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How I grew my product management career with open source Shebuel Inyang Wed, 04/27/2022 - 03:00 Up Register or Login to like.

I'm a curious person, and I like to explore many fields in the technology industry, from visual design, programming, and product management. I am also drawn to open source ideas. So I'm excited to share with you how I, as a product manager (PM), have used open source to build my career. I believe my experiences can help others who are interested in product management.

More open source career advice Open source cheat sheets Linux starter kit for developers 7 questions sysadmins should ask a potential employer before taking a job Resources for IT artchitects Cheat sheet: IT job interviews What is open source software?

In simple terms, open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, enhance, and share. Opensource.com has documented a detailed and comprehensive article to help you understand what open source is. 

My discovery of open source started in the early phase of my career as a visual designer. I was curious to know what it meant and how to be a part of it and that led me to reach out to a few experienced open source contributors and advocates. Though I didn't contribute at the time, I acquired knowledge of the community which helped me when I made the decision to start contributing. 

How to break into product management

It might seem that breaking into product management is difficult, that you must put your boxing gloves on, come out fighting and force your way in. And yet, I've heard from other product managers that it was actually easier to break into compared to writing or debugging blocks of code, or pushing pixels to generate complex wireframes for product design.

Our journeys and approaches are different, so it's safe to say that the road to becoming a product manager can often be long and unpredictable. With the increasing level of competition in the job market, getting a role as an entry-level product manager can be difficult. Recruiters often require 2 to 3 years of experience to join a product team. You might ask, "How am I expected to get the experience?"

Here's a quick look at the four strategies for directing your career toward product management:

1. Internal transition at a large organization that might require your manager to advocate for you as a good fit to transition within the company. You must have proof that you have transferable skills. This is generally considered the quickest route to product management experience.

2. Junior PM roles at large organizations. It's common to go through an organization to get an internship, or to join an associate product management program that employs a junior PM.

3. You can also try to get into product management by joining a startup.

4. You can start a side project of your own to break into product management.

Without hands-on experience, it's difficult to become a product manager. As open source product manager David Ryan stated, "Few people are taking advantage of what is possibly the most under-utilized path to practical product management experience."

What is this path?

Open source is the answer

An open source project needs more than just code to be successful. This ranges from a strategy for the project, user research, and linking the strategy to daily work. These are all activities that a product manager should be actively involved in. But how much of the product management discipline is the responsibility of a first-time product manager?

Susana Videira Lopes stated in one of her articles that the "essence of getting an entry-level product role is to introduce you to the product management discipline in a way that builds up your confidence, while at the same time delivering value for the organization as early as possible."

How can an entry-level product manager get involved with an open source project, and deliver value?

Simple answer: Ask Questions

Here are some questions you can ask:

• What problem or opportunity is being explored?

• How is the solution being framed to tackle this problem?

• What metrics are used to determine whether the project is successful?

• Who are the people this solution serves?

• How are they being informed about it?

• How does the solution fit with both the immediate and wider ecosystem?

• Where is the documentation being maintained on the project?

• Do project maintainers understand accessibility requirements? Are they being met?

You've acquired skills as a product manager. Use them to help you express these thoughtful questions, and invite the team to consider them. The team can select the ones that resonate for the developers and the community, and prioritize what's most important.

These questions help you build user personas, a customer journey map, lean canvas, and more. This kind of experience goes a long way towards developing career potential.

My experience at OpenUnited

OpenUnited is a platform that connects digital talent and work in a unique way. We work with contributors to help them prove specific skills by working on high quality open source products. Once their work is verified, these talented contributors are eligible to work for companies on paid tasks.

OpenUnited is an open source platform that onboards contributors of all kinds—product managers, developers, designers, business analysts, and others. It helps them improve their skills and provides them with a long term source of high-quality paying work.

Farbod Saraf, a senior product manager at Miro, onboarded me on a platform he created with a partner. I joined the project and learned about contributing to OpenUnited. I also learned about other projects that could help me grow in my product management career, and made my first contribution. It was a good experience because I got to start working quickly on bits of the product, to improve the experience of other users on the platform. My mentor Farbod made it easier by making himself available to provide any needed help while I contributed to the project.

Everything you contribute to an open source project becomes a powerful public record of your development as a product manager. I strongly recommend the OpenUnited platform to anyone who wants to break into product management with open source.

How do you find open source projects?

Many people believe that contributing to open source is best left to developers because they find it difficult to search for and get open source projects they can comfortably contribute to.

As a first-time product manager, there are several ways to find open source projects to contribute to. Here's a list of some:

• Speak up in product manager communities such as Mind The Product and Product School.

• Go to local meetups and open source conferences like Open Source Community Africa Festival to connect with open source project creators and maintainers.

• Engage with product managers working at larger open source companies such as GitLab or Mozilla. They may be able to refer you to open source projects where your skills and contribution could be beneficial.

• Investigate open source advocates and DevRel teams at open source companies to get recommendations of open projects an entry-level product manager can contribute to.

• Look to open source companies on AngelList or popular open source products on Product Hunt. These are great places to consider in your search for open products to contribute to.

What next?

Ruth Ikegah, a great source of inspiration for me, wrote an article for beginners in open source. In her article, she gave some tips to consider as you embark on contributing to open source.

Before joining and contributing, do some research on the project, community, or organization, and ask questions. When you finally decide to join the community, try to be active by introducing yourself and stating areas where you can help the project.

Of course, open source isn't just a stepping stone for your career. It's a platform in itself, and it needs great product managers. Get involved, contribute to the community, and help it help you hone your skills.

Gaining experience in open source helped me create a successful career path in product management.

Image by:

Opensource.com

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A practical guide to light and dark mode in Jekyll Ayush Sharma Wed, 04/27/2022 - 03:00 Up Register or Login to like.

Adding a light and dark mode to my side project www.fediverse.to was a fun journey. I especially loved how intuitive the entire process was. The prefers-color-scheme CSS property contains the user's color scheme—light or dark. I then define SASS or CSS styles for both modes, and the browser applies the style the user wants. That's it! The seamless flow from operating system to browser to website is a huge win for users and developers.

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After tinkering with www.fediverse.to I decided to add light and dark modes to this website as well. I began with some internet research on how to best approach this. This GitHub thread shows the current progress of the feature. And this in-depth POC demonstrates how challenging the process can be.

The challenge

The biggest challenge is that sometimes SASS and CSS don't play well with each other.

Let me explain.

From my earlier post on light and dark themes, to create both styles I needed to define CSS like this:

/* Light mode */
:root {
   --body-bg: #FFFFFF;
   --body-color: #000000;
}

/* Dark mode */
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
   :root {
       --body-bg: #000000;
       --body-color: #FFFFFF;
   }
}

This is simple enough. With the styles defined, I use var(--body-bg) and var(--body-color) in our CSS. The colors to switch based on the value of prefers-color-scheme.

Bootstrap 5 uses Sass to define color values. My website's color scheme in _variables.scss looks like this:

// User-defined colors
$my-link-color: #FFCCBB !default;
$my-text-color: #E2E8E4 !default;
$my-bg-color: #303C6C;

The solution seems obvious now, right? I can combine prefers-color-scheme with the variables above, and boom!

// User-defined colors
:root {
 --my-link-color: #FFCCBB;
 --my-text-color: #E2E8E4;
 --my-bg-color: #303C6C;
}

/* Dark mode */
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
 :root {
 --my-link-color: #FF0000;
 --my-text-color: #FFFFFF;
 --my-bg-color: #000000;
  }
}

Additionally, I need to replace the $ values with their -- variants in _variables.scss. After making the change and running jekyll build, I get the following:

Conversion error: Jekyll::Converters::Scss encountered an error while converting 'css/main.scss':
                    Error: argument `$color2` of `mix($color1, $color2, $weight: 50%)` must be a color on line 161:11 of _sass/_functions.scss, in function `mix` from line 161:11 of _sass/_functions.scss, in function `shade-color` from line 166:27 of _sass/_functions.scss, in function `if` from line 166:11 of _sass/_functions.scss, in function `shift-color` from line 309:43 of _sass/_variables.scss from line 11:9 of _sass/bootstrap.scss from line 1:9 of stdin >> @return mix(black, $color, $weight); ----------^
             Error: Error: argument `$color2` of `mix($color1, $color2, $weight: 50%)` must be a color on line 161:11 of _sass/_functions.scss, in function `mix` from line 161:11 of _sass/_functions.scss, in function `shade-color` from line 166:27 of _sass/_functions.scss, in function `if` from line 166:11 of _sass/_functions.scss, in function `shift-color` from line 309:43 of _sass/_variables.scss from line 11:9 of _sass/bootstrap.scss from line 1:9 of stdin >> @return mix(black, $color, $weight); ----------^
             Error: Run jekyll build --trace for more information.

The error means that the Bootstrap mixins expect color values to be, well, color values, and not CSS variables. From here, dig down into the Bootstrap code to rewrite the mixin. But I must rewrite most of Bootstrap to get this to work. This page describes most of the options available at this point. But I was able to make do with a simpler approach.

Since I don't use the entire suite of Bootstrap features, I was able to add light and dark mode with a combination of prefers-color-scheme, some CSS overrides, and a little bit of code duplication.

Step 1: Separate presentation from structure

Before applying the new styles to handle light and dark modes, I performed some clean-up on the HTML and CSS.

The first step is ensuring that all the presentation layer stuff is in the CSS and not the HTML. The presentation markup (CSS) should always stay separate from the page structure (HTML). But a website's source code can get messy with time. You can skip this step if your color classes are already separated into CSS.

I found my HTML code peppered with Bootstrap color classes. Certain div and footer tag used text-light, text-dark, bg-light, and bg-dark within the HTML. Since handling the light and dark theme relies on CSS, the color classes had to go. So I moved them all from the HTML into my custom SASS file.

I left the contextual color classes (bg-primary, bg-warning, text-muted, etc.) as-is. The colors I've picked for my light and dark themes would not interfere with them. Make sure your theme colors work well with contextual colors. Otherwise, you should move them into the CSS as well.

So far, I've written 100+ articles on this site. So I had to scan all my posts under the _posts/ directory hunting down color classes. Like the step above, make sure to move all color classes into the CSS. Don't forget to check the Jekyll collections and pages as well.

Step 2: Consolidate styles wherever possible

Consolidating and reusing styling elements ensures you have less to worry about. My Projects and Featured Writing sections on the home page displayed card-like layouts. These were using custom CSS styling of their own. I restyled them to match the article links and now I have less to worry about.

There were several other elements using styles of their own. Instead of restyling them, I chose to remove them.

The footer, for example, used its own background color. This would have required two different colors for light and dark themes. I chose to remove the background from the footer to simplify the migration. The footer now takes the color of the background.

If your website uses too many styles, it might be prudent to remove them for the migration. After the move to light/dark themes is complete, you can add them back.

The goal is to keep the migration simple and add new styles later if required.

Step 3: Add the light and dark color schemes

With the clean-up complete, I can now focus on adding the styling elements for light and dark themes. I define the new color styles and apply them to the HTML elements. I chose to start with the following:

1. --body-bg for the background color.
2. --body-color for the main body/text color.
3. --body-link-color for the links.
4. --card-bg for the Bootstrap Card background colors.

:root {
 --body-bg: #EEE2DC;
 --body-color: #AC3B61;
 --body-link-color: #AC3B61;
 --card-bg: #EDC7B7;
}

/* Dark mode */
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
 :root {
 --body-bg: #303C6C;
 --body-color: #E2E8E4;
 --body-link-color: #FFCCBB;
 --card-bg: #212529;
  }
}

With the colors defined, I changed the CSS to use the new colors. For example, the body element now looks like this:

body {
 background-color: var(--body-bg);
 color: var(--body-color) !important;
}

You can view the rest of the CSS changes on GitLab.

You can override Bootstrap 5 defaults if it's compiled with your Jekyll source and not from the CDN. This might make sense to simplify the custom styling you need to handle. For example, turning off link decoration made life a little easier for me.

$link-hover-decoration: none !default;Step 4: The Navbar Toggler

Last but not least: The navbar toggler. In Bootstrap 5, navbar-light and navbar-dark control the color of the toggler. These are defined in the main nav element and .navbar. Since I am not hard-coding color classes in the HTML anymore, I need to duplicate the CSS. I extended the default Sass and added my theme colors.

.navbar-toggler {
  @extend .navbar-toggler;
  color: var(--text-color);
  border-color: var(--text-color);
}

.navbar-toggler-icon {
  @extend .navbar-toggler-icon;
  background-image: escape-svg(url("data:image/svg+xml,"));
}

The code above is the default Bootstrap 5 toggler CSS code, with some minor changes. One thing to note here: For the toggler icon, I hardcoded stroke= #000000 since black works with my theme colors. You may need to be more creative about picking colors schemes that work well across the board.

Image by:

(Ayush Sharma, CC BY-SA 4.0)

And that's about it! The light and dark modes now work as expected!

Image by:

(Ayush Sharma, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Image by:

(Ayush Sharma, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Image by:

(Ayush Sharma, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Image by:

(Ayush Sharma, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Wrap up

Bootstrap 5 is complex, to say the least. There is a lot to think about when overriding it with your custom styling. Providing light and dark variants for every Bootstrap 5 component is difficult, but it's possible if you don't have too many components to deal with.

By ensuring that the markup stays in Sass/CSS, reusing styles, and overriding some Bootstrap 5 defaults, it's possible to achieve light and dark modes. It's not a comprehensive approach, but it is practical and serviceable until Bootstrap 5 decides to provide this feature out of the box.

I hope this gives you more practical ideas on how to add light and dark themes to your own website. If you find a better way to use your own CSS magic, don't forget to share it with the community.

Happy coding :)

This article originally appeared on the author's blog and has been republished with permission.

By ensuring that the markup stays in Sass/CSS, reusing styles, and overriding some Bootstrap 5 defaults, it's possible to achieve light and dark modes.

Image by:

Opensource.com

Web development Programming Accessibility What to read next A simple CSS trick for dark mode This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

How To Install And Play Minecraft On Chromebook?  Gadget Bridge

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