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.

Open Source Talk

This talk was particularly focused on why she likes open source personally. This talk was interesting because she brought up a few points that I have not considered before.

The first point that she brought up was the importance of backing our code. Traditionally, many people just rely on posting their code on a centralized server like GitHub. However she broguht up the point that if GitHub all of a sudden goes down tomorrow or chooses to block off our code from us (after all they are a company) a majority of people’s work will be gone. We depend too much on uploading our code to these servers and not backing them up on a separate system.

Another point she brought up is reproducibility. Open source provides a great platform for people with all different computer environments to test out your code. If your code is working on your computer, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work on everyone else’s computer. Open source allows people to access your code, test it on their end, and then ultimately fix it so that it now works on that respective computer environment.

One question I had for her was if she thinks that GitHub will ever be “overthrown” and be replaced in favor of some other code hosting platform. Ms. Steeves responded that she is not sure if this could happen, but she wishes that one day we will have decentralized hosting. In this scenario, everyone no longer goes to a certain server (GitHub) to store all of their code, but rather stores on their on server. It is weird to think about what a GitHub-less world would be, since GitHub has definitely had a huge presence when I started coding.

Project Evaluations

Next, I would like to talk about the 2 project evaluations we did this week. The first evaluation was a project assigned to us (I got Blockly) and the second evaluation was a project that we chose ourselves (I chose Video.js). From these project evaluations, I realized how important it was to look at the recent issues and pull requests. Before going into these evaluations, I mostly focused on if the project is in a programming language that I am familiar with and what kind of contributions I can make (I am mostly focusing on contributions involving documentation). However, after these project evaluations, I learned some tricks (like using filters in a GitHub search bar) to find valuable information on how active the community is in terms of replying to issues and pull requests. In my first evaluation (Blockly) it did not seem like the community was very great, since it was very large. Many responses were very short and never really thanked the people for the contributions. After evaluating Video.js, I got to experience a more gracious community (probably because they are smaller and less mainstream) that provided meaningful comments on pull request discussions. The project evaluations overall helped me evaluate the community of open source projects and exposed me to different types of communities that I can join.

Conclusion

Even though I enjoyed evaluation Video.js, I don’t think this would be the project that I want to contribute to, mostly because I am not sure what to contribute too. I’m not sure how much help I would be with contributing to the code base, so I was looking for other platforms to do so, but it does not seem that they outlining other types of contributions like documentation or creating examples. Hopefully in the next coming weeks I can find a different project to work on.