Tidepool’s use of Open Source

It was a privilege to have Christopher Snider of Tidepool share his insights into the inner workings of a technology company that heavily utilizes open-source principles. I found Tidepool’s mission very honorable, I wish to see more companies that follow a similar philosophy. Being a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of individuals with diabetes stands out by leveraging open source for a deeply humanitarian cause. Unlike traditional enterprises that often use open source to reduce development costs and accelerate time to market, Tidepool harnesses the collaborative power of open source to improve health outcomes. I was very impressed to hear from Christopher about the wide range of users who have forked the Tidepool repository which spans multiple continents. Despite Tidepool not accepting coding contributions they still follow open source practices by being completely transparent with their codebase and other business practices. If most companies followed in the steps of Tidepool, it would greatly improve the relationship between corporations and consumers.

My Group’s Progress

Since the previous week, our group has made one small step in the grand scheme of the project Bitwarden but a large leap in our contributing journey. I made the group’s first merged PR request to the Bitwarden Mobile repository. It was a small contribution to the repo’s Readme file, which had the main link to the Mobile documentation site pointing to a Page Not Found. I was able to find the correct link and update the Readme. I was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly the PR was merged especially since I made the PR near midnight. More recently, one of my group members, Alessandro, was able to have their own PR merged into the Documentation repository of Bitwarden. They have also made an issue highlighting the deprecated guidelines for an entire page in the contributing docs. We are waiting for a response to start working on that issue which will be a large amount of documentation added. Personally, I would like to contribute some code to the project, but every issue we inspect has been beyond our capabilities, which is understandable in a complex project like Bitwarden.