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.

As a well developed company, I am glad Bloomberg is contributing to open source software. It is extremely important that well developed companies pay it forward by contributing to projects and also creating projects for the general public to contribute to. Prior to the talk, I did not realize big companies were willing to share some of their intellectual property with others. As an aspiring entrepreneur, I, hopefully, will one day have the opportunity to do the same.