First Week of Contributing in Groups

This week we finally formed our teams to start contributing to a project for the rest of the semester. My team was very open regarding the topic of our project and we took our time exploring different projects before coming to a decision.

Choosing A Project

Our first step in deciding was to find our common skills and interests. We are all very comfortable working in Python and there was some general interest in working on some sort of data tool, so that was our jumping off point. We also decided to prioritize projects that had not seen a sharp decline in activity, even if that meant choosing a project that was still very new and early in development. Our first major candidate was Bokeh, a data visualization package for Python written in Python and TypeScript. This project looked very interesting and seemingly had a good community that we could join easily; however, the commits seemed to have fallen off over time, with the project being active for over ten years. Our next candidate was Preswald, a package for easily deploying dashboards using visualization tools like Plotly. Preswald is still in its infancy, having started last year and just receiving YC backing. This was very enticing, as it seemed like an opportunity to get in early and potentially work closely with the staff. With the project being so new, there were of course concerns about whether it will succeed and continue to be worked on, but the YC backing gave us confidence that it will be able to stay afloat and the project itself looked very interesting, so we decided to move forward with it.

First Contributions

After choosing our project on Wednesday, we met on Thursday to plan our first steps. We had initially planned to fix a documentation error, but it was fixed only a few hours before our meeting, leaving us to find something else. Thankfully, the maintainers regularly upload example projects, some of which contained minor errors. We identified a missing dependency in the setup files, for which we submitted a fix on Thursday, 3/6. From this, we hoped to get our first interaction with the Preswald team who we could then get in direct contact with and ask about becoming closer contributors. Over the weekend, we identified two more errors in sample projects and submitted pull requests, bringing our total contributions to three. These have not been reviewed or merged yet, but we plan on reaching out to the team early this week and hopefully starting to work with them.