We’re settling into the final push of the semester. This week was about starting our second Oppia exploration and wrapping it up, all while starting to organize slides for next week’s final presentation. It’s a steady rhythm of planning, building, and rehearsing.

This week brought a mix of excitement and that end-of-semester scramble. Our Oppia exploration project is finally clicking into place–after wrestling with outlines and skill-table layouts, we’re seeing our community lessons take shape. I also squeezed in Claude Warren’s DevWorld 2024 talk, “The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Coffee House,” and it got me thinking about how code, process, and those casual “coffeehouse” moments all feed into a healthy open-source vibe.

This week brought a mix of productivity and dreadfulness. As we get closer to the final weeks of the semester, our group project is taking a bit of a turn in a different direction (a good one). I also had the chance to attend a presentation by Shivam Balikondwar on his journey through open source. It was both insightful and motivating, especially hearing about how he got involved with major projects like Chromium and Hyperledger.

This past week, I attended a presentation by Nick Vidal from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) on Open Source AI. Going in, I had some assumptions about what open-source AI meant, but the talk really challenged my perspective, especially regarding its role in industries like finance and the ethical challenges it faces.

So, we finally picked our open-source project–OPPIA! After tossing around a few ideas, our group landed on it because of its strong educational focus and active community. Plus, it seemed like a great project to get our hands on with real-world open-source contribution.

Contributing to open source has been something I’ve wanted to do more consistently, and while I haven’t made a ton of contributions yet, I’m starting to find my footing. This past month, I made a couple of small contributions, and I’m hoping to pick up the pace this week.

This week, we spent time looking at different opens-source project evaluations from other students, focusing on projects that align in some way with our interests or experiences. One thing quickly became clear–most open souce projects, regardless of how exciting or fitting they might be, come with a learning curve.

This week’s class covered Git exercises, group presentations, and some interesting extension projects from different teams. It was a good mix of hands-on practice, teamwork, and seeing how everyone approached problem-solving in their own unique way.

When we first started this project, our team didn’t run into any major problems–at least nothing unexpected. Right away, we set up a group chat on Discord as our main commnication hub. Fromt here, we pitched ideas for the browser extension, dicussing what would be feasible within our short one-week timeframe. Rather than tackling something overly complex that might break at the last minute, we chose to focus on core open-source elements–communication, contributions, licensing, documentation, and styling guides. This approach alowed us to balance learning about open-source collaboration while keeping the project manageable.

Hey there, back again with a blog post for week 2. This time, our discussion centers around why big open-source projects have a code of conduct. To me, it’s more than just a set of rules. Having a code of conduct helps create a welcoming, productive environment where developers from all backgrounds can collaborate without fear of harassment or exclusion.

When I hear the term “open-source”, I think of collaboration and transparency through a community with shared goals. Although it is a software development model, it is also a philoshopy that emphasizes accessiblity and freedom. By empowering individuals to modify and improve upon existing works, the method involves fostering innovation that transcends geographical boundaries.