Contributing to a Project

So far, it’s been a daunting task to find an Open Source project that I both want and have the ability to contribute to. I’ve spent a significant amount of time combing through the issues tabs of various Open Source projects to find a beginner-friendly contribution I can make. The projects I mainly wanted to contribute to include Godot, Pandas, Matplotlib, and Zed. Fortunately, Pandas and Matplotlib had a few issues that were accessible and tagged as beginner-friendly that I believe I can work on promptly. However for the vast majority of Open Source projects, the urgent issues require knowledge of the repo that takes time and dedication to understand. This comes as no surprise to anyone but nonetheless I needed to make any sort of contribution quickly.

Feeling a little defeated and in need of a way to make a small contribution, I chose to add a business to OpenStreetMap near where I used to live. Thankfully, OpenStreetMap provides a small hands-on guide to new contributors to get the ball rolling which made contributing extremely easy. In fact, the process was so easy I plan on continuing to contribute to OpenStreetMap in the future as a way to make small contributions here and there. But in the meantime, I’ve made an effort to get accustomed to the Pandas development environment to make actual code contributions in the future. Hopefully I’ll be able to write about that experience soon.

Openstax

For the videos this week, it felt appropriate to choose the group that dealt with Open Source Education being a college student afterall. As someone whose first instioct was to find whatever free pdf version of any assigned textbook online, I was incredibly happy to learn about Openstax. Their initiative to provide free pdfs first and foremost yet have affordable physical textbooks as an option is incredibly appealing as a student. The Open source aspect of being able to pull and modify textbooks to fit any educator’s lesson plan added another level of coolness. I’m jealous of the instutions that have successfully incorporated Openstax into their curriculums– it would’ve been a lifesaver for sure.