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.

Other Projects

I took some time to read through evaluations done by other groups- the first that caught my eye was for Godot, the open source game engine. This project seems interesting, although I have zero experience with game development. Based on the group’s evaluation, the community seems active, though they didn’t mention how friendly it is. They did say that even the simpler issues will require some intermediate to advanced knowledge of the software and how it works, so maybe contributing code or documentation to this project isn’t the best way to get your foot in the door.

I also looked at the evaluation for VSCode. This one intrigued me because I often use VSCode myself. In fact, I’m writing this blog post with it right now! One thing I found immediately interesting about this project is how many languages it is written in- every language I’ve heard of and more are listed in the evaluation. I suppose this makes sense, considering VSCode aims to be an IDE for whatever language you prefer. Unfortunately for me, though, the evaluators reported zero “beginner” tagged issues, and claim that contributing looks challenging for a beginner.

Looking Ahead

Essentially every open source project I’ve looked at has led me to the same conclusion: “that seems a little hard for a beginner like me.” While that may be true, I suspect that at some point I’m going to have to jump in the deep end and try to tackle a project that seems like a little much for me. There will likely be a steep learning curve as I get to know the project, but I’ll never get that expertise I’m looking for if I don’t struggle a bit to find it. I’m excited to push myself out of my comfort zone and make contributions I’m proud of. I want to do something that feels useful- not just to me, but to other people. Ultimately, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do with code, so I’m excited that I’m finally being pushed to do that.