More Thoughts on Cathedral and the Bazaar

This week in class we discussed Cathedral and the Bazaar and focused on the main lessons found in the essay. Last week, I mentioned in my blog post that I found the Cathedral and the Bazaar analogy to be extremely interesting. This week, as we were discussing the essay with everyone in the class I started focusing more on the implications of this analogy at a company vs. at a smaller company, like a startup. Having worked at a startup, I feel as though the bazaar model is easy to see here. There are of a few engineers usually working together to build a product. Since there is less of a hierarchy at smaller companies, people can find an aspect of the project they are interested in start making progress in that particular area. I feel as though this may not be the case at a larger company. Since there is more bureaucracy at larger companies, there might be less opportunity to branch out and prioritize what you think is important for a company’s success. From our class discussion, I thought it would be important to understand how this model may fit into the real world.

Invited Speaker: Gil Yehuda

Once again, I thoroughly enjoyed having a guest lecturer explain to us the use of open source software at larger companies. I found the lecture to be extremely useful because Mr. Yehuda explained how we could use open source software to improve our resumes. We often hear people say it’s important to have a side project that we can talk about during job interviews. I never realized that we could potentially talk about an open source project that we contribute to in a job interview. Furthermore, Mr. Yehuda’s lecture reminded me that open source is a great way to practice our coding skills and also improve our coding skills. I think this lecture was extremely useful and had a lot of relevant information about finding full-time jobs.

Our Open Source Project: Oppia

Karishma, Selam, and I have been continuing to put in a lot of work on our open source project. This week we have been focusing on creating wireframes for our future site. We also spoke to Sean and Diana, members of Oppia’s team, about our wireframes. They offered a lot of helpful insight on how we could improve our wireframes. I think a major think we should work on as we edit our wireframes is how we want users to navigate through our site. Hopefully, within the next few days we will be able to complete our wireframes and then we can move on to coding our site.