The last week! Once again, not much new to talk about, as everyone is now preparing and presenting their final projects. I think that my group and I’s presentation on Wednesday went pretty well, and we were able to explain our different experiences, good and bad. Preparing the presentation itself was not too bad, and we all stayed in touch and communicated well how we would lay things out. The actual presentation itself was smooth, and we all were able to say our parts and analyze our overall experience.

This week was mainly all about final projects. Not too much to say that I haven’t covered in previous blog posts, to be honest. Although for our standup on Monday I thought it went pretty well, and I feel good with where we are at with our project. We all had something to say in terms of our own interactions and contributions, and I think we are on track for where we are supposed to be. There have been a few missteps in terms of getting certain things pull requested, such as some features not being deemed priority for their next release, or even one contributor actually finishing the feature we were working on first!

To connect more to the earlier COVID-19 discussions and its open source presence, we went over in more detail a broader scope of humanitarian efforts using open source. Learning about all of these different projects and causes, it made me realize just how perfect open source as a culture/structure is for efforts like these. It is a way for people to help each other in a way that was not possible without the internet, and allows for everyone (with the right experience) to be able to help and contribute from even their own home.

This week, we talked quite a bit about a very topical aspect of open source through the efforts of tracking and learning about COVID-19. I’ll be honest in the fact that I never quite expected the amount of unique projects that we were able to put together without a whole lot of overlap. There definitely seem to be trends in the overall types of projects that are out there (theres a whole bunch of datasets), but they all try and do their own special thing.

This week, we got to work in more earnest on our final projects. I am now feeling pretty confident about how my group and I are doing, and the project that we are working on. I’ve used Inky in the past for some projects and thought that it has great potential, but it had some annoying bugs. Hopefully now I can help fix some!

This week, we discussed a bit about The Cathedral and the Bazaar, as well as had Gil Yehuda come to speak about his own experience as a part of Verizon Media. First of all, I found our talk about the Cathedral and the Bazaar to be pretty interesting, and honestly got a lot more active class discussion than I thought! It’s cool to see how varied, and even divisive, the views could be on these simple bullet point style claims that the author makes.

It feels like whenever you feel like you have the hang of using git, you end up learning a new feature that can completely change the way you might use it! While rebasing definitely seems like an integral and more basic function of git, I have never really come across or had to use it for anything that I have worked on so far. Granted, this seems like its most important for projects with very large teams, or something like fast moving open source projects where you are working on your own fork of something and want to not mess up the history of commits with your pull request of a branch that began 5 master versions ago. Either way, this seems like we will for sure need to get comfortable with performing rebases for our main project contributions for this class.

I guess the most prominent thing to write about these past 2 weeks is the whole epidemic stuff going on, and how it has changed class a bit. I thought the first remote class went as well as I could have hoped, although it might end up being tough getting together now in groups to work on our open source project without getting too sidetracked with everything else going on. Meanwhile though, I have been able to make my first myriad contributions to Wikipedia, and it ended up being more fun than I thought to try and fix all of the different small errors and typos and such that exist in the site’s many pages. It feels like I’m not doing a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but I guess that any bit helps and somebody has got to add that missing closing parentheses! I’ll be curious to see how the class progresses from here with the rest of the semester being remote, hoping everything can clear up soon!

Wouldn’t you know, it’s not 2019 anymore even though my post file names seem to think so. I enjoyed the guest speaker once again, and am glad that she came back to speak a little bit more in depth on what she does since she can see things more from a student’s perspective. Her take on websites like Github and the different alternatives was pretty interesting, and made me consider the advantages and disadvantages of using an open source site like GitLab vs a corporate one like Github. Hopefully Github doesn’t decide to disappear anytime soon, but at least they have the data backed up in the Arctic somewhere! (joke btw)

I thought the projects evaluations were an interesting exercise and process. When you see so many different open source projects out on the internet as you’re going about your day, you don’t necessarily pay attention to all of the components that they all tend to share. And while many projects share the same basic components like a Contributing file, a license, readme, etc, looking at these components with a more critical eye can expose just how well/badly they have been implemented into a particular project. Consequently, it then also lets you know how good the quality of a project and its community really is. Although the great thing about open source, is that even if something about the project is unclear, it can always be improved by someone!

While we only had one class this week to talk about, I thought the guest speakers were pretty interesting. The whole realm of open data and dealing with such large quantities of data at once is a pretty new one to me, so I feel like I learned quite a bit on what goes on in that field. It also made me realize just how many different avenues that someone could potentially go down that branch from just general “computer science” and how each one has its own topics, best practices, and useful programs to learn. I found it interesting to just kind of listen to the processes that go into setting up, acquiring, and sifting through all the different data sets out there, even if I likely won’t directly pursue the field myself.

Looking back on my group and I’s work on our extension, Word to Pet, I think we pulled through better than expected. We had a bit of trouble at first getting used to how the extensions are set up, and we found out halfway through that one of our group members had dropped the class leaving just the 2 of us. In terms of programming through, it turned out to be easier than expected once we got into the swing of it. I have had some experience with javascript but just the new format/file organization made it seem harder than it really was. In reality, it was just figuring out where to write code where. All in all, I am happy with our silly little extension and I feel like I learned an interesting skill that I might want to come back to, as creating and installing a simple extension was easier than it seemed!

For our browser extension, we have come up with a simple program that converts certain animal words into images on a webpage. Our process has been a little slow as we have spent time brainstorming exactly what we wanted to do. I believe not all of us are epxerienced with javascript so we wanted an idea that was kinda fun but not too intensive code-wise. I have been working on adding the initial files and folders needed for the extension, and will be starting to work on the initial code as well. I have definitely learned a good amount about how an extension works in general, and even how much easier it is to make a simple extension than it seems on the surface.

I always end up feeling like many open source projects end up being “friendlier” versions of programs or products. Friendlier in the sense that there is a stronger sense of community, finding support for problems can be more pleasant/easier, and even just the fact that the code is open for anybody to see can alieve certain concerns like privacy. It depends on the size and popularity of the project, but since open source projects are so dependent on community contributions, they can end up being even higher quality than a closed-source corperate counterpart. Development of new features, fixing bugs, etc. becomes focused around what the community things is important, and even the less important tasks can still be taken on by a sole contributor, wheras in a company they might have just fallen by the wayside due to having to prioritize money/time elsewhere.