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.

What struck me the most is how structured and well-managed the Oppia community is. From the moment an issue is opened, it goes through a clearly defined process: maintainers review it, assign relevant tags like “good first issue,” “workflow: easy,” or “low impact,” and then contributors can start working on the issue.

However, Oppia has a strict policy for new contributors. New contributors like us must obtain permission before working on any issue, unless they’ve already successfully fixed at least two issues in the past. This approval process turned out to be a major bottleneck for our group. To get permission, we were required to propose a solution in detail: which files we would modify, what the fix would be, and what the expected result would look like (often accompanied by a screenshot).

We submitted requests to fix several issues, but so far we haven’t been successful in getting permission for any of them. For example, one issue we followed closely was tagged as “good first issue”, but after requesting permission to fix, we were imformed it could only be worked on after the next release. We did get close with one UI-related issue: we proposed a design fix and even implemented it, but in the end, we couldn’t proceed because our solution didn’t fully align with Oppia’s design guidelines.

In the coming weeks, I hope we can successfully contribute to more issues and have at least one pull request accepted. Meanwhile, we’re also trying to contribute to Oppia’s wiki documentation. This idea came from our realization that navigating Oppia’s codebase requires a lot of background reading, and improving the documentation could help future contributors onboard more smoothly.

Reflections on This Week’s Presentation

This week’s presentation was given by an alum who now works full-time in open source. He shared valuable insights on how to get involved in open source professionally. He mentioned that he had already contributed to several projects before graduating and encouraged us to start contributing early to get a better understanding of how these communities operate. He also introduced several companies that are deeply involved in open source, such as Igalia, and pointed out that even large companies like Intel rely heavily on open source tools and ecosystems. Although I wasn’t able to fully process everything he said, the presentation reminded me that contributing to open source is not only valuable for improving skills, but can also lead to real career opportunities.