Open Source and COVID-19

With the world in a hectic state due to the COVID-19 pandemic rocking countries all over, it’s nice to see people all over the world doing what they can to contribute for the fight against this infection. And of course, being an open source class, open efforts regarding COVID-19 are some of our favorite ones due to their public nature and the collaborative spirit and unity that comes out of people coming together for the greater good.

The open source projects we saw in class against COVID-19 were largely data driven, and there were also info aggregates that piled facts and news about the coronavirus into one searchable piece of software meant to help inform anyone who comes across them. In an age of uncertainty and misinformation, especially considering how there are those who do not “believe” in this particular coronavirus, information is incredibly important to keep people safe and healthy. Medical equipment is necessary to help those inflicted by the disease, and there are also people open sourcing designs and ideas for equipment such as ventilators and masks. In trying times as these, open source as a concept is huge boon to everyone trying to keep their loved ones safe and healthy.

Tuxemon Progress

More weeks left in the school year means more time spent working on Tuxemon! Honestly, I might just continue working on this project after class ends anyway because it turns out contributing to an open source project is immensely rewarding. Getting in a substantial pull request feels soooo good.

Throughout the last week or so, I’d been helping with an issue request that I made to allow players of this little Pokemon inspired game to rebind the controls to anything they want through the config file. I made preliminarly changes that seemed to work and made a pull request with them, and had constant back and forth with the maintainer to polish up and refactor the code. After I refactored my, admittedly, messy code with the feedback given by the maintainer, the pull request got merged, and a completely new feature got added to Tuxemon! When that pull request got merged in I became almost giddy with excitement. That was a great experience to have.