Initial Plans

During this week, we paired up with group members that aligned with our interests and searched for projects that we wanted to contribute to. My group and I had some ideas of projects from the beginning which included pygame-ce, pandas, and bokeh. If you noticed a pattern, then you’d be correct. All of these projects have a majority of python code. As a group, we are mostly experienced in python, so we decided to stick with projects that use it. We looked at other group evaluations and used them to base the skill requirement of pygame and pandas. We considered the projects, but realized that it might be hard to keep up with the pace of these projects while also trying to understand the well established code at the same time. With bokeh, we felt that it was the best for us at first because it was a simpler project in our opinion, but like pygame and pandas, there were a massive amount of issues in the tracker, and we weren’t sure if it was right for us.

Choosing Preswald

Eventually, we came across preswald which was a much newer project. What attracted us to it is that not only was it newer, it had tags like “good first issue” and “documentation”, and had a small but active community. It is also a data visualizer like bokeh, so it was nice finding a similar project to it. A major issue we had is that while the community had people actively working on it, it seemed to be mostly within the maintainers, and we had issues getting into their Slack. We still have not gotten in, but plan on contacting the maintainers for help.

Our First Contributions

When we were first looking at the code, we tried setting up the development environment and all came across the same exact issue with the command for the example program given to test the environment. This was great for us, because we had a clear plan on what to make our first issue/pull request about. We had planned to create the issue during our first outside of class meeting, but when we actually met up, it turned out that someone had actually made their own pull request addressing the same issue that got approved two hours before the meeting! This was a bit disappointing as we had a plan, but then we actually found out an issue quickly after with another example program that wasn’t running. This time it was a code issue (missing dependency) instead of a documentation issue, and have created a pull request. We also found some other issues with some of the provided examples that we also created a pull request for. Overall, I think it was a good choice that we chose this project and I am excited to see where this goes.