We are in the home stretch now! This week, I had a bit of a mental breakdown.

Hindsight is 20/20, I guess?

Like there’s a bit of me who kinda wished that Stella and I were a bit more brave enough to work on Preswald (a really cool Notion/documenting website app but with ways of integrating Python into the mix) and not be so picky about projects in the first place. I saw the Preswald presentation and the fact that they said that their project was like a bazaar really got me emotional.

Expectations were clear and simple. They were able to work on implementing a lot of different features, some of which were really cool. They were able to get a dedicated channel for interacting with the maintainers of the project. They only really had good reception with the maintainers of the project. They got a pretty good shot at potentially joining the corporate ranks of the main company (who provides the maintainers of the project) to continue working on this project, but now with money!

Their positive status quo kind of got me sad, since I kind of wished I wasn’t so picky on projects to work on in the first place and just be more courageous about learning something completely new (since I think at least one of the group members had to learn a bit about frontend development).

The Depressing Realities of Open Food Facts

On the other hand, Open Food Facts, the project we are working on, felt super cathedraly with three core maintainers (if I am counting correctly) and a whole bunch of transient contributors. There were unwritten rules of the cathedral that we only found out when we tried to create pull requests (or when we looked deeper into some of the conversations in the repo). There were things that Stella and I would’ve like to work on, but I always played on the safe side in terms of interacting with the contributors (even when the maintainers decided to ghost me), since we had already seen how bad some of the communications have been. However, Stella thought we should start playing hardball and jump into things even though the contributors would get super annoyed at us. (To be fair, most of the problematic interactions have been between one of the core maintainers and Stella, so Stella has less to lose if relationships sour even more than me (though thankfully the problematic interactions have basically disappeared).)

And that was what we kinda did with a vague response to a pull request Stella had been working on. What was once a small pull request became a pull request to do so much more, with a few more screens to implement. I did have some stumbles on the way, as their code documentations for UI were really bad (and perhaps we might make a few more PRs to document some of the code). But finally, we got to do something big and hopefully we can contribute it enough that if there are still missing pieces to this contribution, it’s just as easy as implementing the interactions between the app and the server backend.

There’s things that I wished I did kind of differently from the beginning of this open source project. Maybe a different project. Maybe I should have been less specific on projects I wanted to work on. Maybe I should have been more hardball with the maintainers, or tried harder to open a line of proper communication between the maintainers and us. Oh, how hindsight is 20/20.

PS: there was also a HuggingFace presentation. But it didn’t got me emotionally panicking in the same way as Preswald. If anything, it just super dry.