Make your blog post. Reflect on the presentations from this week and your group’s progress.

This week, I got to see what all the other groups had been working on this whole time. They all presented very well and were super clear in explaining their work and their experience with open source, their specific projects and their collaborators/community. One of my favorite presentations was for GitLab, because they put effort into keeping the slides entertaining. I also really enjoyed the freeCodeCamp presentation, just because I am interested in the project.

As far as my group’s progress, we were able to meet up and complete our presentation this week. Thankfully, we even got a chance to rehearse. However, we weren’t able to get our latest PRs merged, which is a bit unfortunate all things considered, but I don’t see why we can’t continue to make edits until the issues we’re signed up for are fully resolved. We’re looking forward to talking about our experience on Monday and showing off what we’ve learned!

What’s Left

My group is making steady progress towards being able to present. We are plannin to meet a few more times in person so that we can get our presentation in order and nail each of our speaking parts. Besides that, we’ve continued working on improving our pull requests. I am still getting through all of the issues that cuased my PR to fail the last submission, but hoping to be done by the time we have to present.

Looking Back

This week, we had our last in-class discussion about open source. It made me reflect on how much I’ve learned in this class. Though I was incredibly late to catch up on basics, like how to contribute in github, how to create pull requests and merge forks and branches, and things of the like, I am happy that I have caught up and I’m working on my individual contributions. Open source is a very powerful tool, and being able to contribute to these projects is a useful skill that I’m glad I picked up. I’m sure that I will continue to work on open source projects in the future, because open source is a solid and free way to brush up on your skills while also helping others.

Before discussing the Cathedral and the Bazaar in class, my favorite lesson was “The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.” Talking about the different lessons with my classmates, it was helpful to hear them tied to their personal experiences. I found that a lot of the lessons meant the same thing as other lessons, especially the one that I picked. My favorite didn’t change, but other peoples’ examples helped me appreciate it more, because in a lot of cases the most important thing that a developer can do is treat the user base as their template. My group is making pretty swift progress. Right now we have recieved our notes from the teammates collaborators about what tests that our pull requests are passing and failing. Our current challenge is modifying our code to be able to meet all of these demands in order to work as well as possible.

Cristopher Snider’s presentation was pretty informative. Compared to the use of open source by enterprise, Tidepool’s use fo open source is commendable for being as transparent and accessible as possible, as far as I know. I also appreciate that they actively involve their users in the development process, encouraging plenty of feedback and contributions. Overall, my group is making pretty decent progress compared to where we were last week. Our current issue is just that we are having problems actually putting through our pull requests. There seems to be some kind of permissions related issue. Hopefully this will be resolved this week.

The use of open source in the world of industry is typically for the reason that it is a cheap and easy way to utilize other people’s work. Businesses are able to cut their costs and significantly reduce licensing fees associated with proprietary software. The two can work hand in hand in many other facets, like taking advantage of open source’s rapid innovation due to its large and diverse community of collaborators. This week, my team has made some progress in solving some of teammates’ issues. I personally am new to writing test coverage, so it is a bit of a challenge, but I will grasp it by the end of the week.

This week, my team decided early on to switch from Zulip to a new open source software called TEAMMATES. We asked for permission from some of the main contributors to pick issues to focus on. We got permission, and over the weekend we met in person to look through the repository and find the files where we need to make our changes.

This week in class we were assigned our teammates and given time to decide on something to contribute to. My group decided on zulip, since it is a communication app that seemed to need a lot of incoming help.

Through the research done in class, I’ve gained respect for the collaborative culture of open source development and the span of different backgrounds, reasons, and passions held by it’s contributers. Unfortunately, I haven’t been in contact with my group this week due to being sick from the cold, but I will be meeting with them this week to hopefully pick the project we will want to contribute to.

The projects that we’ve looked at in class are super impressive, with so many people contributing to create projects that can be helpful to thousands more. I’m really excited to work specifically on getting better at debugging and design. I think the biggest challenge will be finding a way to improve something so vast that many have already tried and succeeded in improving. I plan to overcome them by learning as much as I can about the features and trying them out myself so I can get a better idea of what I want to do.

I watched the videos about agriculture, and I was really interested in the different approaches people took to tackle the issue of a rising demand for food from different angles. It was cool to see how computer scientists are creating ways for everyone to contribute to agriculture and aid in sharing and creating knowledge to aid farmers through open source technology. Hopefully, as a computer scientist, I would hope to be able to add to this work by developing open-access educational resources, such as online courses, tutorials, and instructional videos, to teach farmers and agricultural professionals how to leverage technology effectively. By democratizing access to knowledge, these initiatives can empower individuals and communities to improve their agricultural practices and livelihoods.

My group’s work on the browser extension was a pretty good experience, mostly because of the group members and how open they were to communication and suggestions. We all had fun with our idea, since it was pretty silly to begin with, and at first it was just going to be the one subway surfers video. But over time we thought it would be funny to go overboard and have the extension devolve into less and less of a helpful “study tool.” On the subject of myself, I learned that I work quite well with others as there was a good sense of collaboration held throughout the assignment, and my teammates seemed to approve of my ideas/contributions. Speaking of which, my contributions involved meeting with the team to finalize creative choices such as the extension’s usage/functions, adding to the “going overboard” process by looking for more and more videos to add to the project, and contributing to the overall look with my input on a good icon for the extension, coloring, etc. As I was very new to the process of collaborating on projects with git, and even using git in general, this project was a good learning experience. By learning from both of my teammates (who were very helpful with all of my questions and concerns), I learned how to use this tool and also a thing or two about the css and html. This gives me a lot of confidence that I’ll be able to contribute in greater ways in future projects. I loved all of the other presentations, with my favorite being the presidential candidate project, just because how silly it was reminded me of our own.

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