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.

In terms of this class and this final project, in the beginning of the week it has been hard finding a common meeting time to discuss what to do for the project since the difference in time zones makes the window to meet even smaller. Addtionally we were going back and forth in choosing our project. We wanted to find a project that already has a big community which means that it will have a long life span even after we stop contributing but small enough where there are still enough stuff to contribute to. Additionally the project shouldn’t be too small where there are only a couple of people working on it and the contributions we make wouldn’t really matter since the project might end up dying out soon. So on one end there are projects like React and on the other end there are projects like this that seems to only be active for the time this pandemic is at its peak.

In the end we ended up choosing p5.js because the community seems very welcoming, they value a lot of documentation (which is something in particular that we wanted to contribute to), and it seems to meet that sweet spot of not too big where there are very few contributions left and not too small where it has a very small user base.

Some Contributions We Made and Some Potential Ones for the Future

Most of the contributions that we made so far are just focused on some typos that we found in documentation. They are very minimal, but we just wanted to get used to contributing to this community

• Fixed some broken links
• Fixed some typos in the Chinese translation of the doc
• Raised some issues to see if the community is open to some contributions that we want to make

Moving forward, we also found some key areas of contributions that we would like to make

• Continue doing some small contributions in documentation typos
• Translate a lot of sections of the documentation that lacks the Chinese translation (raised issue on this)
• Provide inline documentation
• Help them with porting examples from their old website to their new one (raised issue on this)

Conclusion

At first this project was very intimidating because it took a long time to narrow down which project we want to focus on and it seemed like no project at the time met all of our criteria. However, once we found p5.js, I got really excited because it was a very satisfying feeling finding something perfect that you have been looking for for a while. Hopefully in the upcoming weeks we will be able to begin making meaningful contributions!