This week, we watched a presentation by a NYU grad student who told us about his experience with open source software, and we also worked on our group project The past couple weeks I have been hard at work on an issue I was creating a pull request for. It definitely was a tough experience as I had to learn and work with technologies that I had little exposure to before, in fact I hadn’t even heard of some of them and had to figure it out on the go. I would say that I spent most of the time reading and figuring out how the Preswald was setup and organised, as I couldnt make the SQL playground widget without first exploring how csv and json files were handled by the backend/enginea. In this regard it was a really valuable experience and I got some experience working on a large scale project with many moving parts.

Unfortunately, someone else ended up submitting a pull request before I had the chance to complete and push my work. It even happened again when Jared and I found a new issue to contribute to and were almost ready to submit our work. I knew that this is a dynamic project with many developers with more experience than me, but having my hard work be in vain definitely left me feeling discouraged. However I realise that I am now well acquainted with the project and so will be able to submit features faster as a result, so my work wasn’t a complete waste. I think going forward Jared and I will make sure to submit our PRs as fast as possible or come up with our own issues to solve ourselves.