This week in OSSD…

This week has been a very interesting, challenging, and long week. On Monday’s lecture we breifly went over project evaluations. Then went over git version control. Wenesday was the first day of online classes through Zoom, where we were assigned group mates for the final project.

Git and all its functions.

I am faily new to git. I used it in a previous class called CSO for the sole purpose of submitting assignments. However, I never utilized (or in fact was aware of) Git’s feature of version control, which is used for actually keeping track of and storing source code. During Monday’s lecture, one of the main concepts we went over was the difference between rebasing and merging. As a beginner, it was confusing at first to fully understand the difference because it is very complicated. I knew what merging is but had never heard of rebasing. Both are designed to combine changes made in one branch onto another branch (the main branch). From what I understood, merging preserves the history of commits, while rebasing does not. When you merge something, it merges as a history/combination of commits. Rebasing will add the changes in the feature branch starting from the last commit in the main master branch. Professor showed us a very useful visualizer that demonstrates the key differences between merging and rebasing. The visualizer simulated make commits, merging, and rebasing without actually creating files. That was really helpful to see how merging and rebasing actually works.

Zoom and Project Groups

Wednesday was the first day of remote learning. For this class, the transition was fairly simple. OSSD is a course that can be easily be taught online, since most of our work is online. Right before lecture, we were given our group assignments. For the final project I am working with Jennifer and Lucas. I’ve known Jennifer and Lucas prior to this and am excited to work on this project with. I think the most important thing about group projects is getting along with the group members and having similar work ethic. I think our group is a strong group with varying skills which will allow us to work well together. For most of Wednesdays lecture, we were split into breakout groups. IN these breakout groups we video chatted with our group members privately, and discussed ideas for our the project.

Our OpenSource Project

Jennifer, Lucas and I are still discussing projects we could get involved in. SO far we have two great projects we are looking at, OpenFoodFacts, and Tuexman. OpenFoodFacts is a crowdsourced database of food products from around the world. It is mostly written in HTML. Tuxemon is an online gaming tool which is mostly written in Python. We are still looking into the two open source project and also looking at others. We want to find the perfect project for us that has a supportive community and has room for us to contribute to.