What I’ve learned

This week is the final week of OSSD, and it is hard to believe my last semester at NYU is ending already. I decided to sign up for this course after looking at the course websites from previous semesters, and I was excited about the opportunities to meet with all the guest speakers who have a background in open source. Now as the end of the course is approaching, I can say that the talks given by our amazing guest speakers this semester did not let me down, but I’ve also gained much more from the course. For example, knowledge of Git. I noticed there will be many Git practices in this class during registration, but I did not take that into account because I thought I was familiar with Git already. It turned out that I knew nothing (not really, but close), and I learned a lot more about Git branches and rebase.

Licensing was another thing I’ve learned a lot about in this class. Before taking this class, I did not realize that licensing is such a huge thing in open source and many other areas. Now, when I need some images from the internet, I will use Google’s advanced search and make sure that the images are free to use or share in order to avoid any possible issues. When I see some cool project on Github, I will also check its license and see if it is open source.

In my very first blog post of the semester, I wrote that I’ve never considered contributing to open source before. But now, the open source world is no longer mysterious to me. By doing the project evaluations, I learned how to tell whether an open source project will be a great one to contribute to, and more importantly, I’ve also learned what the workflow of contributing to open source is like by working on the final project. I would say that this is my biggest gain from the class.

Final Project

The final project was where the emphasis was placed on during the latter half of the course. I’ve never heard of Lemmy before being assigned to group 3, but it is an interesting project and the community has been nice overall. To be honest, working on the final project has been more stressful than I’ve expected. It reminds me of the days back in Data Structures when I was so stressed about my homework and was even debugging in my dreams (I was fixing the Docker error and writing front end code in my dreams recently, I guess that’s what makes it feel familiar). Working on the Lemmy issues has made me realize that I still have a lot to learn in tech. For example, although I’ve learned React before and built a web app using React as the front end framework, I still found working on Lemmy’s front end issues very challenging. When looking at this issue about improving the design of the navigation bar in the mobile view, I thought it would be a relatively easy one in the beginning. But after several attempts, my new navigation bar was still very glitchy and I had to put that issue aside. It is necessary to keep practicing my tech skills so that I can work on large-scale projects rather than just school projects.

The final project has truly forced me to step out of my comfort zone. One of the reasons I chose to major in Computer Science was that I believed I would barely have to speak to anyone at work if I become a software engineer in the future (I know that’s not true). I also don’t post a lot on the Internet, and I prefer to stay anonymous if possible (like on Piazza). But in order to work on the final project, interaction with the community is required. Although it was hard for me, I still managed to leave comments under issues and got some positive feedback from the community, which has given me a great sense of achievement.

I’ve also enjoyed learning about what my classmates have done for their projects. I was impressed by the amount of contributions the p5.js group, the JupyterLab group , and the OpenFoodFacts group have made when looking at their wiki pages. I like how the Oppia group contributed by creating wireframes for the project, and their wireframes look nice. And Inky is the project that I found the most interesting and would like to contribute to it myself someday. To summarize, the presentations and the wiki pages have shown me many amazing projects, as well as the many possibilities of contributing to open source.

Contributions

Maintaining the contributions.md file is something I’ve spent quite a lot of time on this semester. In the beginning, most of my contributions were adding a new location on OpenStreetMap as it was the most straightforward way to make contributions. But I later started to contribute to Wikipedia and other open source projects, and I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with making changes on Wikipedia. Now when I see a news about a new show or something, my first reaction will be “I have to update this on Wikipedia” (this happened to me a few days ago when the news about the sequel to a movie I like came out a few days ago, although I was not fast enough as expected). I believe that I will keep contributing to OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia, as it has become a routine for me to some extent.

COVID-19

I still remember the mixed feelings I had when I flew back to New York from Shanghai in late January. I considered my self lucky to be able to return to the States before the travel ban took effect, but meanwhile I also felt sad or even depressed about leaving my family behind and thinking about the risks they might face. What I did not expect back then was how the situation would evolve so quickly and drastically over the course of only a few months. The quarantine still feels a bit unreal to me, but life goes on.

In my opinion, the shift to remote classes via Zoom has worked out well in general, although it has been really hard to work in groups due to time differences. Last year Zoom was still a company I’ve barely heard of and I was surprised when learning that it was one of the most valuable tech IPOs of 2019, but all of a sudden it’s everywhere. I’m wondering how long the Zoom classes will continue, and I really hope that the pandemic will be over soon.

I learned about about many open efforts fighting COVID-19 from the class, and I was also able to contribute to some of the projects myself. I know that it sounds very cliché, but I do believe that with technology we can make the world a better place.

Conclusion

I enjoyed reading my classmates’ blog posts throughout the semester. This is another thing I liked about this class: everything is open, and you’re allowed to look at the work of others. If you’ve also been reading my blog posts, thank you for the time!