contributing to duckduckgo
20th june 2015
one of the things I have wanted to do for a while now was to follow the tutorial found at duckduckhack.
duckduckhack is the developer community for the popular search engine, duckduckgo. what is so great about it, is that it allows people to develop instant answer. meaning anyone with a good idea could help improve the search function and contribute.
the tutorial goes through the basics of creating your first instant answer which simply allows you to search for your github username and add "duckduckhack" to the search and it will reply telling you that you're awesome. it's a pretty simple tutorial and the guys at ddg have made it really easy to make instant answers. in fact, the hardest bit was actually setting up the development enironment.
once I had completed the basic tutorial, i wanted to see if i could actually create a useful goodie. so I went and created a cheatsheet for the firefox awesome bar. so now, if you type in "firefox awesome bar cheat sheet" you'll get a nice little reference list of the commands you can use inside the search bar thing.
it started off as a full blown goodie where I had to create it from scratch, luckily i had other cheat sheets to reference from. however, i came to merge it back in at the wrong time as the team were just about to release a new format for creating cheat sheets so that they all look the same. it also means people can contribute them without having to faff with any of the actual code. now you can just submit json files.
but, it was all good experience, and not to mention, good fun. feels nice to actually contribute to a big open source community.
-dom