Git Rebasing/Merging Branches

In terms of incorporating new changes from a branch to another, including master, rebasing seems like a much more valuable tool than merging. The fact that rebasing makes the project history completely linear and without vague merge commits is incredibly useful for maintaining organization and clarity.

Though, since rebasing doesn’t give an accurate timetable of when these new changes were integrated from upstream, it still lacks perfect clarity. If only there was a git command that incorporated both the cleanliness of rebasing as well as the context of merging to have perfect clarity for feature integration into a branch.

Remote Class and Final Project Evaluations

The first remote OSS class of the semester was a success! Zoom works surprisingly well, and its breakout room feature is quite handy for distraction-free group work. Quite honestly, OSS is one class which isn’t hurt too much at all by remote learning, though the future for any invited speakers is quite bleak now, unfortunately.

Using the breakout room feature, we got into groups to start thinking about what open source project we want to start focusing on for the class. Because the groups were first and foremostly split by interest, we already had a good, interesting set of projects to choose from:

• Everyone in my group is interested in graphics/games, so we discussed a lot over some of the game development libraries such as libGDX and Phaser. Despite how much we liked these projects, they didn’t seem beginner friendly enough, and there were some technical barriers that prevented us from committing to them.
• One of my teammates brought up a little open source game called Tuxemon built on Python, so we all checked it out. Upon checking out the GitHub page as well as downloading and playing around with it, we were pretty wooed by the project. Some of its benefits as a project to focus on include:
  • Python is a language we’re all somewhat familiar with so not a huge technical barrier there.
  • There seems to be a good amount of beginner friendly issues for us to attempt to tackle.
  • Apparently the game is quite buggy, so we could do a lot of bug reporting and triaging.
  • Game just seems fun! Since working with the game also includes playing it, working on this project would probably be pretty fun.

In the end, we decided to work on Tuxemon. I hope we can contribute to this project as meaningfully as possible.