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

ReactNative

The first project I looked into was reactNative, just because I have recently been writing code in JavaScript and thought that maybe I should do something relative to what I am working with. ReactNative is a platform which allows you to develop mobile apps in React/JS. It was created by facebook and has a very large community. However the more I looked into it and after talking to the Professor, I realized that maybe this was not the best course of action. Not because I don’t want to do it, but rather because of the sheer size. It would be very hard to get my foot into the door and figuring out where I could contribute would be even more confusing. Their files are fairly well documented and they try their best to walk you through installations. Overall if I had more experience and had more time, this is definitely a project that would be cool working on.

Open Food Facts

This is open source project that sorts food by nutritional value. This allows users to enter food information and helps people be aware of what they are putting into their bodies. The majority of this is coded in HTML, something that I am not too familiar with, however it is something that I will pick up from doing Javascript, as you need HTML/CSS to format things. I am personally interested in the because personally I am large promoter of fitness and believe that you should be aware of the fuel you put into your body. If by contributing to this, I can better promote awareness and create more accurate information, then that is something I would want to help with.