This week we read the “Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Raymond and discussed it in class. Overall, I found the essay to be quite interesting and it included a lot of great lessons that should be taken into account when designing something in the future. One important topic the essay talked about was the differences between a cathedral and a bazaar. These two terms are metaphors for development-models for projects (not necessarily open source). The cathedral model is a centralized effort, in which a defined group of developers is developing software under a closed roof. Nobody other than the designated group of people is involved in the project, and outside ideas are ignored. This is usually how companies develop proprietary software using the developers they hired to work for them. On the other hand, the bazaar is less restrictive and involves many people work on the same things at the same time. It’s chaotic, but surprisingly productive as shown through the development of Linux and Fetchmail. It’s hard to say which approach is better than the other, so it really comes down to the community/team you’re working with and the leader behind the operations themself.

On Wednesday, we had the opportunity to attend a talk by Gil Yehuda over Zoom. As usual, I enjoyed the talk because it opened my eyes to a lot of new things. For example, one of them was using open source projects as a “resume booster.” Many aspiring software engineers have side projects they work on their own or with a few friends, but one thing many people forget is that they can add an open source project to their resume. This, as Gil pointed out, is especially helpful since it showcases that one can work and communicate effectively as a team member. This is definitely one skill that companies look for when hiring. Furthemore, learning to read others code and work with files that aren’t yours is definitely a useful skill to develop for the corporate world.

As for the group open source project, my group and I met on Friday again. We met for close to two hours and continued to work on logistical stuff. We made sure to set up everything correctly with Git and Github such as branching a clone of the main repository to the OSSD repository. We also made sure our upstreams were pointing to the branch, so when we want to make a pull request we can do it directly from the OSSD repository to the Tuxemon repository. We also continued playing the game and finding issues or other features we could work on. We then documented all of this collected information onto our Google Doc. Eventually some of these ideas will be implemented and a pull request will be made to the original project (that’s the goal hopefully). We also changed our main form of communication from Zoom to Discord since Discord has chat logs and there doesn’t have to be a host for a meeting session.