For our open source project, my group has created a wiki page on Github that lists our contributions. We had all done work with Free Code Camp, and now we could record what we had done. In addition, we continued looking through pull requests and helping each other with issues that we could help out with together. During class, we went over Free Open Source Software Business Models. It was interesting to learn about a lot of the history behind OSS and various examples of different businesses using and creating various open source softwares that we use in our daily life.

Coronavirus has had a massive effect on our daily lifestyles at this point. We are attending classes through Zoom, we can’t freely go outside to shop or have fun, and the news is exploding with news related to the virus, and barely anything else. However, people all over the world are working at this very moment to help control and collect data relating to the Coronavirus in hopes of improving community understanding. For our classes, we looked into and researched various open-source coronavirus projects that are currently on the web, and explained and talked about what we found. It was surprising how all of us managed to each find a completely different project, with no duplicates. So many people are working hard to raise awareness and keep people safe, and I hope that they will continue to do so.

This week, the groups in our class did stand-up reports on what projects everyone planned to work on and progress/details. My group is planning on working on OpenFoodFacts. It seems to be a site/platform that is very easy and simple to contribute to, and has interesting sets of data that appeal to the members of my group. In addition, the website itself does not exactly look very up-to-par, which means that we an also potentially work on improving the UI and performance of the website itself.

The lecture from invited speakers Gil Yehuda was very interesting to listen to. He talked a lot about real world applications of open source that many of us were not expecting. He also talked about the technology behind open source projects, and how contributions are to be made. Overall, it was an enlightening experience.

While the world has had an extremely hectic month due to Coronavirus, with NYU moving to remove classes for the rest of the month and most of April, I was still able to progress in my Open Source studies during such a time. On Monday, we had gone over our possible plans for what open-source project we would be interested in contributing to. On Wednesday, we were to form groups during class and plan to see which project we would like to work on together. Unfortunately, due to the epidemic, classes were not able to be physically attended. However, via NYU Zoom, we were still able to hold our class session from our residences.

Vicky Steeves’s talk this week was, again, very educational and interesting. Through her presentation, I was able to understand and see the different views of several more aspects of open-source projects that I had not known much of before. However, the most interesting part of this week, to me, were our project evaluation assignments. In the past, I had always known that open source was a thing, and that many projects were based in Github. However, I had never actually looked deeply into the subject and took a look at what the organization and statistics were for such projects.

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend class on Monday due to external circumstances, so I was not able to complete the project evaluation during class. However, for the project that I had worked on alongside my teammates, the experience has let me learn how to effectively communicate with other through online platforms, and watch for each other’s weaknesses and strengths. The most challenging part of this project was the creation of how the extension would work, as I am not very familiar with Javascript. Fortunately, one of my group members was familiar with the language, so he helped the other two of us learn and understand how to edit and create our wanted extension.

This week, there were two guest lecturers who came to speak with the class on the topic of Open Data. From the two guest lecturers, I learned a great deal about the subject matter.

For this group project done for class, I have worked extensively with my fellow group members in learning how web extensions work and are used, and what we could do to create on of our own. With my teammates, I have went through Firefox’s tutorial example web extensions and how to effectively use GitHub so that we could start creating our own web extension based off of these. Even though we are not finished with creating said extension, we have already thought of what our goals are for it and created a base Git repository based on Extension 2 from the Firefox tutorials.

This week, I have learned a great deal about the workings of Free and Open Source Projects, aka FOSS. In the past, I had known of what open source projects were and a very basic idea on how they worked, but now I have more in-depth knowledge of the subject.

Open source software is a field that I have always been interested in, as it is very unique in how it can evolve based on the various users and programmers involved with it. An enourmous amount of online and system tools are open-source, in which anyone is able to edit and contribute to the programs. Wikipedia is one such famous example of an open-source project.