Group Progress

So far, my group has made good progress on contributing to the project we chose, Preswald. One of my group members was able to get a PR merged into the main projects repository, which included a significant feature. However, we have been facing issues in being able to finish most of our issues since there are many people eager to work on them. The issues that the other members and I were assigned to got PRs before we were able to submit our own. This was very demoralizing because we felt pressured to find a newer issue and work on it faster.

On a more positive note, we made a lot of progress on the original tasks that we got, so we understand the codebase a lot more compared to when we were starting. The task I got assigned to was to create a toggleable sidebar, so that users could choose if they can display their data with or without one. I was able to learn a lot from working on this to near completion. We also chose new tasks and have made some progress on those. Getting these done should be relatively faster, since we understand the project’s code more. In the remaining few weeks, I hope that we each have at least one significant feature merged, alongside some bug fixes and documentation updates as we go.

Presentation by Shivam Balikondwar

In class, we had a presentation from Shivam Balikondwar, where he talked about his experience and journey into contributing to open source projects. I think it was a really good presentation because it gave a good timeline of how contributing to open source builds skills over time and teaches/exposes you to things that you may have never even considered looking in to without contributing.

One thing that I found interesting is that Shivam’s first contribution was to FireFox, which I thought would be difficult for me to contribute to at first because it was a bigger project. He mentioned that although there are a lot of people working on these bigger projects, a lot of people who work on the smaller issues meant for beginners often don’t finish them. I also found it nice that he showed the many connections that he made over time due to being involved in many open source projects.