WEEK 1: THE FINAL BEGINNING

OPEN SOURCE STUFF.

In terms of my initial thoughts on the subject matter, its a little silly but working on an open source project feels like it has a certain amount of prestige to it. From someone who tends to feel like theyre stumbling through many of their comp sci classes, open source projects look like the “Step Above” where you can do more than just the bare minimum. Whether that idea gets changed by the end of this, we’ll see!
Right off the bat open source has benefits in the limitless worker base the project can pull from. Im always surprised by how many people are passionate enough about a project to contribute, no matter how mundane the task may seem at first glance. It does however seem unfortunate that the only credit the people working on this is in some sense just a sense of satisfaction and something cool to put on your resume. Good reasosn to do it, but thinking of myself here, projects that put food on the table will usually be a higher priority than ones that don’t. Some exposure to open source projects Ive had includes Bukkit, which is software for expanding the capabilities of the pupular game mincreaft, Wikipidia, who doesnt know what that is, Kafka, a publisher-subscriber based database and messaging type thing (its kind complicated) that I worked with while in Japan, and finally Atom, a text editor where desired parts can be added or removed at will. (I also just found at that Dolphin, an emulator for the Nintendo Gamecube and Wii is open source. Neat!)