Vicky Steves

This week we had the opportunity of having Vicky Steeves come talk to us for the second time. I really enjoy having her come to our classes not only because her talks are extremely informative but also, I find her area of work to be fascinating. Before these talks, I never knew that librarians were also computer scientists. It has been extremely fascinating for me to learn about how tech is used to manage a library and its resources. During her talk, Ms. Steeves spoke about how a great deal of code is no longer available to us because it is outdated and cannot be run on our machines. She also spoke about how some code will not function the same way on different machines. This was an issue I was aware of, however, I did not realize the implications it would have. From this talk, I was able to broaden my understanding of computer science and also learn about areas studies I was unaware of.

Project Evaluations

This week we also started submitting our own project evaluations. I submitted one evaluation on Inkscape and another on TEAMMATES. From my evaluations, I was able to understand the different kinds of projects online and about the different kind of open source communities. It has been interesting to see the difference between very active communities and rather slow communities. I enjoyed doing my project evaluations and found the project evaluation template to extremely helpful. There were questions on the form, such as how many people have contributed in the past 6 months or how long does it take for a pull request to be accepted, to be very useful pieces of information. I think if I were to do my own evaluations I would not have taken these factors into consideration, but I feel as though many of those questions allowed me to gain a better understanding of the community I would have to work with in the future.

What I Want to Contribute

From doing my own project evaluations and from reading other evaluations, I have realized that there are many projects spanning lots of different topics written in various different languages. Contributing to an open source project stills seems really daunting! After looking at various repositories, it seems as though there are many large, complicated code bases. I am a little worried that I may not have as much experience as some of the other students and this may affect how I will be able to contribute to projects. However, it seems as though many of these projects could benefit from more documentation and I feel as though this is an area where I would be able to contribute. From looking at the various evaluations, I think I would like to contribute to a project that is somehow related to education. Some projects that I am interested in include: FreeCodeCamp and Teammates. I am extremely willing to work on most projects because I would really like to have the opportunity to learn how to read code.