So far, our project has been coming along good. We have gotten a second pull request in, the one that fixes some outdated instructions in a challenge about MongoDB Atlas. We have all gotten freeCodeCamp to work locally, so we can easily work on issues. The regex pull request that I did is probably blocked by a code freeze, so we might not get to see it merged soon. Other than that, we are doing okay and making progress.

This week in class, we have explored many open efforts regarding the coronavirus. We looked at multiple projects, which range from open design documents for things such as ventilators, open source projects, and open datasets such as New York’s dataset of infections. It is great to see that so many people are doing these projects for the greater good.

The standup reports were today. Many of the projects are very interesting, and they are making progress with their projects. We are not the only group that is working on freeCodeCamp; there is another group that is working on it as well. In our group so far, we have been given a go-ahead to start working on 2 issues, one fixing some outdated instructions, and another fixing a regex. I have looked at the issues and see potential solutions, but we don’t have write access to our fork so I cannot open pull requests yet.

Our group, Group 12, finally settled on freeCodeCamp for our project. Before spring break, we had tentatively selected OpenFoodFacts as our project, but we decided to change it this week. freeCodeCamp was one of the projects that I evaluated for the project evaluations. In that evaulation, I mentioned that it was possible for a group to do that project for a few weeks. I have never contributed to freeCodeCamp (or any public open-source project for that matter) before, but I am familiar with the MERN stack from taking AIT last semester. In addition, some parts of the codebase don’t require JS knowledge. The coding challenges are written mostly in Markdown, which is pretty easy. So we plan to work on freeCodeCamp, look at some issues, and possibly create a coding challenge.

I have evaluated two projects so far for the project evaluations. Both are web applications but are drastically different. I evaluated FreeCodeCamp, which supplies free coding tutorials. FreeCodeCamp runs on a MERN stack (JavaScript), and Markdown based templates for their coding challenges. This shouldn’t be too hard for those that are familiar with JS already (those, like me, that have taken AIT). I also have evaluated MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia. This runs on the LAMP stack (PHP), running on a normal web server. It is a very large and busy project, but there are some easy first issues that can be worked on. I am familiar with PHP, so this could be a possibility.

There have been a lot of evaluations for very different projects. Some projects, according to their evaluators, should be easy to contribute to. Other projects would be harder to contribute to in the timeframe of a few weeks. I do not think I am ready to select a project yet. The talk this week was about open data, the formats that it is in, how to parse it, how to find such data, etc. It was very interesting.

My group, group 10, worked on an extension that changes the font of any website. The extension was written in HTML/CSS/JS, which I was mostly familiar with. The new things I did learn were the APIs that were specific to Firefox WebExtensions, which are necessary to build such an extension. The other groups’ extensions did simple things, such as adding info to the pages or altering text on the page.

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