Presentations and inspirations

In class on Monday and Wednesday this week, we had a round of presentations from six groups. This is our first presentation week, and it is very interesting to see what each group is doing with their projects.

the Structure of presentations

The presentations from the different groups are very similar in their structures. Many groups made a PowerPoint for their presentation. In the beginning, an overview of the project is given to us. But since we are all somehow familiar with each other’s projects now due to the various stand-up reports, most of the groups kept their introduction concise. Then, some groups went into why they specifically want to contribute to this project and other groups went directly into their contributions. I think the interest is not redundant, though we went through them in the stand up reports as well. I believe it is key because besides completing the course requirements, our interests is what powered us through the various difficulties we encountered contributing. Talking and sharing our passion remind us of why we choose to contribute in the first place. In the part where each group talk about their issues and pull requests, I payed the most attention to see what my peers are capable of. I did not think that contributions could be measured in terms of important or trivial, because no matter coding contributions, documentations or just translations, is capable of helping a group of people. The size should not matter

Making our progress

We had a pair-programming session on Friday to discuss one of the issues that we have struggled with. Pvdz is one of the maintainers of Gatsby, and we had a zoom meeting to discuss how to check if the page context is too large. During the meeting, pvdz have us a short introduction to Gatsby’s repository. Where the files are located and how to navigate around them. He also introduced some important elements Gatsby is using right now, such as nodeJs and react. We went through a specific function called serialize and how it is different from stringify. For the issue we are contributing to, we discussed possible solutions. During the discussion, pvdz found out that his original suggestion does not work, because page data does not exist in a single file, so there is no way to check its size via a parser. This solved our struggle as well, so we are very content with the outcome of the meeting. Now we are able to tackle the problem on our own with a single checking method.