This week, I found out that I was more delusional in my goals and that I should’ve been a bit more realistic on the goals and aspirations for the project I would be working on.

Take One

This is a bit of a journey, but on Monday, I was assigned to a moshposh group, since I already had found a potential specific project idea and that I could also do a web project or anything frontend, but I guess my potential specific project idea was used to form the original group I was in. My ex-groupmates also had relatively specific project ideas, which kind of didn’t go well at the end. One of my ex-groupmates suggested working on Ghosty, a terminal emulator that feels like it belongs on macOS and Linux (and also had Mac hardware to run this). However, one of my other ex-groupmate had a PC, and wouldn’t be able to work on the project (and wasn’t fond of the idea of running Linux on his computer). We kinda were forced to pivot to something that us three could work on. However, because my ex-groupmates preferred something backend (like contributing to the Gleam compiler, particularly because of the fact that it would be platform agnostic), but I wanted something that was more frontend, we were kinda doomed. I did suggest a compromise idea of working on Tauri, which is basically a web app framework similar to Electron (using more native OS web browser systems), but my ex-groupmates were kind of set on working on Gleam.

I ended up exploring what the other groups were planning on doing, and found a few groups I could have joined, and basically tried to follow up on what they were deciding on and programming languages of choice (which was JavaScript, which I am shaky in but I am willing to put in the time and effort at this point, especially since most jobs require me to make web apps anyways). I had to decide between two groups that were both frontend focused, but one group wanted to make a few big contributions, while another group wanted to work on a lot of little contributions. I decided to join the former group, since I felt that if I ended up struggling on any JavaScript, I could always phone my groupmates and set up a peer programming session to troubleshoot any issue I am experiencing at the moment. Both groups at the time were not set on a project to work on, but we felt that we could finish up discussions on this by Wednesday.

Take Two

Turns out, Johanna, my professor, realized that it might be better to restart the conversation about what project to work on in a fresh group on Wednesday. I was paired with Stella, who was not in class on Monday when deliberations were occurring, to restart this conversation. This time, I came in with the expectation that I would have to work on something non-iOS and something frontend. Stella and I have already communicated a bit before after Johanna said that I should restart the conversation, and we were both in agreement to work on something JavaScript and frontend. I had suggested two software, Rocket.Chat (a open source Slack clone) and Zulip (a open source Slack alternative, where each work topic has it’s own thread instead of using multiple channels). However, I barely had familiarity of this and Stella wasn’t exactly too fond of this, so they recommended OpenFoodFacts (an open source repository of food and their nutrient contents) and iNaturalist (an open source nature activity tracking app), since they use the latter and a lot of former students have contributed to the former in the past.

I recommended OpenFoodFacts, since it was a large and diverse enough of a project that moved just fast enough that we could contribute to it without getting trampled by others, and it allowed us to explore different ways of contributing to the project (such as mobile app development with a cross platform framework, which Stella was interested in, and traditional web development with some backend work for when we get tired of the mobile app development work). As there were already a lot of project evaluations that could basically be summed up to being a good project to work on, we both ended up being on board with this idea (though we did both try to set up the development environment for the cross platform mobile app, as we both wanted to try working on that first). We were both also able to quickly decide on times to meet up for the weekly meetings, as well as the team rules (which were loosened up a bit because of how we are a two person team). We didn’t hit any road blocks as a team yet, but I did struggle for a bit setting up my cross platform mobile app development environment because I didn’t read the fact that they had specified to use a specific version of the tools. Oops.

But all in all, after a little hiccup and a lot of bouncing around, I have finally found the group that I am going to be working on the open source project with, and we got up to speed really quickly. Oh, the wonders of just starting things from fresh again.