Week 15 - Second Week of Presentations
Project Presentations… Continued!
This week we continued project presentations. We have a lot to get through! Today I’ll take a few minutes to mention a few that stood out to me.
Week 14 - First Week of Presentations
Project Presentations
This week in class, we began our presentations showcasing each group’s work on their open source project. This week we had two presentations on Wednesday, and our group was one of them!
Week 13 - Open Source in Business
Open Source in Business
This week in class we each picked a video to watch from the podcast series “Open Source in Business.” This series, hosted by Dave Neary, sees figures from around the industry providing insights onto how open source fits into the company they work for. These comapnies include Comcast, US Bank, Microsoft, Netflix, and many more.
Week 12 - Open Source in Practice
The Cathedral and The Bazaar
This week in class we examined Eric Raymond’s essay “The Cathedral and The Bazaar.” It is filled with pithy aphorisms about open source, which we spent our discussion unpacking. Here are a few that stood out to me and my open source experience.
Week 11 - Back From Break
Shivam’s Presentation
This week our class TA, Shivam, gave a presentation on his experience with open source. I found that this presentation actually helped ease a lot of my own doubts when it comes to open source. Shivam is currently in a graduate CS program at NYU, but he told us that his undergraduate degree wasn’t in computer science, but rather in electronics and communication. In fact, the reason he got involved in open source was to learn programming and software development, despite having no formal education in the topic. Despite having limited programming experience, Shivam used open source projects and their community to teach himself what he wanted to know.
Week 9 - Almost Break!
Progress on Preswald
This week in our group work we encountered our first major setback: we have some rival contributors competing for our issues. When we were scoping out Preswald, we saw that there’s not robust system for assigning issues, but that didn’t seem to us like it would be a problem, since the project isn’t terribly active. This week though, someone jumped us by submitting a PR on an issue we were working on, and another has been commenting on an issue we’re working on, documenting their progress on completing it.
Week 8 - Open Source Presentations
Open Source AI
While it is, of course, not officially a governing/regulatory organization, I think it is easy to perceive OSI (the Open Source Initiative) as something in that vein. Considering this, when Nick Vidal visited our class to discuss the new Open Source AI Definiton, I was expecting to hear about the ways that this definition would make AI more “responsible”- more fair, more transparent— like regulations probably would. After hearing him speak, though, I came away with a different perspective on what this new definition does and why it exists.
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.