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.

Some open source projects I have used in the past and still am using are Visual Studio Code (a source code editor that I’ve used all throughout college), MusicBot (a bot for an app called Discord that allows you to queue music into a voice channel), Android (a mobile operating system), and LoLTimers (a jungle camp spawn time tracker in a game called League of Legends). I hope to one day contribute to these projects that have helped make my life easier.