The Cathedral and The Bazaar

My favorite quote from The Cathedral and The Bazaar was “If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.”. I believe that the having the right mindset is one of the most important things when it comes to success and hapiness. The way I interpreted the “right attitude” was approaching problems from a place of curiosity and opennes to new experiences. Given that Linux started as a hobby project for Torvalds, it’s obvious that he was coming from a place of curiosity.

This holds well with my personal observations in the CS department. I’ve seen fellow CS majors who approach their studies with genuine curiosity are generally have much easier and happier time throughout college compared to those who see it as a chore. When it comes to finding projects to add to their portfolio, those who approach software development with an open mindset often have a very easy time finding interesting stuff to work on.

Group Progress

I’ve continued with my contributions to an open source project made in Godot, called Libre Aim. I’ve first helped with a very simple problem and made a pr, and when it got merged, I was confident in moving on to more challenging problems now that I confirmed that the community was active. I’ve updated the health bar displays using a different technique that what was originally implemented, making changes according to the specification in an open issue.

However, maintainer told me that that issue was already partially implemented and he’d prefer to keep the current implementation as it’s less prone to bugs, and more performant. I’m a little frustrated that they didn’t update the issue but also I should’ve confirmed that the technique I was thinking of suits the project on the discord channel, where the maintainer is more active. Honestly, I have a feeling my implementation was actually less prone to bugs as it’s a more standard implementation and I’m not convinced on the performance point unless I see a good measurement of both implementations. However, I’m not familiar enough with Godot profiling tools and the project in general to defend these positions properly.

Moving on with this project in particular, I’ll confirm what I’m planning to do with the maintainer before going ahead and making changes. Even though my changes ended up not getting merged, I’ve learned a lot about Godot in the process and I’m now better suited to contribute to Godot and Godot related projects.

As for my teammates, Leanne is also considering contributing Libre Aim after she has finished her benchmark contribution and Allyson is continuing to update official demo projects to the new version of Godot.