For this week we are just having our final presentations for class. I have finished up my two pull requests the first one fixing some instructions issues regarding mongoDB and how to set up a basic database to store your files. The second one was regarding the basic fundamentals of computer science using getter and setters. I had to change up a lot of the inner documentation trying to re-explain what these properties do while also changing the example code. Overall this was very eye opening. I hope to be able to contribute more to open source in the future outside of class.

This week we had a short presentation of where everyone updated what their plans were moving forwards with their projects and their progress. Everyone has been making good progress and has been making pull requests. Our wednesday class ended up being canceled due to personaly reasons. Our group has made 2 more pull requests for FCC and we are planning to present on wednesday (5/6/2020). I have made 2 pull requests so far, but going to try to squeeze one more in. This has honestly been a eye opening experience for me and I think I will continue to contribute to FCC and find some other OS projects that I want to contribute to.

HFOSS and Business models

##Class

This week of zoom classes we had everyone give a brief 5 minute presentation on the projects that they are working on and the progress they have made so far. Most groups have made progress such as getting the dev environments working and starting to create minor pull requests here and there. Many groups are working on very interesting projects and its very cool to see students making contributions to large projects. It feels as if we are part of something bigger than what we are just coding when we get labs from our classes.

This was the second week of zoom class and it was a very insightful two classes. In regards to our monday discussion, I found it very enlightening. The “Cathedral and the Bazaar” we read brought along many different schools of thought. I agreed with a lot of the principles that Raymond brought up in regards to Computer Science and just life skills. I think that he had a good view in terms of ‘open source’ and how to become a better programmer. However I thought there were parts of his judgement that were very biased and did not neccesarily apply to the majority. There was a lot of disagreement between students in terms of what they felt was ‘right or wrong’ in a broad sense. Ultimately it was a very production discussion and fascinating to see how my classmates think about computer science and open source developement.

This was the first week we had online zoom classes. It definitely feels very different now that we have to do all of our classes online. It’s a weird feeling learning everthing through a screen. Even though I study computer science and the majority of my work is done through my computer, being able to sit in class and listen to the professor speak is part of the experience. I think the biggest impact this has made in regard to our class is when we break up into smaller groups. This is because I have a sense that the class is divided into two categories of people, 1: people who already know a lot of the material or may not want to put in a lot of effort to get the work done and 2: People who are very new to this material and are seeking guidance to put in the work. It’s especially challenging in small breakout room, because sometime the entire group just does not talk and expects the class exercises to get done.

Contributing

This past spring break we haven’t had class so I thought, what better what to spend it than trying to contribute to some open source. I am definitely behind in contributing, but after doing so it is actually quite fun. I contributed to open food facts. I updated some of the foods with more facts and listed out all their ingredients. I added an item in of which they did not have in stock and uploaded more pictures. I’m going to try to contribute to Open Food Facts at least once every two days and see how I can make other small contributions to Wiki and Open Maps. I also need to figure out how to list my contributions from my website to my blog page.

Git- Rebasing and Merging

We learned about the difference between rebasing and merging branches. To be honest, the whole subject is still quite complicated and trying to figure out the difference between them. For the time being I think it is just best to stick to merging. The more I learn about git the more amazed I am, because of all the functionalities it has and how practical they are for version control. The git visualizer is definitely extremely helpful in assisting understanding how the git process works, especially when you are forking and cloning repositories from the master branch.

Firstly for the talk, I really enjoyed Vicki telling us more about her experiences in the open source world and how she got into contributing. I found it very enlightening hearing about her experiences in terms of just contributing and how she initially got her foot into the door as well as talking about problems with open data. One of the issues she mentioned was reproducibility within data, code and system environments. She specifically mentioned how only up to around 30% of bugs or issues that are mentoned with instructions are actually reproducible. This create a very real issue, becasue if you cannot recreate an issue, it is very hard to isolate issues. So much thought has to go into this because of different operating systems and versions. Furthermore, she brought up hacktober fest, which is a good way to help initiate people to contribute more.

Project Evaluation Reflections

In regards to learning about Open source projects in class, firstly I learned that there is a lot of research that needs to be done ahead of time before diving in. This is because before being willing to commit many hours of your own time into a project you should get a good sense of how the community is and if they see eye to eye on what you want to acheive. I think what was most challenging about picking a project is seeing how friendly the community is towards newbies, how active the community is in respoding and actually being willing to guide people, last is if the project is something you are passionate about. In general finding projects that align with all your goals can be extremely challenging however it is definitely possible. I believe that I am for the most part ready to find a project that to contribute towards.

Although this week was extremely short, I learned a lot from our guest speakers. Firstly I didn’t know that there were so many practical uses for data engineering and data mining principles. I also was fascinated by the amounts of tools they had to solve their problems and that many different industries use different tools based on set standards, as each program has their own strengths. I did not know that when it came to cleaning data, there were a lot of pre-requisites to and issues to solve before the actual cleaning. Such as checking formatting, making sure correct values are jnput, and table in general are even and data is aligned correctly.

Week 3:

For our group extension we did a lot of reading up on about how Mozilla works and how extensions can be useful. We learned how to implementvey basic extensions at the beggining of class. Even though they were just simple icons and border changes, it was really interesting to see how if more work was put in, you could create something extremely fancy. For our extension idea, we plan on making a color/border changer for specific colors to better represent NYU and their colors. We have locked down the idea and just need to finish up the code to implement it. I’m confident we will have it done by the due date and be ready to present in class. I’ve definitely learned many things about mozilla and the practical uses for it!

When I hear the words open source, to me it sounds like a collaborative proeject in which everyone or anyone can contribute to. These projects are typically very vast and aim to target specific issues in the tech industry. However open source does not neccesarily mean that everyone can just used the code as they please due to licensing rights. While closed source is software contributed to by a community but it’s closed off to the public to see and change. Some of the advantages to open source are a costs, service, and innovation where the more people you have joining a project the workload will become less. The downsides are security and usability. I wanted to register for this course because I have never worked in open source development and believed that this class would be a great way to get my foot in the door and really be hands on.