It’s Winter break now at Hacker School, but the week was quite productive. I worked on two projects.

Ray-tracer

My first project of the week was a ray-tracer. I started creating classes for lines, spheres and vectors in a geometry.py file. After a day of work I was able to generate a black dot in a blank screen. Then I added a horizontal plane, a light font, shadows and reflections. I used these slides to guide me when I got confused. Now my program is able to generate images like:

My first Mozilla bug

I’ve always wanted to contribute to open-source and now I finally feel ready. I searched for simple Python bugs with no owners on Bugs Ahoy and decided to go for Bug 1052195, because it was a Django bug and I’ve finished doing the very well explained tutorial just last week. The actual bug fix involved about 3 lines of codes, but I ended up reading Django’s source code to learn how things work, it was a great experience. After submitting my pull request I was asked to add test cases covering my changes. After reading the test files and experimenting a little I was able to add new tests without breaking anything. My pull request was merged and now the sole verified email address is checked by default for users with only one verified email. It was a great experience and everyone was really nice with me on the IRC channel. I can’t wait to pick up my next bug!

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