Group Presentations

Last week, we’ve presented our experience contributing to Godot to our class. As we prepared our presentations, I’ve realized that the contributions we’ve had for the duration of this class was a very good way for us to get into the Godot ecosystem and familiarize ourselves with using the engine, but I feel like we still have a long way to go to be truly reap the fruits of our work, and make more impactful contributions. I hope to continue using Godot and become a more active member in the community.

As for other presentations, it was nice to hear about the experience of other groups. I found GitLab group’s presentation to be very interesting, mainly because their experience was the complete opposite of what I’d expect with little I knew about GitLab before. Compared to most other open source projects, GitLab seems more complicated and harder to get into, I was surprised to learn that the Gitlab team was very helpful and made it easy for newcomers to get into the project. I guess the takeaway is that the quality of help, be it through contribution guides, responsiveness to the questions, etc, is a better determinant of successful contributions than choosing a project that is not very complicated.

End of the semester

This has been one of the most helpful classes I’ve taken at NYU. I think the experience of trying to contribute to a living breathing software project, trying to figure out how things work within the project and interacting with their community is invaluable.

I enjoy classes where the students have room to explore their curiosities, without strict guidance. I think that approach not only brings more interesting stuff out of students, but also helps them preserve their innate curiosity towards the subject. This class and Ken Perlin’s Computer Graphics class, which also leaves a lot of room for exploration, have been the most enjoyable classes I’ve taken at NYU.

I’ve enjoyed blogging actually, and plan to continue doing so, but I’ll continue under my own domain: ahmetilten.com/blog