So the end of this week officially marks the end of the semester, so this blog post will mostly be just a recap of the semester and my experience working on the final project. First, I would like to recap the final contributions that I made that are not mentioned in my previous blog post.

Nothing too major happened this week. Since my group is the first group scheduled to present (we are presenting this Monday), we have been constructing our slides and finalizing our contributions. It’s crazy how we are nearing the end of the semester. The month of March felt like the longest month of my life because of the coronavirus, but April felt like it flew by so quickly.

These week, the two classes we had focused on Humanitarian Free and Open Source (HFOSS) projects, which are projects that apply the ideals of open source towards helping humanitarian needs, and open source business models, which are ways people make money off of open source projects.

This week we discussed various open efforts regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to this class I actually found a bunch of open source projects on Github regarding the pandemic since my group and I were trying to find an open source project to work on for our final project. When looking around for a project, we went to the Github explore page and the trending section and found that around a quarter of the projects that were on the trending list had something to do with the coronavirus. The projects were in a variety of forms - APIs, CLIs, visualizers etc. During our class research on open efforts regarding the coronavirus, some of these categories showed up.

During this week, the two classes focused on Wikipedia and the concept of Open Encyclopedia, and stand up reports which were updates from each group on how far they are in their projects. Additionally, it is the second week that we have been working on our final projects. First, let’s get into our discussion of Wikipedia.

This past week was the first week that we started contributing to our final projects. It also is the second week of online classes. The first week of online classes was pretty rough since it was such a different environment. I was so used to always going to the library to study since I know that if I stay at home I would be way too distracted all the time. Now, my room is both the classroom, library, and sleeping area so sometimes its hard to differentiate them. Especially differentiating sleeping time with studying time. I found myself constantly tired and wanting to crawl back into bed and not getting out. However, with the second week I am a lot more used to this situation and my body is less tired than before. I don’t mind doing online classes anymore, but the biggest drawback is having the distraction of my parents doing stuff around the apartment. Other than that, life with online classes is getting easier. Okay, lets get into the contributions now.

This week has been very different from other weeks in that it is the first week of online classes! The worst part about online classes has been the inability to meet up in person to work on projects. Even though there is the ability to share your screen on Zoom, I do miss just being able to glance over at someone else’s screen that’s next to you without my computer’s fans blasting like crazy as it’s broadcasting my screen on Zoom. However, some pros of online class is not having to take travel time into account when attending class. When you see that class is about to start, it’s very easy to just hop on a couple minutes before it starts.

This week, we started to make big steps towards picking out our final projects. On Tuesday we learned more about useful git commands for contributing to GitHub repos, and on Thursday we held our first Zoom class where we were assigned to our project groups and began looking for projects to contribute too as we start heading into our Spring break next week.

As we start approaching spring break (in almost a week!!!) it’s finally time to start thinking about which project we are going to contribute to for our final project. During this past week we had to do two project evaluations, which really helped me figure out what to look out for when trying to find a project to contribute too. In addition to this, we had another open source talk from Vicky Steeves. Let’s get into that first.

This week was pretty jampacked with different types of open source projects and ways to contribute to these projects. To begin with, we had to evaluate several huge open source projects. Next, we had a guest speaker come in from Bloomberg to talk about how the company uses open source projects to do their job as well as how they contribute to open source projects to give back to the community. Finally, I’m going to talk about some very small contributions to open source projects that I made myself :)

This past week, we were lucky enough to have two guest speakers come in to talk about open data who are both experts in the field. Prior to this talk, I had some experience working with data - I took an online course where I learned some MongoDB, did some web scraping with Python and SQLite, and took the Intro to Data Science course here at NYU where we used pandas. So, going into this talk I was excited to learn more about the different tools these two experts used in their fields and the processes that they use to analyze and use data.

If you have been keeping up with some of my previous blogs (check out my last blog here) you would know that my group and I have been working on a Firefox browser extension. The bulk of the coding was finished last week, so this week was mostly focused on finalizing the project and getting it ready to present. Here is the link to the repository of the project. If you install it to the Firefox browser, you would be able to use it to navigate through this blog post!

During the past week in the Open Source Development class, we were tasked with creating a Firefox browser extension, with the focus mostly on getting used to working on a repository as a team rather than how complex the extension is. My group’s original idea was to create an extension that lets you pick a mood you’re in and it will play random songs from Spotify related to that mood. In theory this seemed pretty easy - all you would have to do is connect to the Spotify API and you are good to go - but a couple of challenges came along while we attempted this idea.

Nowadays, collaboration seems to be essential to success. Having the ability to be team-oriented and contribute your personal skills to benefit a project is important to many different jobs. Not one person knows or has the time to do everything so it is important for many people to come together to do the work that one person cannot. And to me this is what I think of when I hear the term “open source”. My first experience with an open source project was working on a web browser game. I designed the frontend and the animations and posted my progress on Github. However at the time I didn’t know how to do backend development for websites. So I sent the link to one of my friends and he pushed his backend code to Github and soon after we had a functioning video game that keeps track of user progress. I really enjoy the collaborative nature of open source, but I only experienced collaborating on projects with only a couple of people. Through taking the Open Source Software Development class at NYU, I look forward to contributing to larger projects and stepping out of my comfort zone.