Group Presentations

This semester is slowly winding down and coming Spring 2020 is coming to an end. This was the last full week of classes. This week during lecture five groups presented their projects and what they’ve worked on for the last third of the course. My group (group 2) were one of the five that presented.

I thought all of the presentations that went on Monday and Wednesday were very well done. It was interesting to see the varying levels of progress each group has made, and the interactions each had with their respective projects. It was also every interesting to see each group to reflect on the personal experience with the project. Some groups had a really positive experience with their respective projects. However, not everyone had a positive experience. I remember during Inky’s presentation, one of the group members stated that they did not had the most positive experience due to miscommunication and interactions with the community. However, he did mention that he learned a lot from the experience. This shows that when going into a project, you may not know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. It may take getting fully involved with the project to know that it’s a project that you would not want to work on. This is a lesson I also learned during this process.

My group and I were slightly nervous to present in front of the class. The day before we did a practice run for our presentation and went over what we wanted to discuss during the actual presentation. I think our presentation went well. We discussed the progress we’ve made in the last two months. WE were able to get a pull request approved. WE worked on a new feature for the website, which is yet to be approved/merged. I spent a great deal of time working on translations for the website. Every week or so I have been translating a file to Bengali. Lucas and Jennifer (my group mates) were also working on translations and minor bugs on the website. Overall, working on this group project was a very interesting and enriching experience. I enjoyed working with my group mates. I was able to learn a lot from them. Overall, the presentation went well. I look forward to learning about what my other classmates worked on this semester in the coming week.

Reflections on OpenFoodFacts

Overall, I had a mostly positive experience. I enjoyed getting involved with a project and seeing how an OpenSource project is developed and the effort b=behind a project like this. However, my group and I learned the hard way that looks can be deceiving. We thought that this project was mostly written in HTML. However, this project was mostly written in Perl, with hints of HTML and CSS. My group mates and I do not know any Perl, which made understanding the functionality of code very difficult. Also, the code was poorly documented. We had to spend hours trying to decipher what the code was doing in order to make any minor changes. This was the most challenging part. We also noticed that most of the issues were being solved by the same very active members. This made it very difficult to work on the very few HTML issues that were available.

Besides these few challenges, I enjoyed working on this project. It was challenging at first trying to familiarize myself with the project, but it became easier with time. Also, prior to this I had no web development experience. I did not know any HTML or CSS. Before I started working on this project, I spent a weekend on code academy trying to teach myself HTML and CSS. During the last few weeks, I was able to build upon those skills by working on this project. Overall, I really enjoyed working on this project and learned a lot.

Reflections on the Semester

This semester definitely did not go as planned. There were some speed bumps, and roadblocks, but we were all able to preserver through it. Prior to this class, I had next to no knowledge of what OpenSource is or how it is used. This course opened my eyes up to a very different side of software development. I learned new skills and approved on my skills as a result of working on an OpenSource project. Also, having presenters throughout the semester was also very helpful in knowing where and how opensource used in the real work. I really enjoyed this course and will be continue contributing to OpenSource projects in the future.