Open Source this week was jam packed with exposure to real life Open Source Projects. On Monday we focused on projects that I could see myself potentially contributing to and on Wednesday we got an inside look on what Open Source looks like in an industry environment. Aside from learning more about Open Source I also took this week as an opportunity to finally start making contributions of my own. Prior to this class I do not think I would have had the confidence to make any sort of Open Source contribution, but I am really looking forward to making more and potentially larger contributions over the semester and beyond this course.

Finding a Project

As I mentioned before this week involved a lot of different opportunities to dive into the world of open source. This started on Monday when we were asked to research different Open Source projects that we could potentially contribute to throughout the semester. To help us dive into the specifics of a project we were put into groups and assigned a project. My group was assigned OpenEMR, an open source electronic health records management system. While my group and I had no knowledge on the medical field, it did not matter - we were still able to navigate the project seamlessly and felt like we could potentially contribute to this project. The reason for this is because unlike some of the other projects groups were assignment OpenEMR really encourages newbies to learn and join their project. Not only do they have entensive documentation, but they are super organized and reply to open issues (no matter how trivial) quickly.

While OpenEMR encourages contributions I still find it difficult to get started especially with a project that is so large and already has so many open issues. My concern is that I do not want to open an issue that is already being addressed. I also do not know where to even start because the code base is so large. I do not know if I feel quite comfortable yet contributing to this particular project. However I think this could change for a project I am more interested in. I personally would like to contribute to a Swift project, where I would understand more of the code. For OpenEMR most of the code is written in PHP which I do know but not as much as other languages. Hopefully this week I can explore more projects and find the right one for me to contribute to.

Open Source in the Industry

This week my peers and I also had the opportunity to learn about how important Open Source in in large companies, specifically Bloomberg. We got to hear from Kevin Fleming, a member of the CTO office at Bloomberg, and his experience in working with Open Source software.

I had heard of Bloomberg before but I did not know how integral Open Source was to how their products work and their relationship with their consumers. Not only does Bloomberg leverage Open Source technologies like Jenkins, Github, and Kubernetes but they also contribute to Open Source projects. I was especially interested in learning how they improved Jupyter. They are truly dedicated to their consumers and contributing because to improve Jupyter (a tool their consumers use) they dedicated a team to track how people navigate different tools. Based on this research they were able to change the UX Design of Jupyter and improve the experience for their consumers.

When I think Open Source I do not tend to think about large companies like Bloomberg. However I think it is great that in such a large company collaboration and the open source movement is not only supported but encouraged.

My Contributions

The best part of this week for me honestly was starting to contribute to projects. I must admit my changes were not large by any means, but for someone who had not contributed to any open source projects in the past this was a big step for. In the future, as the semester progresses I intend to make more contributions of course and larger changes hopefully.

As for this week I started by going through the other blogs. I notice of of my peers had a broken link so I raised an issue. As of today the issue has been closed as my peer has fixed the link. For my second contribution I added a restuarant that was near my apartment to Open Street Map.

Final Thoughts

Overall this week was pretty great - I felt like I accomplished a lot and I really learned a lot from the guest speaker. I’m also super motivated to start making larger contributions in the coming weeks. This is truly just the beginning!