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.

Lucide

Lucide is an open source (obviously…) library that provides thousands of “Scalable Vector Graphics” (SVGs) icons to be used in projects. I had never heard of SVGs before, but they seem like a pretty cool concept. Essentially, store images as a vector representation, allowing it to be scaled to any size without any pixel artifacting that occurs when resizing a regular image. When the group first introduced SVGs as their main contribution, I wondered how they could get any significant code contributions out of such a design-focused project. They explained, though, that SVGs are actually created with code- XML, to be precise, so every piece of art they made for the project actually was code, in a way. They showed off a lot of icons that they made, and I was pretty impressed with the design of all of them. I particularly liked their “kayak” icon.

They also talked about all the design guidelines they had to adhere to. Some of them were pretty straightforward- like requiring all icons be designed on a 24x24 canvas (for consistent design spacing), but others were more complex, like “icons should match the optical volume of a circle or square”. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds like a pain to design around! The project my team worked on was honestly a bit of a free-for-all— there were virtually no guidelines, and as long as something worked it was accepted. I’m impressed that this group was able to navigate such a robust set of project rules and make some contributions that got accepted.

Mattermost

Mattermost is an open source alternative to Slack. They follow an open-core model, and, according to the team who worked on it, a lot of the content is locked behind a paywall. As it turns out, this model was a bit challenging for them to navigate. The group tried to make some feature contributions, such as adding custom themes to the app, but despite there being an issue requesting this, the (completed) contribution was rejected. Apparently the core development team for Mattermost is primarily looking for simple bug fixes from their open source contributors, not major features, as they’re saving those for their official employees and including them in their paid release. Team Mattermost took this roadblock in-stride, and ultimately they said they would pick the project again, but I can say that, for me at least, I would find that to be pretty frustrating!

The team also made a signficant amount of translation contributions. As someone who only speaks one language, I really admire these kinds of contributions. Translations are a fantastic way to make a project more accessible- a core principle of open source!— and they’re something I simply cannot do. (Not yet, at least!) I noticed that this project (and many others that ask for translations) have a specific webpage specifically for it. This seems like a great way to make the translation process accessible to everyone, not just people who are comfortable with code. I’m sure there are a lot of people who are willing to make some translations, but are intimidated by the idea of modifying files on GitHub. These translation portals seem like a great way to encourage more people to contribute.

Next week!

There are just a few more presentations left! So far the presentations have been really fun, and I’m excited to see what the last few groups have to present!