This week we have presentations on our open source project contributions. This weekend we were suprised to see that the idea that one of our group members had set out for us to work on had been completed by the project’s main contributer. Furthermore he even expanded greatly on the functionality of the proposed change. We had proposed to add a counter to give more information regarding the complexity of one’s program. The counter would give how many “knots” (essentially parts) that one’s story contains, allowing the writer to gauge how much more or less needs to be added to flesh out their story. The main contributer added both this, and any other type of quantitative counter possible in the inky writing environment. While this leaves us at a roadblock again in terms of contributions, it is cool to see the idea one of our members had figured out so greatly expanded on, to the point where the maintainer of the project decided to implement a better way of getting the data of one’s story, and edited the ui of the environment itself to foster this. Crazy stuff honestly. We have some ideas of expanding this concept past what the maintainer had built, but we will not be able to figure this out before our presentations as he has not merged his changes to the main branch yet. Hopefully we will figure this out soon though!

This week I had my first ever pull request to an open source project go through! It was a small fix for an issue unlikely to ever happen but even then the project maintaner thanked me for the fix and said nice catch :). At first I had my doubts about the possibility of us actually getting stuff done, but we got stuff done. I guess the hardest thing really is to find something to do, especially considering that most of the easy stuff is already done by the time people like us see a project. And the reason the hard stuff is hard is not because of the actual coding, but because it is hard to see what the project leads want for their project, and it’s hard to even ask. The fix I put through was a side effect of working on an even bigger change to the project, one that I am still unsure the project maintaners even want. Regardless I am glad I even got something done, before getting into Inkle/Inky I had no experience with javascript so it is really nuts to say that the first thing I ever actually contributed to the world is a line of javascript. Hopefully the next thing I contribute to the world is multiple lines of javascript… perhaps even an entire function. I can’t wait!

This week we discussed open source projects that are part of the fight against covid-19. This is important to me because last week I found out that I lost both of my grandparents to covid-19 within the span of 2 days. It really does hurt to know that I couldn’t do anything to protect them, but it’s very comforting to see that so many people have stepped up to solve this pandemic purely for the greater good rather than for personal gain. My grandparents were denied ventilators due to the shortage we have in NYC and the need to distribute them to those more likely to survive. If hospitals in countries suffering from heavier shortages of ventilators and other life-saving equipment could utilize some of the DIY equipment projects that my peers talked about, then hopefully more lives can be saved. I am so glad to know that engineers worldwide have put their time and effort into trying to solve this seemingly unsolvable problem. Additionally, while I am aware that I lack the technical skill to assist in this fight, some of my peers brought up projects which use the computing power of anyone willing to offer their gpu up to work on folding and unfolding proteins. Projects like this allow anyone to help in the fight against both covid-19 and other debilitating illnesses. Upon hearing about them I set my computer to assist in this. While many of these projects are too young and too complex for the average person to contribute to, they set an important precedent; in the event that another life-changing pandemic appears, I know that these projects will be more ready and more capable of producing important work.

In class this week, each group presented on the open source project that they chose. It was interesting to see which projects had the most contributions and communication done by the students. It seemed that those with the greatest success were projects that were medium sized and in the process of a big change. For example one group found lots of work in updating links, and translating examples and comments on a website. Some groups had issues with communicating with their projects. For example the groups who decided on freecodecamp seemed to be pushed aside when trying to communicate with contributers. I feel that the reason for this is that large projects like freecodecamp have too many people already working on it making it difficult to find anyone willing to mentor some students who are looking to make some quick contributions. Unfortunately due to time constraints our group was unable to present on our progress, but in terms of communication with the project we seem to be in the green. This is because our project: Inky has a company behind it meaning there are people working on it 24/7 even though there are not many people working on it per say. In terms of actual contributions we had some ideas as most of the stuff that needs work seems to be functionality in terms of ui for non coders. For example one of the possible contributions is expanding on Inky’s dark mode user interface. One of our group members has also raised the issue of possible problems while installing the environment and posted it to the project’s issues on github. In terms of actual coding the project is built in node.js so I am learning a little bit trying to figure out where things are and how the files interact with eachother.

This week we had Gil Yehuda talk to us about the impact open source has had on his role at Yahoo/Verizon and how it impacted the software engineering landscape overall. This was an especially interesting talk because of how important the role Gil has at his company and how long he has been in the field of software engineering. He was able to shed some light on the backlash that open source originally had towards it, for example, telling us that he originally thought that open source was going to be impossible for a corporation to benefit from, but explained that over time he began to feel that the benefits outweigh the negatives. This is different to the guest speakers prior because its a more realistic example of how open soure arose in large companies and how their software engineers probably felt at first. In addition to this, he is what one could consider a executive at his company, so its implied he has been there for a long time and really has seen the rise of open source first hand. The coolest part in my opinion was when he explained the ways to leverage open source to help us get employment, and as he said that he at one point helped with recruitment for his company, it was a very valid opinion on what to do to get a job through open source contributions. He explained that showing depth, passion, and attention to detail in any code one puts out publically is best way to show to employers that we are talented. I will definitely change how I deal with publically uploading code as a result of this talk.

This week I did a little bit of research on Godot and some games that were made on it. It seems like the engine itself is truly very versatile in the types of games that it can assist in building. In fact, I actually found out that two games I have previously played were created in Godot. This excites me greatly because I have even more of a reason to contribute to Godot beyond just because we must for class.

This week NYU cancelled in-person classes until the next school year. It’s really a lot to deal with and very stressful as this is my final semester and this sudden change affects both the resources I and other students have access to and our ability to make some final interpersonal relationships in these final months. On the other hand, it is fortunate I am taking Open Source as this class is perfect for teaching us how to communicate with projects over the internet rather than in person, meaning that our learning in this class will not be too affected by this sudden change. I suspect it will be harder to keep up in general with everything being moved online, including class itself, but in terms of actually contributing to projects online we should be fine.

This was an amazing guest talk, I actually learned so much about open source, and reproducibility and the potential that open source projects have to further an important goal of researchers and data librarians I had never really thought of before. This talk kind of revealed to me the impact that open source contributers can have beyond programming. The fact that there are people working on ensuring the survival of writing, research, code, data and much more is quite inspiring given how little attention most institutions seem to pay to maintaining older codebases and anything that isn’t currently in use. Furthermore, it was good to get a contrast between the previous speaker who works primarily for a private company, versus Vicky who works for NYU and seems to have more free reign over vocalizing opinions about open source vs closed source. It was honestly very cool and I learned a lot.

Last class we had Kevin Fleming, an employee who works on Open Source projects at Bloomberg, come and speak to our class about the intersection between private companies and Open Source projects. It was really inspiring seeing the passion that he has for working with open source projects and learning about how Bloomberg interacts with the various open source projects that they are partnered with. The most interesting thing to me personally was the interest that Bloomberg seems to have in outreach projects meant to teach and foster communities of programmers who would otherwise be unable to have the resources to pursue a career in programming. It’s really awesome in my opinion especially considering that there are so many new ideas and skills being brought to the table that would never have been there if this outreach did not exist. Very cool!

This week we had a guest speaker come to talk to the class about open source in relation to databases. Sadly, I missed this talk because I am sick, so I am going to read some other blog posts that will hopefully shed some light on what Professor Engel talked about in class.

Both of my partners are very talented and were constantly updating/working on the extension. At first the extension seemed like it would have a pretty simple implementation, however very quickly an issue we ran into was figuring out how/where to store the urls that the user decides to block. There is javascript code to add url’s to local storage, but I believe there was some issue where this list of blocke websites would get erased somewhere in the code before the actual block check occured or the code did not add the urls to the list correctly in the first place, meaning that either way the web extension was not actually blocking any urls. I definitely feel like I made the easiest contributions, but it’s good to know that there usually exists small but necessary tasks that need to be done. In my case it was making 2 icons, and a redirect page. I attempted to write the redirect code in the javascript script, however I ran into problems with the concept of javascript promises and asynchronous inputs and what not, so in the end I really did not contribute too much but I still got something in which I’m glad for. Both of my partners killed it with the end result. It took a lot of work, the code was not working up until the presentation we did in class. Literally minutes before class started, one of my partners figured out how to solve the issue with url storage.