Reflections on Project Progress and Final Presentation

During this week we continued making progress on our project. We’ve received some comments on some of the pull requests and we worked on implementing suggested changes. Some Pull Requests that Anastasia made were merged in. Kyla is working on merging lessons from an abandoned project into the main project. During our weekly meeting on Wednesday we started working on our presentation for the following Monday. We decided to talk about what freeCodeCamp is, our experiences interacting with the community, our specific contributions, as well as challenges we ran into while working on this project.

Reflections on Project Standup and Progress

On Monday we gave a standup update on the progress on our project. We talked about what we worked on and what issues we ran into. Since the previous standup we shifted from working on issues posted on the GitHub issues page to contributing new lessons to the Rosetta Code programming section. We did this because there is a lot of work to be done in that section and the work is much more consistent than waiting for new issues from the issues page. We also talked about an issue with contributing new lessons to FreeCodeCamp, the maintainers of the project themselves could not decide whether a new issue should be raised for every lesson contributed. The course of action that we decided to go with is creating a blanket issue for adding missing lessons from Rosetta Code and reference that issue with the pull requests that we make. During our weekly meeting we discussed what lessons we are planning on working on.

Reflections on Project Progress

We continued making progress with adding lessons to FreeCodeCamp. We are mostly working on the section on interview questions, specifically Rosetta Code. FreeCodeCamp has some problems but are missing many of them, so we are working on creating lessons for these missing problems. Kyla added the wiki for our project to the class wiki page. Anastasia made a pull request for a FizzBuzz lesson. During our weekly meet-up we worked on preparing for our stand up on Monday. We wrote up what were planning on saying during the standup and discussed how to approach the issue with opening up issues before making pull request for new lessons.

Reflections on Project Progress

In the previous weeks we’ve submitted two pull requests, both solving an issue from the issues page. One has received feedback previously and changes made but they’ve yet to provide further feedback or merge it in. The other pull request on fixing the BFS/DFS issues didn’t really have any substantive comments on it. This week I made a new pull request adding a new lesson in their section on Rosetta Code. That PR also has yet to receive any comments. In our weekly meeting we dicussed our plans for the next few weeks. We decided we are going to focus on contributing Rosetta Code lessons because there seems to be many that are missing. We think this will allow us to get more done and make a bigger impact on FreeCodeCamp rather than just waiting for issues to come up on the issues page.

Reflections on Other Group’s Projects

All the groups had very interesting projects but my favorite was Lemy. I think it is a very interesting concept and as someone who goes on Reddit a lot, to see if it takes off in the future. I liked that even thought the group was not familiar with Rust that they are taking this oppurtunity to learn a new language. It is also nice to see that many groups have already been in contact with their respective communities and that many have also started making contributions to their projects. It is good to see that their is a wide variety of goals in these projects from transparency in state governments to creating interactive media.

Reflections on Dicussion on The Cathedral and the Bazaar

I thought everyone who spoke durinng the dicussion made some really good points on the pros and cons of closed-source and open-source software. As a student open-source is very advantageous for us because there is so many projects and tools for us to work with that we might not have access to if they were not open-sourced by the company or might not be able to afford if the company charged for them. Without a strong open-source culture there are less resources for students to learn and for developers to build off of for them to build the next great thing.

Reflections on Group Discussion

During the first weekly meeting we discussed which of the open issues that we were interested in working on, our plan on getting familiarity with the project, and potentially adding new lessons. We found an open issue that dealt with a hash table lesson where one of the tests was passing even if the method was implemented incorrectly. We worked together on looking at the code and see what was wrong. We can up with a solution, tested it, and created a pull request.

Reflections on Project Evaluation

I thought there were many project evaluations that had projects that I would potentially like to work on. I know what I want to work on a project that is in Java, JavaScript, or Python since those are the languages that I am most familiar in. A project that I found interesting was OpenStates, I have an interest in politics and government so this would is a project that I would like to make contributions to. One con about the project is that their issues seems to be mostly be dealing with web scraping errors resulting from states changing the format in which they display information on legislation. While the work is important I don’t think it is as intersting as adding new features to a project.

Reflections on Project Evaluation in Class

With the activity in class I learned more about different interesting open-source projects that I might be potentially interested in contributing to. I thought it was interesting that the NSA has an open-source tool for reverse engineering software. The project that our group was assigned was Godot, an open-source game engine. Our project had extensive documentation and communities across most major platforms. I learned more in-depth what the purpose of the CONTRIBUTING and CODE-OF-CONDUCT files were for and why there are important to open-source projects.

Reflections on Deena and Vicky’s Presentations

I thought that both their presentation were very informative and a good primer on things to consider when working with open-source data. I believe I was familiar with much of the tools Deena talked about. But there was still information I learned including spreadsheets not being a good format to store data in because of limitations on much much can be stored as well as difficulty in seeing the calculations behind each cell, especially with very large data sets. I liked her story of rows accidentally being left out of a dataset being used to study effects on spending on the economy. It shows the importance of picking the right tools to store and manipulate data, especially when your study will have great impact on others, including being used as fact by policymakers.

Groupwork on Browser Extensions

Groupwork on Browser Extension

Our group decided to create a browser extension that blocks out certain sites that typically distract students from studying, including Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We named our extension StudyBuddy. I had a little bit more experience with Javascript so I mostly worked on the logic that connected the UI to a store on the backend that stores the sites that have been blocked as well as the status of the extension. We have a UI and some logic and are putting the finishing touches on the extension. One problem we encountered was storing the state of the UI elements in the extension. We found out that each time the UI is opened, it’s essentially as if a new webpage is opened. So that status of all the checkboxes and buttons are not kept. We solved this by using the built in extension storage APIs to store the sites we are blocking as well as the status of the extension. Each time the UI is opened we pull the info from storage to properly update the UI elements. We anticipate that we will have a working product by the presentation date. Some things I have learned over the course of this project is how to create extensions in Firefox, how intercept and redirect web requests in Firefox, as well as using browser storage for extensions.

Open Source

When I think of open source I think of software whose code is open for everyone to see. That anyone can take the code, make their own alterations and propose changes to either the original or create their own project. An advantage of open source is the community of users can come up with the best ideas for improving the project. If there are issues or bugs with the software, a community working on a fix could potentially be much quicker than if it were up to one company. This community could also be a down side to open source. If the members cannot agree on the changes to the software, then there could be splits resulting in divergent versions. I signed up for a class on open source software development because I wanted to learn what open source is all about and start contributing to projects.