Reflection

Project Decision

We first reviewed all project ideas from 2 helpful resources provided by a student peer and tutor: Awesome First PR Opportunities and past GSoC list of orgs. Then, we filtered them based on our familiar languages (for me, Python, Java, and JavaScript). After that, we picked around 5 ideas and discussed the pros, cons, and potential applicability for each one. We finally decided to delve into Oppia, which is also the project that the Professor mentioned in the Humanitarian and Social Good Projects slides. We also completed the project evaluation for Oppia together.

Any Obstacles and Solutions

Well, to make a solid decision, all group members need to test whether the installation and setting environment work on their laptops. This is the part where I encountered some difficulties.

There are 3 ways to do this: WSL2, VirtualBox, and Docker. Initially, we decided to try Docker because some of us already had it from the Operating Systems course we took previously. I didn’t, so I tried downloading Docker, but I had trouble downloading the WSL terminal and Linux distribution subsystems from the website or Microsoft Store (I’ve tried all of them, and the only solution was to reset my computer, not restart). I don’t want things to be overly complicated, so I chose to try the second option, which is using VirtualBox instead, and it works!!!

Our team has 3 members in total (Justin, Shay), and we created a Discord server for both synchronous and asynchronous communication (sometimes Zoom for synchronous discussion). We split the main channel into announcements, general chat, project ideas, documentation, scheduling, environment issues, and GitHub bot, with a general voice channel.

I think this way of communication is very effective and efficient. Up until now, we’ve done 2 meetings outside of classrooms:

• 3/8 - Dedicated to setting up the installation environment/repository on all of our devices to make sure everyone is contribution-ready.
• 3/9 - Dedicated to reviewing all the proper contribution documents and any templates we have to follow and making sure we are all on the same page on how to contribute properly.
• upcoming meeting on 3/11