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 deploy it. It also lies somewhere between open-source and commerical software, whereas other teams (to my knowledge) have found some truly open-source projects. Still, I find it exciting rather than alarming — I am already learning the names of project managers, core UI/UX people and so much more about the process of developing a commercial product, and it’s a privilige to see it all on GitHub without actually working for Mattermost. I find that Mozilla’s projects are in a similar vein to that, too.

Nevertheless, we have started working on our first contributions to Mattermost. I got assigned a nice little issue that I solved in a matter of minutes, but I can’t test my solution due to my laptop’s hardware constraints. I did spend a solid hour figuring out the file structure — I’ve never seen the source code to such a big app before. This experience made me more savvy in that area, which will help me and my teammates with future, big contributions.

Just to be a little self-aware : we don’t have much time left. My teammates and I are still debating what kind of major contriubtion we should make, and whether we need one at all. I am becoming more and more in favor of offering a lot of small fixes, and I’m also not sure if the Mattermost PM and IX teams will approve a big feature in time (or ever!) Anyway, that’s what we will figure out in 2 days at our weekly out-of-class meeting.

I also failed at my goal to make an individual conding contribution before spring break, and my list of possible projects to contribute to grows bigger and bigger without any progress. I’ve set another task, which is to have a PR by the end of this week, but given my past track record with deadlines … uhh.

Shivam’s presentation

I was SO impressed by Shivam’s presentation! One question I didn’t get the chance to ask him was: How and why did you decide on Firefox as your first open-source contribution? But as I set with it after Wednesday, I thought that contribuing to a big organization makes a lot of sense: they’re too big to worry about someone not getting something right. In fact, they’re more interested in (and have designated channels for) helping the newbies. I thought it was so cool and brave of Shivam to start contributing in his freshman year with no software engineering experience. Very inspiring!

I also liked the slide where he listed some practice opportunities — I’ve actually just applied to the Igalia Coding Experience because of that! I was surprised to hear that the open-source industry pays well, because from what we’ve covered in class, I thought most developers treated open source as a passion project and a side gig. But Igalia offers $7000 for their fellowship, so I’m not complaining!

foreword

I really need to get myself together for this final push, and as I’m getting more and more excited to work with Mattermost, I’m becoming more confident about sprinting the finish line.