Project Evaluation

During the project evaluation activity this week, our group was assigned OpenEMR , an open source software for electronic medical records and medical practice management as the project to be evaluated. I have always been interested in the combination of Computer Science and Health Administration, so I was very excited to look into OpenEMR. We first looked at the website of the project. The website of OpenEMR is very well-organized, and we were able to easily find everything we needed on the navigation bar and the footer. The website offers 3 fully functional demos to give visitors an idea of what the software is like. I tried one of the demos and it was very well built. There is an active forum where members of the community (both developers and users) post their questions. The website also provides links to the official Slack chat and the unofficial Telegram chat. The “Docs” tab links to a separate OpenEMR Wiki site where demos, manuals, development info, etc. can be found.

We then looked into the GitHub repository of OpenEMR. The most recent issue was created within the last hour, indicating that the project is quite active. The Code of Conduct file is very detailed, and if any unacceptable behavior is witnessed, it can be reported by sending admins a direct message on the community forum. The CONTRIBUTING.md file provides step-by-step guidelines of how to make code contributions. It also includes a link to the development policies on the wiki site where codes styles in different languages and development best practices are specified. The primary programming language of the project is PHP, a language that I have never used, but after looking into the source code, I found that it looked quite similar to Java, which I am familiar with. I also noticed that the documentation style can vary a lot among files. Some files have very detailed comments explaining each variable and method, while some files only have minimum documentation. But in general, most of the files in the repository are well-documented, and even beginners can understand the code after reading the comments.

After investigating the website and the Github repository of the project, I believe that the OpenEMR community is friendly and welcoming to beginners, and OpenEMR will be a good project for someone who doesn’t have much experience with open source to work with.

Kevin P. Fleming Talk

Bloomberg Terminal (Travis Wise via flickr/ CC BY 2.0 )

This Wednesday, our guest speaking Kevin P. Fleming from the CTO Office at Bloomberg gave us an informative talk on open source at Bloomberg. I didn’t know much about Bloomberg before the talk — Bloomberg News (the the subscription is kinda pricey imo), Bloomberg Terminal (looks like the interface is for experts only), and, maybe, Michael Bloomberg. But during the talk, I learned about so many surprising and interesting facts about Bloomberg. Here is the list:

• Bloomberg Terminal has 325,000 subscribers. I was very surprised when I first saw the number because I thought it was the number of subscribers to Bloomberg News, and 325,000 was such a tiny amount compared to millions of subscribers of other news services. After Mr. Fleming explained that it was the number of Bloomberg Terminal subscribers, it made much more sense given how expensive the subscription is (over $20,000 per year). However, it was still surprising for me to learn that the sales of Bloomberg Terminals accounts for about 85% of Bloomberg’s total revenues.
• Bloomberg Terminal has community features. Users in the community can contact each other via email or instant message (sounds like Facebook for financial professionals). After reading more about these features, I found out that Bloomberg Terminal has a DINE function that gives you reviews of restaurants (source: 16 Powerful Bloomberg Terminal Functions - Business Insider). It is hilarious that the article refers to it as “Wall Street’s Yelp”.
• The Bloomberg Terminal outage in 2015. This was probably what I found the most interesting in the talk. I didn’t realize that the crash of the software system can have so many impacts on the global financial market.
• Energy consumption of computing. I knew that deep learning or cloud services require high levels of computing power, but I never actually paid attention to how much power will be consumed.
• PowerfulSeal. This is Bloomberg’s open-source testing tool for Kubernetes clusters inspired by Netflix’s Chaos Monkey. I found the term chaos engineering very interesting (sounds very cool and is quite precise). I believe it is a great practice for building robust and resilient software systems.
• Babel. I learned that Bloomberg’s engineering team contributed to Babel, one of the most popular JavaScript compilers. I have used Babel and really liked it, but I did not realize that it is open-source. It’s always amazing to learn that some tool I’m familiar with is actually open-source.

My Contributions

So far, I have added a few locations on OpenStreetMap. At first, I thought OpenStreetMap would be something like Google Maps that includes most locations, and therefore I was kinda worried if I would be able to make any new contributions if most locations had already been added to the map. However, after I actually looked at the map, I realized that many locations are missing. This was a good news for me since I would be able to make more contributions. I’m planning to add more locations in my neighborhood to the map, as where as my favorite restaurants in NYC.