Down to the wire

Were getting close to the end here and its admittedly not going quite as smoothly as I would have hoped. With the benefit of hindsight its easy to see now what should have been warning signs weeks ago when we were deciding on projects. The activity in the discord was almost definitely the decicisive factor in deciding inky was promising enough to contribute to. The crucial mistake though was assuming that those people active in the discord were mainstay contributors in the github, which it now seems wasn’t the case. We were confident we would be able to get feedback and guidance on issues from them, but we really can’t , which is making the whole process a little more uncertain. For instance we made an issue on adding a count feature for something specific to the project a week ago, and we still havent gotten a response from the project creator. The people in the discord are interested, but its hard to say if translates into genuine interest for the leader. They recommended just doing it, as the leader “probably” wouldn’t say no to a pull request, but that admittedly doesn’t fill me with confidence over the idea.

I think i’d feel better if I were “on the board” so to speak. My groupmates have mostly been able to have their work commited to master, even if its small, which I think is a nice confidence boost. I ended up feeling surprisngly disheartened when the leader turned down my installer. The hardest part now of this whole thing is that I can’t confidently say what to do next. I’m trying to make contact with people but it doesn’t always work out. Im pretty used to just doing things myself but thats just not an option here so its a weird feeling to deal with.

As we approach the end here and I start to reflect on the class as a whole, I start to feel like the greatest lessons learned here really have nothing to do with open source, but collaborative work, and really just work as a whole. I think I have to trust my gut a bit more in the future. Back when I was making the project evaluation for inky I felt red flag after red flag, and I brought up that maybe we should change things. I say this not to throw anyone else under the bus, but moreso to criticize how easily I just gave up on the idea that there may have been a problem. I went from “We have a large problem” to “We have no problems” jsut from hearing an opposing viewpoint, but that binary true false mindset is maybe more dangerous than I would have thought. In reality, we 100% had a problem, my gut was right, but my groupmates were also right, the problem wasn’t so big that we needed to abandon the inky ship alltogether.
Proper response would have been to pre-empt this problems with a plan, rather than let them sort of blindside me as they are now.

I think I have a weird relationship with communication on these sort of ideas and projects. I tend to feel like if im the only one that sees a problem, then does it really exist? To which the answer is probably… “sometimes”. Theres this weird feeling that if im working in a group, I HAVE to cater to how the group is feeling about an issue, but thats pretty stifling to my own independence. If im not in line with the group, I must be wrong and just not seeing things properly the way they are, somehow beneath their level. When you spell it out like that obviously it sounds stupid but I think its easier to get in that mindset than one might assume. After mentioning my installer and getting it shut down, I started to feel like a nuisance. In reality, and I have to remind myself of this, the project leads don’t even know im in a class, so as far as they know im doing this out of the goodness of my heart.
Thus theres really no way im a “nuisance”. I feel like when i do the full open of “Hi I don’t entirely know what im doing could I get some guidance?” or “man Im not really sure if this is going well, do we need to re-evaluate our plan?” people either look at me like a weirdo or just flat out ignore me, but thats: One, almost certainly 90% in my head, and Two, A really obnoxious way to respond to that and if they feel that way frankly they can get over themselves.