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 and PRs are addressed in a matter of days
• The project must have many (for the purpose of this blog post, let many be at least 10) issues labelled good first issue — this ensures we have something to work with
• The programming language(s) the project is written in must be familiar to all of us — this caused some discussion because one of my teammates really like Go. But we found the solution, so stay tuned!

The process of choosing a project was bumpy: many times when we discovered an exciting project (that was not in the project evaluation repo), we’d find some issue that meant we couldn’t work on it: no easy or good first issue labels, confusing contributing instructions, or a really rude core contributor.

So….. based on the above criteria, we narrowed down our pool of candidates to two projects: Mattermost and Musicblocks. We’re leaning to the first one (I think).

The tasks for the upcoming week are: one — PICK ONE PROJECT!!!! two — make sure we can start contributing, like, yesterday. The second point involves installing the development environment, setting up databases and servers, etc. which can be pretty challenging in the case of Mattermost.

While I was not in class on Wednesday (due to having been sent to Minnesota), I still caught up with my teammates asynchronously. I tried to set up the developing environment for Mattermost, which involved a lot of googling and staring at Stack Overflow and was still unsuccessful. Our #1 priority, therefore, is to try again and assist each other with the setup.

In summary, our main obstacles so far have been:

• indecision
• no experience building messengers

To over come them, we will:

• each try to deploy the project

We are meeting on Monday, 3/10, to discuss all of this.