This week we were given the opportunity to look at both good and bad examples of open source projects, and attend a talk about how Bloomberg contributes to open source projects. Now that we’re heading into week 6 of the semester, we need to start narrowing down our ideas on what projects to contribute to. Thus, these experiences this past week may serve as guides or galvanizers for ideas in the near future.

During the project evaluation activity on Monday, the class was split into groups of four and assigned a open source project to assess. My group was given Godot, an open source game engine used to build PC, mobile, and web games. In this activity, we were asked to look for certain features such as documentation, licenses, communication boards, and guides on contributing. We then looked at how detailed or organized each of these components were since these are usually determinants on whether or not an individual will want to contribute or not. To find these features, we perused Godot’s website and Github repository. Most of the files were easily found since its Github repository and website were very well organized and aesthetically pleasing in general. The only file I found a bit challenging to find was probably the guide to contributing since it was buried in its own different Github repository, which took a bit of navigating before you could find it. This activity was definitely a didactic experience as I was able to learn the importance of documenting code and having good naming conventions since other people are will be looking at your files. Additionally, it has let me keep my eyes peeled for certain characteristics I want to see present in a project before I decide it’s a good idea for me to help contribute to it. For example, if there isn’t even a guide on how to contribute, then clearly the project is not inviting of outside contributions. Fortunately, Godot checked all of the boxes for me and I can see it being a very good project to help make contributions to. As of right now I’m not sure on what exactly I want to make contributions to, but I do feel like I’m ready and Godot has piqued my interest.

On Wednesday, we got to listen to Kevin Fleming talk about how Bloomberg uses and contributes to open source. Unfortunately, his slides were not given to us, but it was still a great experience. He talked about how Bloomberg uses open source technology to help its customers make more informed decisions. He mentioned the usage of Jupyter Notebook as a way for customers to customize their functions through Python code in the Bloomberg terminal. He also mentioned how literally anything can trigger a change in the stock market, so during important events like the election, Bloomberg will have a internal lockdown not allowing any type of deployments to prevent data discrepancies. This was very interesting to hear as I always thought of Bloomberg as just a premium news company and not a company constantly making integrations and colloborations with open source technologies. The talk was definitely an enlightening experience. Unfortunately, according to Kevin, Bloomberg has no projects that are beginner friendly for contributions, and so I’ll probably cross Bloomberg off my list of ideas if it ever pops up. So far I’ve only made contributions to the course web page, so I’ll stick to looking for more beginner friendly open source projects to contribute to.