CSCI-UA 480 Computer Science Student, Spring 2025
I had a wonderful time hearing about the other projects today and wanted to share my thoughts and feedback. Everyone did a wonderful job of contributing as much as they could to their respective projects and I can’t wait to see hopefully more of everyone contributing in the future.
I thought that our presentation on Lucide went really well. I was very nervous at first and spoke a little too quickly trying to disguise my stutter but I believe my groupmates more than made up for it. We seemed to finish on time and had time to answer a few questions.
My team has made a lot of progress on our presentation. We now have 90% of our slides made and ready to go.
As the end approaches, I am immensely proud of my teams accomplishments regarding Lucide. Even though we have not been able to complete a single large contribution as planned due to time and knowledge constraints we have made a good use of our time nonetheless.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an Essay by Eric S. Raymond, software developer and open source software advocate, that compares different approaches to open source projects that reflected his experience with Linux and GNU.
For the last couple of weeks, I along with my group have been diligently working on contributing to Lucide an open source icon toolkit. Although, our progress has been slow, I feel we have succeeded in finding our rhythm as a group and on developing new ideas on how best to advance this project.
I recently had the privilege of attending a presentation by Nick Vidal from OSI, or the open source initiative. OSI, is the authority that defines open source and it is recognized globally. Following that, OSI currently provides the definition of open source software. Nick Vidal was able to inform me more about the how, why, and what of open source AI.
I now have team members with whom I can work with on making a major open source contribution. We have combined our goals for the semester and are now pursuing work on an open source project in which we can improve our skills in either Javascript or Typescript. An ideal project would be one that has good first issues open, timely communication, and opportunity for growth and creativity.
It has now been six or so weeks since starting my journey. Over these past few weeks I have learned more about open source software development than I had previously thought attainable in such a small time period. After learning more about git, licenses, conduct, and the community I believe I will soon be able to make actual contributions to code. For now, I am proud of the small contributions I have been able to make.
A goal of mine this spring is to make a major contribution to an open source project. An ideal open source project to contribute would have to be accessible for beginners, have a clear project goal in mind, have an active community, and a wealth of instructions for contributors.
Version Control Systems are important in allowing developers to safely interact with code. It is not a flawless system but it allows for mistakes to be made in a way in which they can be undone which is extremely useful for everyone involved in production.
A browser extension is a small piece of software that is added onto a browser for all kinds of purposes including those made for productivity,accessibility,and entertainment. For those who use Chrome as their browser users can go to The Chrome Web Store to explore and download these extensions. I, along with my team: Jacob Padilla and Lulu Zhuu, worked on developing one such extension.
An important part of open source projects is the code of conduct. It’s a clear and reliable guide for users and contributors to interact with each other, the product, and the code. The overall goal is to create a successful and inclusive community.
The first word that comes to mind when I think of the term “open source” is collaboration.