Tidepool and Stallman’s Printer

What’s stood out to me about Tidepool is that the problem they are fixing is a larger scale, more crucial version of Stallman’s printer problem. You are given a device, in this case blood glucose monitors and insulin pumps as opposed to a printer, and you can’t hack the device, or access the data it generates. The only difference is that for Stallman this was simply an inconvenience, but for diabetes patients, this problem can affect their health in a major way. The importance of being able to ‘hack’ into devices and having access to your data is tremendous, especially in the healthcare industry.

Tidepool being set up as non profit sets them in a very good position to utilize open source. Since they don’t have to answer to shareholders, they are able to put the mission of the organization first, and as an organization that aims to give access to the data of diabetes patients, it makes sense for them to have all their software as open source.

Group Progress

Unfortunately, the godot-vim plugin I wanted to contribute to turned out to be a dead end for now. I made a simple pr and it has gone unnoticed. I also put a comment in one of the issues asking if the project was still maintained and no one has answered yet. I’m turning my attention to writing benchmarks for now.

There is another open source vim plugin for godot, it has more stars on Github but a worse overall plugin. I’ll inquire if that is actively maintained, if so I’ll contribute to that as well.

My teammates have been working on creating benchmarks and updating demo projects to the new version of Godot. This is a good way of contributing code and getting a good understanding of the Engine, paving the way for potential core engine contributions. Seeing them succeed in those, I’ll try them as well.