Christopher Snider’s presentation was great and I was really glad that he was able to answer my question “Do you think Tidepool, as an open-source project in the healthcare space specifically diabetes space, being cleared by the FDA will lead to more potential healthcare related projects become open sourced?” as I was curious about the space and the role of open source in that space. I was really glad that he kept on repeating that the FDA was not the enemy and open-source software was not a problem for the FDA. Snider said that in fact they just had to be prepared for everything for the FDA and they are more than willing to help. The problem does not really lie with open-source which was my initial assumption. I think is this great to hear and if this knowledge is out maybe it can encourage more to build software services like Tidepool to truly serve certain communities in an open/cost-effective manner like Tidepool does for people suffering with diabetes. Tidepool’s whole purpose as open source is to provide transparency and with health-collecting organization that is always a risk that you are not in control of your data. I think Tidepool’s use of open source then is really different as it uses open source to empower the end-user, the consumer. Enterprise use of open source on the other hand is more like Yehuda’s talk where he talked about OSPOs. Enterprise build open source software to benefit themselves and maybe they contribute to OSPOs, again to benefit themselves. Tidepool’s purpose is different where it really is to benefit the user. I think that is genuinely a very commendable purpose. That being said it is a very different form of use from OSPOs and OSPOs are still great too as while they are made to benefit the corporation, they still can end up giving up back to the community.

In terms of group work, we’ve been making strides and very good progress. P5 is a good project so it’s going slow but steady. Every meeting we practically have a new issue going on or a new issue solved. I think meeting twice a week is a good number on top of one more meeting in class. I guess our biggest challenge right now is the contributors of the project’s speed and direction. We are making PRs but they are taking time reviewing it which makes a lot of sense based on their timeline which says that they usually start picking things up by May. However, the great news is that that we did indeed get one PR merged thanks to Leo. Every meeting we try to look for some easy tasks that we can finish either during the meeting or right after on top of another bigger one that usually will take the week or two. We’ve been doing that consistently so getting that first PR merged is a good motivation. We’re currently waiting on 5 more PRs to be merged and hopefully they will get the wonderful “LGTM’ message.

As an individual, I think the biggest obstacle right now in terms of contributing to this project is finding meaningful work that I want to do. Often, though I have to steer away from my domain and find issues that are quite challenging in terms of my knowledge for issues in OpenGL for example. But I use that as an opportunity to learn despite not being able to solve the issues. In the end, the issues that I can confidently solve I still try to tackle but definitely the learning curve is my biggest obstacle right now especially in unfamiliar domains.