Reflection on Presentation by Christopher Snider

This week we had another invited talk from Christopher Snider. Interestingly, he talked about open source in an approach closer to business instead of technology, this is kind of similar to the talk from Gil Yehuda, he also shared the ideas about open source from more likely a business approach. If we can have some more invited talks in our class in the future, I hope to hear the discussion more focused on technical aspects.

From his talk, we learned about how Tidepool works. When we compare the use of open source by Tidepool to enterprise, I think it is the purpose of using open source. In enterprise, they have to deal with profitability, but Tidepool is a nonprofit organization, as from their website, their mission is to “make diabetes data more accessible, actionable, and meaningful for people with diabetes, their care teams, and researchers”, they also mentioned that they “Always put people with diabetes first”, but I think it is impossible to achieve this in enterprise and business, they have to focus on earnings. Thus, I think Tidepool is more transparent and closer to the diabetics.

Progress on Group Project

During this week, I tried to find some newly added issues in p5.js, and I replied to two of them. For the first one, it is an issue about the Chinese translation errors on the p5.js website, I checked the website and replied to the issue, I also made a PR to fix this issue and it was surprisingly merged by the maintainer within an hour. (As for our previous PRs, they have been waiting for merging for more than one week). I am also been added as a contributor to p5.js for the translation :).

For the second issue, a developer reported that he failed to load a machine learning library in p5.js. I tested on my computer and replied to him, suggesting that this problem may be from the OS version or browser version, but eventually, it turned out that recently there was an update to the machine library and developers fixed this issue.

For me, I feel like contributing to open source is interesting and enjoyable, especially when you can help other developers solve their problems, they are mostly very polite and respectful and thankful for the help and support from you. Also, there are some challenges for us to overcome. For groups, I think it is the untimely response from developers and maintainers, imagine that you made a PR one week ago but nobody replied or reviewed your code, this is kind of frustrating. It is the feeling that you are willing to contribute to this open source community, but they are too busy to deal with these issues. For individuals, I think is to accept that sometimes maintainers of open source projects just don’t respect other developers. Once I made issues to another open source project, I created issues and gave a detailed description of the problems, including that I found a wrong link and provided the correct link to that website, but they just closed the issues and paid no attention to my comments. As I checked after they closed the issue, the links in their files are still wrong. So I think we should learn that seldomly maintainers just don’t care about your contribution, and we should not be angry or unhappy about that, just stop contributing to these unrespectful ones and find something else.