The Cathedral and the Bazaar

I really enjoyed this week’s class discussion, as well as the article we had to read. My favorite lesson did not change based on the discussion, becuase of what I mentioned in class about how some of the lessons were more relatable to us as students than others. However, listening to other students in the discussion made me realise that I could relate to a lot more quotes than I initially thought, and listening to thier experiences reminded me of my own. This article seemed to be targeted more towards people who were running projects with exisiting user bases. However, even though this did not apply to me and many other users, the practices such as listening to users, writing good code, and finding and solving problems are crucial and important to every Computer scientist.

One thing that I loved and was very memorable was when Ahmed made the comment on the quote about fixing what you want to fix. He said, ‘every time I find an itch that I want to scratch, I find that someone has already scratched that itch for me’ or something along those lines. I found that extremely funny, and I could relate so much to that comment.

Project updates

We attended the New Contributors Meeting on wedsday, which proved to be very helpful. Unfortunatly, it is only once a month, so that was the last time for this semester. The people were extremely friendly, and helped with issues, and I managed to set up my development enviorment on my laptop, which is very positive news. Becuase of that meeting, I also had a greater understanding of how to compile and run pandas, so the issues are easier to debug and fix.

Our group has contributed a lot to docstring issues, which is a positive. This however, is very tedious. The df.plot issue I was working on got fixed by someone else, so I had to pivot to a different issue. I found an BUG issue where it was incorrectly dividing an array, and managed to look through to code to identify that the issue was due to floats when converting from an array to an pandas.index. However, because index() is a pretty core function, I could not just fix index to work for the specific issue by rounding to a certian decimal place, becuase there are many other cases where index() is used with floats. Because of this, I decided to abandon the issue, but left a helpful comment identifying the issue that was causing the bug report.