Part 1 - Project Progress

Before spring break, my group was able to finish our first round of significant contributions, developing four new features for Preswald.

My assigned feature was an AI chatbot widget that could access any data sources in a Preswald app and provide the user with information and analysis on the data. This turned out to be a fairly significant undertaking because of the learning curve of getting familiar with the codebase, especially since making the chatbot required constant communication between the React frontend and Python/FastAPI backend. I also faced some issues with other contributors working on the issue at the same time; Preswald operates on a first come first served basis for submitting pull requests, but many contributors do not even acknowledge that they’ve started working on an issue, which has led to some cases of people working on features that they believed were unclaimed before a PR randomly appears and gets merged. This was partially the case for me, as I claimed the issue and posted several updates on my progress before another contributor submitted a pull request the same day and around the same time as me, which ended up being merged. However, my version of the feature had several functionalities that the other contributor did not include, so I have been working to implement my features into the widget. Additionally, I proposed updates to the contributing documentation for the project to ensure that contributors comment on issues that they are working on so that other users are aware of their work, and my changes have been merged. In the coming week I plan to finish my revisions on the chat widget then start on another feature. My team as a whole has also made progress on multiple other issues, with one new feature merged and another almost done, as well as making smaller documentation and bug fixes that have been merged.

Part 2 - Presentation by Shivam Balikondwar

This week we had Shivam present about his experience as an open source contributor on projects such as Chromium and Firefox. The first thing that stood out was how ambitious it was to contribute to Firefox as a first project, especially not being a computer science student, as large projects like that are in my opinion very intimidating to get into. His journey was very inspiring, as contributing to Firefox led him to an opportunity to work on Chromium at Igalia, which then led to an opportunity to work at the Linux Foundation. Sometimes as CS students the path seems very rigid - get internships at big companies, build your resume, get a job in big tech - but it was very refreshing to see that that is not the only viable option. Shivam also discussed a lot of programs surrounding open source, like Igalia, which I was not aware of before. This was probably the most insightful presentation of the semester so far for me, as I have been feeling uncertian about my path forward and it was great to hear from someone who was able to turn open source contributions into bigger opportunities.