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.

However, with out project evaluation assignments, I managed to take my first looks into the inner workings and organization of open source projects, and was impressed to see how much went into the development and maintenance of these repositories. The two main focuses of my evaluations were Facebook Folly and Waifu2x.

Facebook Folly is an open-source C++ component library that is used extensively at Facebook. From what I had seen when looking into the project on its Github repository, it was fairly well-maintained and had a decently active contributor base, with succesful contributions only mere days apart from one another. There were not many comments explaning the code though, only comments that explained what the functions and files in their entirety did. Overall, it was a well-organized and active open-source project.

Waifu2x is an online image enhancer that serves as a very accurate and useful resolution increaser for artwork, and sometimes even photos. When evaluating this project, I noticed that there was really only one active contributor, which was the creator. Other people have contributed in the past, but it was exceedingly rare. In addition, the code was basically all uncommented, making it very hard to understand. However, the creator did often respond to issues and pull requests very quickly, and the program itself was very effective and useful.

For the future, although I do not have a specific project in mind that I want to work on, I am interested in contributing to an open-source project where my contributions will have a visible or actual effect on the project itself. Hopefully I will be able to contribute to an open-source project successfully and skillfully in the near future!