This week me and my teammates has presented our open source contributions on the project Oppia to the class, listened to many other presentations regarding their choices of open source projects, even including another Oppia group, and continued to cotribute PR to both Oppia and my personal open source contribution.

Regarding group project

My team has presented our contributions to the Oppia project this Monday, with showcases of coding contributions, translation contributions, content creating, and community engagement on github.

I personally have covered contributions ranging from front-end fix, to back-ed adjustment, and issue proposing, as well as content translation and creation. One thing that I am most proud of myself is depsite constant obstacles, I never gave up on the hope to make my PR passed by constantly engaging in community discussion and maintaining personal connection with Oppia senior member to discuss the solution to my case. It’s indeed working out as I was able to make more PR request based on single files later on in the project and still working on resolving the unrelated systematical error resolved.

One particular interesting issue that I got asked on is would we choose the same project if offered a second time. I think the asnwer for me would be no, as I would prefer to choose a smaller project, where there’re less stubborn rules and focus more on the creativity and coding contributions. Contributing to Oppia has been a great opportunity to understand the workflow and rules of a mature open source project, and also offers us a sense to see how software enginners would work on an existing project at a larger tech firm, but I personally would really love to see my code being taken into account and my ideas could be considered as the foundation for something bigger.

Although the presentation is made, I will keep making contributions to the project through multiple channels and maintaining connections with the supervisors.

Regarding other presentation

It seems very interesting to see how the other group of oppia has also run into siilar issue as us, that it’s very challenging to set up the environment, let alone making actual code contributions. And situations like questions being claimed, PR being taken happens at a much higher frequnecy than expected.

In response, they also came up with the approach to diversify their contributions, like including translations and content making.

One thing that’s really inspiring me about listening to other people’s presentation is to see how all of us have learned different things about contributing to the open source project, despite the successful PRs being merged. Some has built connections with Microsoft employee, some has had their creative plan being considered for the future development plan, and some has learned new languages. For example, the autogen group has contributed heavily on both frontend and backend fix and merged multiple successful PR, while some group like the odin group has faced similar issue like we did with the repository members regarding issue fix but still keep the effort going.

Regarding my personal contribution

After many rounds of conversations with Oppia members, I’ve finally got granted with the permission to submit PR request without passing mypy test and add single file instead of a general folder. In that case, my code can be manually reviewed by the reviewer and decide what to do specifically with my case, which is that my environment is incompatible with the oppia mypy and python version.

I’ve also noticed the issue proposed regarding my weekly page on github, as the avatar is not shown successfully on my subpages like contributions and aboutme. I fixed them by creating a pull request that fixed the media path of my photo and merged it to the main branch to have the issues fixed.