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.

For the second class we had a guest speaker, “Gil Yehuda” who talked more to us about what open source meant to him and what he does at Verizon media. He explained how he too, was somewhat confused as to what open source truly meant, and it was not until he was much older did he finally understand for himself. It’s actually surprising that he talks so fondly about it, because he mentions when he was younger and first started working he was completely against it and wanted no part of it. But now, he’s well rooted into the community and is always eager to learn more about open source. We learned a lot more about OS’s history and how it has expanded to the giant it is today. We then discussed how having open source experience is very practical for the real world in terms of getting a job and that having contributing experience is a tremendous help. This is because if you are familiar with the tech stack a certain company uses and you have quality time spent on a project posted on your gitHub. Companies will notice this and will want you due to the fact of previous experience.

Finally for our project, we have started making progress. We have listed a few of the issues that we would like to work on and have begun discussing how we plan on fixing them. We are still brainstorming what coding challenges we could create for beginner coders and have reached out to the community by emailing the devs. We have also found other communication channels and will try to actively use those to be more involved in the community.

Thank you for reading my week 9 blog! Hope you enjoyed it, stay tuned for next week!