Tidepool and Christopher

Christopher Snider provided great insights into the mission of Tidepool in providing accessible technology to monitor necessary vitals for sugar content. I think the largest difference in Christopher’s mention of open source by Tidepool vs open source by Enterprise ultimately comes down to the people that the software and open source benefits. In my opinion, tradtional enterprise version of open source benefits from going to market faster than if were to develop the product completely internally. The intent is not of a higher moral goal other than to benefit the institution itself.Tidepool centers around transparency and providing diabetes technology to those that deal with the illness. It is also much more transparent in all its development practices and procedures as it is valilble. Therefore Tidepool is more so aimed at benefitting the general public, which better supports the free and open source movement idea of creating software ultimately to help people. Business models at insitutions emphasize profits and saving costs as opposed to benefitting everyone. In enterprise use, the benefits of the general public often come second to the opinions of investors and shareholders.

Group Contributions

Me and my group have made siginificant progress in trying to resolve a pull request with code updates we previously made. Our implementation was adding additional styling file where the gulp file they used would not be as needed in certain aspects of the application. The maintainers checked our code and offered their opinions which we have to resolve along with their tests. The challenge we faced is really fixing these issues in order for the maintainers to accept our pull request. We have most recently been meeting many times outside of class and our scheduled meeting times to work together and debug the pull request. The codebase is very large to be tackled on its own as many parts are correlated in how the web application is deployed. Together we have been trying different ways to resolve this slow progress on certain issues with css, the backend perl and the web application. We have found that our speed is the biggest barrier in that it takes such a long time for us to resolve a pull request to be merged. Personally I have found signifcant issue with trying to make progress in coding in PERL for backend work. The syntax is similar to PHP so therefore some of our group members have a bit experience. We have been working collaboratively as a group on these issues, but on my own I find it difficult to understand some parts of how the templates and perl correlate in its usage. I think on my own I need to communicate more with the maintainers on how certain parts of the web application is structured. As a group, I think that our recent steps to meet very frequently have been beneficial and we have resolved at a much faster pace than before.