Week 7 - Group Work!

Our Project: Preswald

The project my team and I have decided to contribute to this semester is Preswald, a tool to create interactive data visualization dashboards. One of our group members, Arnav, discovered the project (I’m not sure how/where- I should ask him about that), and we all liked it right away. One thing about the project that spoke to all of us was how new it is— the project began in December. Development on the project is active, and new things are being added often. We all like the idea of making critical, formative changes to a developing project.

Week 6 - My Contributions So Far

What I’ve Done

So far I’ve made a number of small contributions (which you can find my clicking the “Contributions” tab at the top of this page!). Many of my contributions— especially when I was first starting— were Wikipedia edits or OpenStreetMap contributions. I found OSM contributions in particular to be pretty fun. It’s satisfying scrolling around neighborhoods I’m familiar with and dropping pins to fill out the map.

Week 5 - Project Evaluations

Evaluations

This week in class we spent time exploring different projects and evaluating their fitness for contribution. The kinds of things we looked at are the number of contributors, the frequency and recency of contributions, the contribution process, and, of course, if the project has a license making it officially open source. Our group looked a PyTorch, the machine learning framework for Python. PyTorch has a very large and very active community, though it seems to require a lot of technical expertise and doesn’t come off as super beginner friendly.

Week 4 - Project Presentations!

The Project

This week in class all ten groups presented their browser extensions. I was pretty impressed by the creativity and technical complexity of all thr groups that presented. In the process of working on my own project my ideas of what was possible in an extension and what I was capable of with my current level of expertise expanded a lot, but seeing all the projects my classmates made expanded them yet again!

Week 3 - The Browser Extension Project

The Project

Earlier this week in class, we started a group project on browser extensions. Our task is to create a (relatively simple) open source browser extension for Firefox.

Week 2 - Codes of Conduct

What is a Code of Conduct?

Many open source projects have a “Code of Conduct” that provide a set of guidelines on how contributors should act when representing the project and how they should treat each other. Many, including Go’s code of conduct, are based on the Contributor Covenant’s code of conduct template. Some sample’s from Go’s document are “be friendly and welcoming”, and “productive communication requires effort. Think about how your words will be interpreted.”

Week 1 - What is open source?

First Impressions of Open Source

When I hear open source, I think of software that is publicly available for use, free of charge, and also free to modify. I have been using open source software for longer than I have been aware of the term open source. Wikipedia is one of the first websites I ever remember going to, back when I was first introduced to the internet.