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!

I thought seeing the more corporate side of open source was very cool, and just learning about Bloomberg as a company itself was quite interesting as well. Hearing about just how crazy and huge all their systems are and how ridiculously fast and accurate they have to be is mind boggling. It was also comforting to know that despite having such fine margins for error and high standards for system quality, they still trust and actively participate in open source projects, proving that they can be just as, if not more, useful as any other closed-source one.

Starting this coming week as well I will (finally) begin contributing to some of the other open source projects we had set up at the start of the semester, like Open Street Map and Wikipedia.