As we wrap up the end of the academic year, it has been a great opportunity to reflect on what I’ve learned so far about open source and my journey through my current project.

Group Project:

Project Progress:

Group Stand-up:

Developing Our Project:

Project Updates:

Project Development:

In light of current events, it has been interesting to transition to having class and working with my team members remotely. Despite the abrupt change, my team and I have been able to figure out an optimal time for all of us to meet-up as well as find a project we are all interested in.

PROJECT EVALUATIONS:

The project evaluations (P.E.) were a great way to get a sense of what to look for when choosing an open source project to work on. Personally, prior to the P.E., I had not considered how important looking at open issues, how detailed their documentation is, and how often people communicate. The major challenge when working on open source projects is finding a project that aligns with your interests and given skill set. Initially, when looking for projects it was discouraging to see that the more interesting ones tend to require languages I didn’t know how to use or background knowledge I didn’t have. After this experience, I narrowed my choices down to TEAMMATES, FreeCodeCamp, and OpenMRS. All three are well documented and seem open to new or first-time contributors. I am particularly excited to hopefully work on OpenMRS because it aligns with my interests in med-tech.

In addition to my personal interest in listening to people discuss how they incorporate computer science in interesting/ unconventional ways into their work, I was especially excited to hear from women speakers in general. As a woman of color, it can be discouraging and sometimes mentally taxing being in a space that is hyper-maxuline and not diverse. In many situations, it sometimes feels like women, people of color, those that identify as LGBTQIA+ are hard to come by or even don’t exist in this field. So, in addition to the insightful discussions about open source data, it is nice to hear from these types of people. I hope in the future when other guest speakers come in, we can continue having this kind of representation (and more) throughout the semester.

During class I enjoyed listening to other group presentations and of those presentations, two that stood out to me were Study Buddy and Table of Contents. Both were fantastic ideas that I personally would want as an extension. After hearing those presentations, I went ahead and looked to see if Chrome had a similar step-by-step guide to making file extensions that Mozilla FireFox had. Conveniently I found it with ease (check this link here) and began after finding this resource, I began thinking about other file extensions I could create for my benefit and others.

Although I normally prefer to choose my own partners for group work, I was happily surprised that the personalities in my group meshed well with mine. As we determined where our individual skill sets were needed the most, it was relatively easy to divide up the work and communicate major tasks that needed to be accomplished. For my team, I helped write a portion of the code for our file extension in addition to the README file. The objective of our extension is to change the cursor to an emoji. The user will have three options: a hammar, neutral face emoji, and mind-blown emoji.

Open source embraces strong values of community, collaboration, and transparency, for the benefit of the platform and its users. This relationship with the community pushes developers to constantly contribute new functions and to ensure old ones perform properly. As a result, popular open source software (OSS) projects are often on the cutting edge of technology. Additionally, budding engineers have a unique opportunity to become a part of meaningful large scale projects.