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!

Kevin also talked a little bit about the various services that the Bloomberg Terminal system requires to keep chugging along. Recently, due to a big data class I am in, I have become interested in distributed and cloud systems. Kevin talked a bit about how they utilize Apache Hadoop, and I have been dipping my toes in using the NYU Dumbo hadoop cluster so it was cool seeing that it is used in finance by companies such as Bloomberg. It would be extremely cool to contribute to a project as important and widespread as Hadoop but I bet it requires highly specific knowledge as to how the system works so I am unsure if I will have time to learn enough to even begin to contribute but I guess I will see.

Another project that Bloomberg interacts with is Jupyter Notebook which I used in one of my intro classes. I remember it being very unwieldy and confusing to use at the time, but interestingly enough, Kevin spoke about how people have been working on the UI to make it more accessible and intuitive to the average person. Jupyter Notebook is another project I am very interested in, and it seems that the developer community behind it is very open and accessible, so perhaps it is another project I could potentially contribute to.