Be the Change, Make the Change — Contribute to the Change

Be the Change, Make the Change — Contribute to the Change

GitHub is an indispensable tool for anyone aspiring to be a successful web developer. Making contributions to existing projects or may be even driving a new project altogether are crucial parts forming a developer’s journey. Developers are expected to make things happen in a faster, more efficient way on a website or may be an application for that instance. While performing these daily essentials, they tend to come up with something new and unique. Creativity is the essence of innovation. In their journey of ‘Make It Happen’, our two talented in-house developers made a valuable contribution — a contribution that will be not only useful to our team but even to the other community members using it.

When you plan to add a new feature to your website or application, a vital ingredient to be considered revolves around enhancing User Experience. Aniruddha Shevle, our front-end developer was working on building an React Native app for an existing client and had sought at using some community sourced plugins. During the development process, he used react-native-google-places-autocomplete plugin, a handy option for quickly accessing data from Google Places and populating the app based on user’s queries. Everyone of us come to a point when we feel that if we change a particular thing, it might make it BETTER! Aniruddha played his part in not only coming up with a better way of achieving the desired functionality, but also contributing back to community.

Having control over these elements is crucial when it comes to making the best user experience and this is exactly what Aniruddha did by suggesting the change by making provision for developers to override pre-determined background and allowing them to be set them individually. Neat!

Similarly, we had another contribution from Tushar Kotlapure, a fellow React developer, suggesting some more fixes for the same plugin, giving developers the freedom to customise the UX/UI elements on the plugin and adjust the look and feel exactly the way they would want to.

Aniruddha had also worked on an alternate solution for a calendar plugin called React Day picker. The plugin in itself allowed some flexibility to the developers in how they would want it to look and function. But like everything in this day and age, one can always add more, strive to make things better. With that in mind, he proposed changes to the which allowed the developers to use the same plugin in various scenarios and have greater control.

Do you have any interesting developer stories to share? We, and a lot of others in the community would love to hear them, may be adapt to a few changes you might have made! Keep sharing, contributing — Be the change to bring one.

You can read more about their work here:

React-native-google-places-autocomplete

React-day-picker