a look at the package here:

https://chocolatey.org/packages/lektor

Thank you for your time! Stay put for the next Vocabulary site update!