In terms of choosing an open source project to work on with a group, I have a slight dilemma. On one hand, I have quite a bit of work this semester, so it would make sense to choose a project that doesn’t have many prerequisites.

There are a few projects that don’t require serious code contributions or only involve some light front-end work. On the other hand, I do want to learn and have something to show off on my resume. It just doesn’t feel right to spend my time on something I won’t learn from in order to check off a box for a class. For the moment, I’m going to evaluate etcd, a distributed systems project. It is definitely an ambitious project and will require some study of raft consensus algorithms and Go. Luckily, Go is quite simple and shouldn’t take long to learn. I’ve used some basic Go for a cryptography project before. I’m also curious as to whether or not anyone else in the class is interested in distributed systems or more generally just low-level work. This will probably be the biggest challenge; I hope this doesn’t force me to work on something I’m not interested in.