Amazing Hacktoberfest 2020 — Thanks To Our Contributors ❤️

The outcome of all amazing contributions to DeckDeckGo.

Let’s cut right to the chase: Hacktoberfest 2020 for DeckDeckGo has been amazing 🤩.

We have received thirty-two Pull Requests which not only helped us to solve features and issues but definitely pushed forward our editor for slides 🚀.

We would like to thank once again each and every person who gave us a hand and, the least we can do, give them credits back by listing here afterwards all their amazing work!

Note: following contributions are sort by date ascendant.

Display Regions

We aim to be transparent. That’s why we are listening publicly each and every third party services we are using.

Jade Suntoro (Twitter / GitHub), a front end Engineer from Taipei, enhanced this list with the location of the cloud server as it can matter to know where data are host.

Note: Obviously, on demand for enterprise clients, these can be moved elsewhere.

Auto Slide

Being able to loop a presentation and make its slides swipe automatically for showcase purpose war requested since more than a year.

Fortunately, thanks to Themistoklis Bogiatzoglou (Github) this capability is now supported.

In addition, this new feature was also documented in our doc for developers, thanks to Hugo Licon V. (GitHub).

Version And License Badges

Akash Borad (Twitter / GitHub) is a long time contributor, therefore we should not just thank him for having added badges to all our mono-repo READE.md files but also for his constant help and support.

Script To Remove www Before Build

We had an issue when our editor was build locally if the www (output folder) was not cleared first. Akash provided a script to automatically process this step.

Border Radius

Thanks to the many (yes many, not just once) contributions of Thomas Ledoux (Twitter / GitHub), a front end developer from Belgium, the elements of our users’ slides can now be styled in new ways, such as modifying their border radius.

Letter Spacing

Useful specially for titles, Thomas added another style option to modify the letter spacing of elements.

Colors History

To be honest with you, the color picker used to not be my favorite part of our editor, I always thought that it should be improved. Fortunately, thanks to a full rewrite of the component and enhancements provided by Andreas Moldskred (GitHub), in order to keep track of the colors used among slides, and Jonathan Wagoner (GitHub), to display the focus on selected state, it is now more convenient than ever to work with.

Standalone Pager Web Components

Our presentations used to display a “pager” in the bottom left corner (“Page 1 on page XY”). This default display was turned optional a couple of months ago, when I noticed I rather liked decks without these 😉. Nevertheless, it remained in our core Web Component.

That was until Akash extracted it to a standalone component developed with Stencil, making our core even lighter.

Looks like he provided quite a few improvements no one might notice but, makes actually the all platform smoother.

Full Screen Bottom Sheet

Together with the help of Andreas, we have redesigned the editor’s actions when displayed in full screen mode. The goal of this change was to make the tools less predominant when users are actually not editing their slides but rather moving their mouse while presenting.

Style List Items

Thanks to a feature provided by Koushtav Chakrabarty (GitHub), users can style the items of their ordered or unordered lists.

User Experience

Generally speaking, through Pull Requests or discussions and thus since many months, Roy (Twitter / GitHub), a font end developer from the Netherlands, helped and made our editor more accessible to anyone.

In this particular Hacktoberfest he notably improved our issue templates, adjusted some alignments and links in our documentation and helped shape the new color picker.

His UX contributions to our project is definitely always a plus for us and for all our users.

Optional Chaining

In addition to the UX improvements, Roy also refactored the editor to introduce optional chaining through seven Pull Requests!

Overflow Hidden

I particularly like this bug fix provided by Betina Zhou (GitHub).

First of all, if fixes a bug I did create 😅 and secondly it displays that there is no small or big contributions. Each and every single contributions push the quality forward!

Prompt To Reload

Slides published with DeckDeckGo are Progressive Web Apps. To make readers aware if new versions of the decks they are reading have been published, Akash provided a prompt to reload for all our kits.

Word Cloud

I once saw a tweet of Michael D. Callaghan which gave me the idea that it would be nice to be able to generate on the fly “word of cloud” in presentations.

Achilles Moraites (Twitter / GitHub), a software engineer from Thessaloniki, Greece, created such a new Web Component developed with Stencil and d3-cloud.

Cherry on top, it cannot “just” be use with DeckDeckGo but in any websites or applications. Checkout its documentation.

Box-Shadow

Thomas was eager to add many new sweet styling options. Thanks to another of his contributions, users are able to set box-shadows for elements of their slides.

Waves

In addition to horizontal transitions, presentations made with DeckDeckGo can newly be swiped vertically or scrolled with a new mode we called “Papyrus”. These two new animation made the slides looks like a bit more like landing pages. That’s why adding “waves” to their background feels almost natural.

This feature was developed and provided by Jade. Quite an amazing contribution!

Workbox v5

In addition to his “word cloud” contributions, Achilles even took the time to migrate our editor from Workbox v4 to v5, something I was hoping to solve for quite a while.

Active Slide Number

Another nice UX improvement was submitted by Rodolfo Nei (Twitter / Github). Wich such enhancement, the number of the active slide is displayed in the toolbar breadcrumbs and, hopefully, makes the user more aware of the progression in the presentation.

Medium Profile URL

One of our component takes care of rendering social links. As I noticed that Medium changed their profiles’ URL, I opened a feature request which was then solved by Sai Bhargava Ramu (GitHub).

In this particular feature, I have to highlight the process applied by Sai. First asked some more information, then drafted a Pull Request to finally effectively submit it. This was an example of good communication.

Markdown

I have to include a final feature which was developed during last October. Christian Petro (GitHub), from Slovakia, has provided this week a full new standalone Web Component developed with Stencil to bring the Markdown support to our editor.

I still have to review it and, I am not sure yet “how” we are going to integrate it in terms of UX and design, but I am really looking forward to it.

Summary

Hacktoberfest 2020 has really surpassed my expectations and, I am so grateful so many contributors helped us bring our editor for slides forward.

Thank you everybody — not all heroes wear capes ❤️.

To infinity and beyond!

David

Reach me out on Twitter and, why not, give a try to DeckDeckGo for your next presentations.