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.

Progress So Far

We’ve all been able to install the development environment, and we’ve already found a few small code issues and documentation issues that we’ve been able to fix. Two code issues were based on missing dependencies, and the documentation issue was in a tutorial that referenced a deprecated function. So far we’ve made three issue reports and corresponding pull requests solving them! We’re pretty happy with the progress we’ve made so far, and we’re looking forward to better understanding the project and making even more substantial contributions, like adding features and fixing more significant bugs. Since the project is new and commits are being made so rapidly, we are hoping to get some guidance from project leadership on where our efforts would be most valuable.

Roadblocks

Despite our successes, we do have one major roadblock: we haven’t made any contact with the project community. As far as we can tell, virtually all the contributors work for the company (Structured Labs) that develops Preswald, and the seem to be working closely with each other. They have posted a link to their Slack channel in multiple places— but access to it is restricted. Everything in their CONTRIBUTING file makes it seem like they are friendly and open to contributions, but I think we will need to put in some leg work to get their attention. Some of the core contributors have their emails on their LinkedIns and encourage people to reach out to them, so we’re planning on sending an email at the start of next week explaining our interest in the project. That’s why we focused on making some contributions to the project this week— we’re hoping this will show some commitment and knowledge so our email lands with a bit more “oomph.” I’m excited to report back next week with more progress!