Weekly Open Source Blog – Fix Plans & Reflections

Work This Week

• Got one issue closed: #453.

Weekly Open Source Blog – Fix Plans & Reflections

Progress on Issue Fixes

This week, I made solid progress on two issues in Oppia:

1. Fix Plan Iteration for #354

I submitted a fix plan earlier this week and received four thoughtful suggestions from the maintainers. Their feedback pointed out areas where I needed to clarify my understanding and improve my approach. After reviewing their suggestions, I rewrote the fix plan and submitted the updated version. I’m currently waiting for their response.

Reflections on Famous Quotes in Open Source

In class, our instructor shared several famous quotes about open source development for discussion. Some of these resonated deeply with me, particularly those related to users and testers:

Progress on Our Group Project

Over the past few weeks, our group has been working on contributing to the Oppia project. Before any actual contribution could happen, we needed to set up a development and testing environment, which took quite a bit of time—especially for someone like me, who had no prior experience with web development or server configuration. To get started, I had to learn the basics of Docker and WSL. Eventually, I managed to successfully set up a Docker container for the cloned Oppia project, which allowed me to test changes locally before making any contributions.

Reflections on This Week’s Presentations

This week, we had two presentations discussing different aspects of open source: its history, key contributors, and its role in AI development.

Decision-Making Process

At the beginning of our project selection, we discussed our backgrounds and realized that all three of us were relatively comfortable with Python. This made it clear that choosing a Python-based open-source project would be a good starting point. Meanwhile, since none of us had previous experience contributing to open-source software (OSS), we decided to look for projects that involved documentation and UI polish tasks—areas as well. In that case, we could make meaningful contributions without deep familiarity with the project’s core codebase.

Reflections on My Learning Journey

Over the past few weeks, I have explored different ways to contribute to open-source projects. Initially, I started with small contributions, such as adding annotations to OpenStreetMap and making minor improvements to a web extension. These experiences helped me understand how open-source collaboration works and what kinds of contributions are accessible to beginners.

Thoughts about different projects

I’ve looked at these projects, and regardless of their size, each part seems very organized, and the community communication is quite close. They all seem like healthy projects. One that is more closely related to me is Godot. I personally think it’s quite easy to learn (maybe because I’m a game developer), but the group’s evaluation of it was that ‘this project is not very beginner-friendly.’ I realized that people from different backgrounds can have very different perspectives on the same project. From the description in this group, it seems like this community is very busy, and everyone works efficiently together, giving the overall impression of a healthy and thriving project.

Group Project Review

I think all the web extensions made by each group are great. The projects include Website Time Tracker, Tab-Organizer, Quick Notes, Currency-Unit-Converter, and GitHelper. For more fun projects, we have Virtual Pet, I Did That, Browser Scroller, Meowtivation, and Colorize.

Tomato Clock - A Web-Based Study Aid Open Source Project

Idea:
After brainstorming together, we decided to recreate a Pomodoro timer, a tool that became popular a few years ago to assist with learning and productivity. The goal of our tool, Tomato Clock, is to help users track time and remind them to take appropriate breaks, thus enhancing study and work efficiency. We focus on building it as a web extension and making it open-source, so it can be accessible and useful to a wider audience.

What is the Code of Conduct?

Code of Conduct is a series of guidelines that define what we can do and what we should do within a community, like a open source project.

About open source

The first time that I heard the phrase “Open Source” was back in highschool. At that time, I was learning 3D modeling back then, and Blender, an open source software was my tool.