Introduction

This week in Open Source Software Development, we’ve been tying up the last loose ends on our Oppia project and shifting focus to our final presentations. With our contribution work nearly done, a lot of the class time has been about reflection—both on our team’s journey and on what we’ve learned from the other groups.

Progress on Our Oppia Project

Most of our attention this week went into preparing our presentation. We finalized our slides, ran through several practice rounds, and made some edits to keep things clear and within the time limit. It’s been cool seeing how everything we worked on over the semester—bug fixes, feature work, documentation—came together into a coherent story.

Putting the presentation together also reminded me of how much we’ve learned: understanding how Oppia’s codebase is structured, collaborating through GitHub, navigating their contributor dashboard, and following their review process. All of that took time to get used to, but by the end, I felt a lot more confident working within an open source workflow.

Reflections on Other Teams

One of the best parts of this week was getting to watch the other teams present. Everyone tackled open source from a different angle, and it was interesting to see how those approaches played out.

One group worked on a Python library and got really deep into backend performance issues. Their debugging process and how they communicated with maintainers stood out to me—it showed how technical contributions go hand-in-hand with strong communication.

Another team split up responsibilities based on skill sets—some focused on documentation while others handled code. It was a smart division of labor and showed that you don’t need to be writing code all the time to make a meaningful open source contribution.

Seeing these diverse strategies reminded me that open source isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. Whether you’re fixing bugs, improving UX, translating content, or helping with documentation, every piece matters.

Closing Thoughts

As we get ready to present, I’m feeling both a sense of closure and appreciation. Contributing to Oppia wasn’t always easy, but it was definitely rewarding. Watching other teams approach things differently also gave me ideas for how I might collaborate more effectively in future open source projects. Overall, it’s been a solid way to wrap up the semester.