Now, it’s time for presentations. My group didn’t get to do it this week, but the presentations that did happen were pretty fine, for the most part.

There was a presentation on AutoGen, which was pretty cool, but it felt kinda dry for some reason (though I feel like that might be down to how it doesn’t feel that tangible or relatable to my realities, though).

Things get really fun with the two Oppias though, just because the two different teams took on different paths to doing a lot of contributions. Both Oppias made some code contributions and some localizations, but one of the Oppias decided to have some fun with creating one of their own lessons and submitting some voiceovers, which sounds fun. I was concerned that the lesson wouldn’t be good, so I did run through a bit of the lesson (about Manhattan) and it turned out to be good enough of a crash course for me to kinda recommend if I am not around to teach people about the wonderful things NYC has to offer. Unfortunately, contributing to the Oppias didn’t sound like fun because Oppia acted like a cathedral, and at times it was hard to contribute (but at least the maintainers were more active than the ones for OpenFoodFacts).

Speaking of cathedrals, that’s what happened to Mattermost. I really like how they were kinda bouncing between the desktop and mobile apps! But the group wasn’t able to have much fun implementing new things, which is just kinda cruel. Like a bazaar environment sounds more fun and I think they were kinda bummed about not being to have fun with contributing to Mattermost in more substantial ways (beyond just bug fixes). I kinda hope the maintainers at Mattermost decide to hire these lads, since I feel like the Mattermost group would be a great addition to the development process in general (and I feel like they’d be able to contribute to a lot, if given more power to contribute more substantial things).

I really loved Lucide and I really found some of the presentation to be pretty interesting, such as how they got so much free reign of the project and the icon contributions. There was some form of cathedral going around, but it still felt bazaar enough that they were able to create some pull requests to bridge some functionality gaps (color picker, for example). Yes, there were still guidelines as to what spacing to take place for the icons, but the rules for that project were fair enough, especially since it’s an icon library and all the icons need to feel like they were meant for each other.

All in all, I really love the presentations that happened, and kind of wished the maintainers for Open Food Fact were just a bit more cooperative in the first place. I feel like we could’ve done great things with more cooperative people.

PS: I have a really burning hot take. Please please please. I can tell when you are reading off of a script and that’s just lame. Like I feel like you gotta let some ideas marinate in people’s heads.