Presentations!

This week my group was the first to present our open source project contributions, which we did for the dashboarding tool Preswald.

While going first was a bit of added pressure, I took it to mean that my group had made some of the best progress so far, which alleviated some of the nerves. Everyone in my group has put in a lot of work on the project, so we all had plenty to talk about and felt very comfortable with the material. I introduced a bit about Preswald and showed an example project, as it is a very new project and we did not expect people to know much about it. We then discussed the open core model and the (sometimes frustrating) community of contributors before getting into our contributions. We chose to focus on four main code contributions - the sidebar widget, LaTeX integration, allowing multiple data sources for the AI chat assistant, and the debug panel. I presented the debug panel, as it is so far my largest contribution that is likely to be merged. It is a relatively simple feature, projecting some information from the command line into a widget within the app to help less technical users, but working on it was a great learing experience, particularly for getting better with using websockets, so I felt that it was still important to talk about. I was very pleasantly surprised with how engaged the rest of the class was, as we got a lot of questions about Preswald and our experience developing for it.

Hugging Face

The other group to present on Wednesday was Hugging Face, a very popular library for AI and ML in Python. A project like that to me seemed very intimidating to contribute to, but they had made an impressive amount of contributions and seemed to have had a good experience with the community. After the presentation I asked the team about their backgrounds with AI, and surprisingly only one member seemed to have substantial experience while the others were learning as they went. I was overall very impressed with their work and their attitude towards the project, as choosing Hugging Face was very ambitious and they managed to find ways to contribute meaningfully even without being experts in AI. I am very excited to see the rest of the projects over the next few classes!