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.

The final contributions

In my previous blog post, I mentioned how I issued a pull request to add some examples, but it never got addressed. I was pretty discouraged when none of the maintainers haven’t gotten back to me about it for a while since it leaves a lot of unknowns and I think I would have appreciated it more if they would have simply just said that they didn’t believe the pull request would be useful rather than ignoring the issue. However, the day before my group presented, I got a notification from GitHub saying that I finally got a comment on my issue! It was from a maintainer that seemed fairly new, since I haven’t seen his name that much before and it seemed like he was just doing a run through all of the issues that haven’t been addressed yet which is why he saw mine. Luckily, he really appreciated the issue and let me work on it and throughout the process he was very nice and helpful in offering suggestions on my pull request and responding very quickly. I really enjoyed my interactions with him and I did some digging around and it turns out he actually has been through the NYU ITP program!

One notable thing about the issue I raised (which is linked here) is that it was a good opportunity for multiple people to work on it as well since the issue was pretty broad and basically was just asking permission to add a whole group of examples. Two of the people that responded to it are part of my project group, but there is one random that offered to help which was nice to see.

Additionally, I think that my group did a very good job with this whole entire project. It was very easy to work with them and in total we had a lot of contributions. In times like these, it’s definitely very easy to kind of give up on school, so I am glad that all of us still had the motivation to continue working hard on this project.

It’s not as hard as it seems

Overall, from this course, I learned that contributing to open source is not as hard as it looks. Before going into this class I didn’t know anything about the procedure of contributing to an open source project. I’ve never raised an issue before and had no idea how to issue a pull request. I always thought that it would take a tremendous amount of skill to get a meaningful contribution. After this course, I definitely have a better sense of how to use the collaborative mechanics of git. Additionally, I don’t feel so paranoid with raising an issue or a pull request because worse case scenario they won’t accept your issue or ask you for changes with your pull request. I think a big part of why I’m comfortable with contributing now is because my group and I encountered a very helpful and friendly community in p5.js. So this class also helped me figure out what I should be looking out for when trying to find a community to contribute to.

A smaller thing that I got more comfortable with as well is contributing to Wikipedia. Now, I enjoy contributing to Wikipedia pages about people and bands since sometimes I would know some random fact about them or hear something in the news and I wouldn’t hesitate to add it to their Wikipedia page.

In the future

In the future I don’t think I would be an active contributer for p5.js and constantly look through their repository, but I think that I would occassionally look around and see if there is anything I can contribute to. However, I think it would be great to find another open source project to work on since, from Gil Yehuda’s talk, I learned that you gain a lot of valuable skills being an active contributer to an open source project. I will definitely look into projects that I tend to use a lot, since prior to this class, I have never used p5.js before.

Conclusion

Even though the latter half of this semester has been really weird, I still think that I managed to get a lot of good experience with this class. I hope that I will eventually be able to find a community that I feel very passionate about and would want to contribute a lot of time to them. Additionally, from writing all of these blog posts, I think that it would be fun to set up my own personal website now and include a blog section since it allows you to explain much more in depth the stuff you are working on.

Thank you for reading my blog posts throughout the year!