In this post, I would like to reflect on my OSSD class — the reason I’ve been updating this blog — and how it has changed my relationship with software development and computer science overall.

Takeaways from OSSD

My key takeaways from this class are :

• Do not...

In this week’s post, I wanted to take time to reflect on my personal experience with open source. Getting into Mattermost for the first time and not knowing much about its community, I treated this as a good old class project that I’d forget about right after I leave the...

Progress report

For Mattermost, I am still working on the issue that I was assigned two weeks ago. My fix was wrong, and I am still struggling to load the development environment (iOS app simulator). However, I am making progress by exploring the project’s structure on Jira and helping...

The Cathedral/Bazaar situation

This week, my classmates and I got to discuss The Cathedral And the Bazaar, which is, apparently, a seminal text for the open source community written by developer Eric S. Raymond. Behind the incredibly rich and detailed descriptions of how he built an email client, Raymond...

This week, I (1) was in full final project mode and (2) learned about someone’s exciting journey with open source.

commit-ment issues

My team and I have decided to work on Mattermost. It is a large piece of software, and my computer sort of crashed when I tried to...

This week I got to hear a presentation by Nick Vidal, OSI’s head of community, about the definition of open source AI. The fact that this definition requires developers to share all data and all source code that was used to create and train the model. While this makes sense...

first week of teamwork

This week, my team and I started looking for a project that we will regularly contribute to for the next 2 months. As step 1, we narrowed down our own demands:

• The project must have an extremely responsive community — this means that questions...

Contribution check-in

So far, I was able to make two small contributions:

1. I added a source to a Wikipedia article about my hometown.
   1. Challenges: Finding an article with issues that I could solve rather quickly (such as adding a citation) was the biggest challenge. I decided to...

Thoughts on projects

What surprised me the most is the size and scope of the projects we’ve looked at so far. Like MuseScore, most of these projects are relatively nieche (bar VSCode or Pandas) yet extremely intricate and complicated. And I’m not even talking about code. There are...

git

As my Data Journalism professor said, git is a form of black magic done on computers, which makes knowing it feel like knowing ancient sorcery. To people who don’t understand what git does and why it is so widely used, it seems extremely complicated,...

Team 3!

This week, I explored Firefox extensions as a simple example of open source projects. Our Open Source Development professor divided us into teams based on our levels of expertise in Git and Javascript and tasked us with a couple of readings and a chance to create our...

What? And why?

This past week, I’ve learned that licenses and Codes of conduct are essential documents that accompany Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects. A Code of conduct is a set of guidelines and expectations that contributors must follow. While each team can technically be super creative...

I would like to make it clear: I know very little about open source projects.

If I was asked to define open source today, I would say it is a principle that requires developers to make the source code to their project available for the public to view and/or...