Git Exercises

The git exercises we did in class were mostly review for me, though it would probably be valuable to just read the git book assigned in class. I’ve always believed doing is faster than reading or watching, but having a thorough mental model of git or any subject won’t come through a bunch of google searches or trial and error.

Extensions Presentations

I expected that presentations would focus on the code and how the extensions were built rather than on code of conducts, licenses, and other supporting files. Personally, I think that these details are boring and not useful to discuss once you’ve seen two or three of them. The part of open-source that I find engaging is the act of working with peers on technical projects, especially on something that might actually have users. The reason I chose to build a website time tracker with my group is because I would actually use it. Possible extensions of this idea include some kind of ai/ml eye-tracking to monitor focus with an alarm that goes off when I lose focus. I can also add a camera for my work station. The idea might work inside of a business to track the hours logged by remote workers, though arguably this is a bit dystopian and sends the wrong message. At work, people should be judged overwhelmingly by their output and not their input.

My favorite projects by other groups were the LaTeX/Markdown note app and the currency converter. The former seemed more technically challenging, and I thought it was pretty impressive given that we only had a week to work on this. The latter seemed useful and is a good reminder that simple projects can be just as useful as more complicated ones.