Christopher Snider

The talk with Christopher Snider was another interesting and eye opening perspective. Up until this point, I have still been viewing open source through a more technical lens, such as open source coding projects, integration and maintaininace for companies. It was interesting to see someone whose knowledge of software is pretty much from high school CS classes (if I correctly remember him briefly saying that in his talk) talk about an open source software company from the more buisness/shareholder perspective. It is interesting that although it is open source, it isn’t what you would normally think of a open source project. It is very corporate, with meetings, documents, deals with companies, regulatory stuff, and full time employees.

What makes Tidepool different from the user of open source by other enterprises is the extreme open source and transparency philosophy that they have. They have built trust with the community by making everything they can possibly make availible to the public availible to the public. This is very different from what I learned with the previous speaker, where companies are mostly proprietary, but use open source projects to compliment thier product/work.

One critique I have is that often times, it felt more like an advertisement for the products and services Tidepool provides, rather than a lesson about open source and how it affects Tidepool’s operations/decisions. However, I loved listening to him talk, as Mr. Snider was a very articulate person who clearly knows a lot about what he is talking about, and very engaging.

Project updates

Project work is mosty individual work so far. Right now, it is very difficult to make contributions. The issue I am working on seems to be very hard, and I am not sure if it is a dead end or not. I have looked at other similar issues, and it seems that sometimes, its an issue with another open source library that panda uses, such as matplotlib, and not an issue with the pandas library itself. For the amount of time I have spent looking throught the codebase and trying changes, I feel like it is not reflective becuase there are no contributions or pull requests. I need to pivot to other things to get some concrete results. As an individual, this class is a litle harder. Unlike assignments or projects in other classes, there is no concrete problems to solve, or specific things that I need to make. Becuase of this, it is hard to see progress and knock out issues, which in turn makes it easier to get demotivated and discouraged.