Presentation

This week our group did our presentation on Inky. Because we didn’t have many concrete contributions, we talked a bit about the pitfalls of choosing Inky as our project and how we hope to do better. We each talked about our own small contributions that we made as well as communications with the community. Overall, it seemed to be a successful presentation and, even though, as a group we are kind of lacking merged contributions, we still have some unpulled work to show in our project files so I’m not too worried. At the moment I am working on some more feature requests for Inky to maybe get another contribution before the semester ends.

Group Standup Reports

This week we had our group standup report and we basically just updated the class on what we had done and what we were up to. Our group talked about the installer one of our groupmates made, a few small grammar fixes, and a default file opening fix. As for me, I talked about the pull request I had made (find specific word count) that got denied because it was editing code from a file from a third party editor. The main contributor said while it would be a nice feature to add, the code would get overwritten anyway when they updated to a newer version of the third party editor. So while it was pretty disappointing to not get my pull request merged it served as a lesson to stay away from third party program files. Now I am just looking for more features to implement in preparation for next week’s presentation.

Group Project Update

This week during our group meeting, we hashed out the plan for the next week. Some of what we talked about included pooling all possible and known issues as well as distributing that work. We also talked about having a large group contribution paired with a small individual contribution to make things fair for everyone. So far we have a plan fleshed out to work on UI features that would make sense in a text editor like Inky and each person is working on one part of the UI. We are mainly focusing on word count and knot counts (which are like story branches) as well as choice counts. As soon as we can figure out which files are directly related to these functions it should be pretty straightforward.

Presentations

This week our group presented our report on the project, Inky, because we didn’t get to present the week before due to time. We explained our initial project (Godot) and why we decided to swap to Inky as well as our community interactions with the developers and our next steps. The active community and the pool of issues we could choose from all contributed to our decision to choose this project.

Presentations

This week our class had our group stand up reports where we had to introduce our project and report how far we’ve gotten. Although our group didn’t have time to go this week, I learned a lot from listening to others speak on their progress and their next steps. It gave our team a few ideas in terms of goals and also gave us an idea of how far we were compared to other groups. Turns out we were slightly above the curve because we had already established contact with many of the developers of the project Inky and we had received some feature requests as well as open issues directly from the community. As for our contributions we are deciding how to split the issues among our group members so that each person is comfortable with the difficulty of that particular issue.

Group Project

So after our decision to swap to Inky we went ahead and tried to install the developer environment on our personal computers but we all ran into some problems. We asked the project community about the issue and while they were responsive they could not fix our problem. Luckily, Carsen found a solution and shared it with us so we could successfully install the environment and we decided that this fix could be one of our contributions to the project. As for other potential issues, we learned that the issue pages wasn’t properly updated and most of them were already solved but not marked ‘solved.’ Because of this we consulted the project creator and he gave us a list of open issues and other feature requests. We were also thinking of proposing some features that would make the UI nicer and clean-looking but Professor Klukowska warned us about being too forward with feature proposals that were not specifically asked for. So far this project is looking very promising, especially since the community is so helpful and active to our group.

Group Project

This week after our group had our first meeting, we decided that the project we initially agreed to work on (Godot) was extremely complicated and required many hours of research and dedication to learn the code base. We saw that if we were to work on this project, most of our contributions would be related to documentation, which is great but we also wanted to contribute some code. Because of this, we searched for a new potential project and settled on a text narrative adventure editor called Inky. After checking out some of the issues and the code base itself, we found that Inky seemed doable. The next step was to enter the community and get a feel of the developers’ attitude towards the project itself (how active / alive the community is) and so we entered their Discord channel and introduced ourselves and asked them about their project. We got a pretty swift response from one of the creators and they assured us that they were happy to help with any troubles we encountered. Now, the only steps left are to create a project evaluation for Inky and then we can finally start contributing to it.

Spring Break

This week was spring break so not much happened. Our group was supposed to meetup during the break but we postponed it to this Monday because of the whole quarantine situation. Most likely all group meetups will be online now and starting from Monday we will, as a group, search for potential issues that we each can work on. Whether it be documentation or code we have yet to discuss but we will probably start with documentation issues as a starter and as we get more familiar with the code we can start diving into the actual code base. Other than that this week was pretty uneventful.

Godot

This week our team decided to work on Godot because it was one of the projects we all had in our common interests and because the language used was something we were familiar with. The others used JavaScript/HTML but Godot uses C++ primarily which makes it easier for us to contribute. After deciding on what to work on we looked for a few problems we could potentially work on and we set up the development environment. We singled out some beginner friendly problems and decided to talk about how we go about fixing the issues together every Wednesday around noon using Slack. Despite the virus situation making it difficult to meet in person, collaborating online shouldn’t be a problem as we can just as easily communicate through Skype or Discord. As for the remote class on Zoom, it went much better than expected. I even thought it was better than in class sessions simply because the audio was clear which made it easier to pay attention.

Guest Speaker

This week Vicky Steeves visited again to talk about data preservation and how important it is to have data stored. One of the interesting things she talked about was that scientific research data from 30+ years ago were mostly gone because they had not properly stored their data, a huge impact from such a minor detail. Her insistence on data preservation really hammered the point home that data is fragile and without taking the proper steps, it can completely disappear.

Jupyter

This week I wasn’t present for the day we got in groups and did project evaluations so I went ahead and just took a look at one of the projects myself (Jupyter). This project in particular presents new users with clean question and answer format on contributing to make beginners of open source feel welcomed. They have a developer guide for code contributions, documentation guide for documentation contributions, and even a community guide for engaging in meetups and other community events. As I’m not familar at all with Jupyter and its inner workings, if I were to contribute to this it would have to be documentation and community related for now.

This week Professor Deena Engel and Vicky Steeves came as guest speakers to talk about databases and their experiences with open data. The most interesting fact I learned through the talk was that when exporting data to a spreadsheet, be wary of what can alter or incorrectly transfer data. For example, Professor Engel explained that there was a case a few years ago about DNA codes being converted into dates when exported into Excel spreadsheets and the result was that many scientific papers that referenced this data turned out to have misleading and incorrect data. Mistakes of this kind are especially large because they involve data essential to human genetic makeup that could be used to save lives. I was really surprised at this example because I’ve always taken data obtained and presented with research as undeniably correct but the fact that a simple conversion mistake can create such massive errors is a little worrisome. Overall, Professor Engel and Vicky’s talk was informative and helpful in understanding open data.

This week, my group and I successfully finished our dice roll and coin flip extension and my teammate even gave it a stylish flair using neon colors. We also added a new animation for the coin flip to accompany the dice roll and we made the interface look cleaner and easy to use. Everyone did equal amounts of work and our communication improved since last week, making the process easier and enjoyable. From a simple concept with a simple design, we kept building on top of it to create something a little more complex and flashy and came out with something really polished and satisfying.

This week my group and I worked on a firefox extension that lets the user roll a dice or flip a coin at any time. At first the idea seemed daunting because I had never written Javascript before this course but after analyzing the first class exercise, I got the idea of what each line of code did and how it showed up on the webpage. After playing around with the base code in the exercise, I figured out how to adapt them to fit our project idea.

When I think of the term open source, I think of a bunch of individual programmers with different backgrounds each contributing a small portion in a big project. What I didn’t think of before the first few classes was the community aspect to it. I always imagined contributing to open source projects as a lonely process where you had to teach yourself the context of the code already written and just do your assigned part. It seems much less daunting once you know that there are people willing to help you and get you started on almost any project, and I imagine the same goes for closed source projects but on a private and much smaller community scale, which may make interactions between programmers more intimate. I’ve always had a fear in entering these communities which is why I decided to take this course to familiarize myself with the process and give me the tools to contribute to a project I am passionate about.