Guest Speakers

In Monday’s lecture, we had a discussion on what we think about the talks delivered by our guest speakers. Someone brought up a really interesting point of how the career paths of Kevin and Gil differ. Kevin was the type of developer that people would often think of a “open-source hacker”, and when companies realized they need open source people on their teams, he became a very desirable hire for the companies who want his expertise developed from contributing to open source projects. On the other hand, Gil has a more formal path into the software engineering and corporate world and then started to get involved with the open source world. What they have in common is their greatest passion for open source today despite how different their career paths are, and I really enjoyed their stories with open source.

Wikipedia

“Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the most important open source project of them all? “ When I first saw the question, I was thinking about projects like Linus or Mozilla. But I soon realized that if we’re talking about the number of contributors, the answer would be Wikipedia. When Wikipedia was first established, people believed that it would 100% fail: the idea that anyone can edit anything at anytime just sounded too unrealistic. When I first started to use Wikipedia many years ago, I thought there would be some form of reviewing process to decide whether an edit should be approved, so it was surprising to me when I found out how it actually works. I used to not understand why professors won’t let us cite Wikipedia, but now that I’ve started to make contributions myself, I can totally understand because it’s hard to tell if the contributors are really know the subject or not (although my experience with Wikipedia has do far been great).

Joanna mentioned that the “high-impact pages” on Wikipedia are actually being watched by a certain group of editors and volunteers who will get notified whenever there’s a new edit, so they can verify the edit and revise it as soon as possible if it’s a malicious one. This makes a lot of sense to me. For many times, I’ve witnessed how a malicious edit can become news on social media in a very short time, and it’s not surprising that the change will get revised quickly given that people have already noticed it. Joanna also mentioned that she has been using Wikipedia as a tool to translate particular terms from English to Polish, and I can definitely relate to this! For the terms I’m more familiar with in English, I often go to the English page first and then switch to another language. For some reason, I feel that Wikipedia will always give me the most “official” translation of a term.

Group Stand-Up Reports

In Wednesday’s class, we had the group stand-up reports where each group introduces the project they are working on and talks about their interactions with the community as well as the progress they’ve made so far. One project I found very interesting was Open Food Facts. As someone with dietary restrictions, I always read the nutritions facts carefully before adding any product into my shopping cart. I’ve been using Fooducate to check the nutrition facts of a certain product, but after taking a look at Open Food Facts, I feel like it has more useful information (take my beloved Trader Joe’s Chile Lime Chicken Burgers as an example: Fooducate vs Open Food Facts). Given that Open Food Facts is more informative, is open source and has no ads, I think I’ll be switching to it from now on. Another group that left me an impression was the p5.js group. It seemed like they’ve made a lot of contributions so far, which was really amazing.

Group Project

It’s been hard for our group to find a meeting time that actually works for everyone. Since we are in different time zones, the best time for us to meet would be 11 pm, which probably isn’t really a best time since it was too easy to pass out anytime before that… I guess our team will have to figure out a meeting time that works better. As a result I’ve been looking at Lemmy’s issues tab. Issues like In mobile view, replace the top menu with a proper mobile-like overlay drawer popped from the left or right · Issue #601 · LemmyNet/lemmy · GitHub and Implement a way for a user to export their account data. · Issue #506 · LemmyNet/lemmy · GitHub look quite doable, although the owner mentioned that the latter is kinda down in priority. I’ve also started to do translation work on Lemmy @ Weblate. There are way more untranslated words and paragraphs than I expected, but this fact also makes me feel more ambitious :) In addition, translating has been harder than I’ve imagined. As an indecisive person, it takes me forever to pick the most appropriate translation when there are several possible ways to translate a word. I feel that it’s necessary to get very familiar with the project in order to deliver high quality translations.