This past week in Open Source we had an opportunity to hear what some of the groups had been working on for the past couple of weeks. I enjoyed hearing about the different types of contributions everyone was able to contribute in such a short amount of time. My group took a slightly different approach in our project. Instead of working on multiple smaller contributions, we decided to work with the Oppia team and figure out what larger projects they needed help with.

So we have for the past couple of weeks have instead been working on pages for the Oppia Website from the ground up. Despite working on pages that seem like they are from scratch we stil had to adhere to the oppia code style and make sure our pages worked in the same fashion that the other pages on Oppia worked.

Overall, while it may not seem as though we have contributed a lot to the community quite yet we have definitely learned so much about the code base, and have really become closer to the various contributors of the community. We continue to keep working on the project even after the class is over.

I look back on these past few weeks as a thorough introduction to an open source community. In terms of open source contibutions I have really learned that above all else what really matters is does your contribution benefit the community. Is what your producing going to help the project or not? Of course we’ve gotten a lot out of contributing, strengthening our coding abilities, but what really matters is what we produce and how it will help Oppia users.

This is part of the reason why it took longer than expected to perfect the pages. We could not just code what we thought was right. We needed to make sure the designers approved it, people who use the site would like it, and overall would the oppia contributing community be happy with it.