This week we worked together in groups to look into the specifics of several open source projects. The open source project my team worked on was called Whiskey, as I had put that down as a project i was interested in (and possibly could contribute to). However, we noticed that pull request took a long time to review and that the lead maintainer seemed to be absent from discussions as of late. In addition, it seemed that the overwhelming majority of contributions were only performed by one person. In previous lectures, the professor noted that if this was the case we should avoid taking on this project and I agree as I want a project with a more collaborative nature.

I actually noticed this as a common theme among the other projects that the rest of the class looked at. In fact, it seemed that most groups actually didn’t recommend their project as something to contribute to (at least for first timers). I realise now that finding a good project that meets all of the criteria is actually more difficult than it seems. That being said, I still think some projects that we looked at in class, such as Pandas, could be possible canidates for contributing to.

Overall, the takeaway for me from this activity was that there’s a lot that goes into a good open source project and it is important to dig into the organisation, collaborators, activity, etc. when choosing what project to contribute to.