Reflections On My Team’s Presentation

For some reason, I was extremely nervous before our presentation. I kept wondering how we should structure it: Who would introduce each section? How would we present our shared challenges? And which tool—Figma, Canva, or Google Slides—would best showcase our work? Thankfully, Vasily jumped in early and built a presentation skeleton in Figma. That initial framework made it significantly easier to flesh out content and visuals afterward.

This past week we had our first look at other teams’ work on open source projects. And I shall say that both of the presentations caught my total attention:

1. Team Preswald showcased several user-facing improvements and documentation enhancements in the Preswald project.
2. Team Huggingface demonstrated a broad range of contributions across both the Transformers and Datasets repositories.

Open Source in Film

This past week, I watched a video about Open Source in Film, featuring Larry Gritz (Sony Pictures Imageworks) and Carol Payne (Netflix), who were happy to talk about how open source has reshaped the film industry over the past two decades. As a computer science student, I found their insights into tooling, collaboration, and community-building especially curious to ponder about.

Reflections on the essay

Eric S. Raymond’s essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar was a very interesting deep dive into someone’s experince of trying to follow open source practices in the 90s, which was definitely a fascinating read! I was struck by how early Linux hackers experimented with distributed collaboration long before GitHub or GitLab existed. Two of Raymond’s aphorisms resonated with me in particular:

Mattermost is what Matters Most

My team and I did not work on the project during spring break at all, so we started off by assigning some long-term issues to each other. This was also when we began exploring other Mattermost repos, such as mattermost-mobile, desktop, docs, and mattermost-developer-documentation. That being said, we began getting ourselves acquainted with each repo, their issues, contributing rules (which differ for each), and, most importantly, developer setups for each environment. We are currently all working on our own assigned issues and a bunch of smaller tasks!

Reflections

History of Open Source

It still strikes me how open source grew out of a simple desire of people wanting to share knowledge and improve technology without artificial barriers! Something that definitely stickd out to me was how by the 1990s, open source went mainstream through projects like Linux, Apache, and MySQL, all of which thrived on global collaboration, and how Red Hat, for example, demonstrated that companies could profit by providing services and support around open-source software.

Apologies for the late blog post! I’m hosting an event this week, and things got a bit hectic during the preparations. If you’re here searching for fixes to contribute—tough luck, my page is perfect! But on the bright side, you ARE in luck because you’ve discovered this post and can attend the event! 🤗🤗🤗

How are THINGS?

A lot are still in limbo state. On February 15th, I started writing a Wiki article on Taisia Kitayskaya and I’m still figuring it out. I hope to finish this contribution by the end of the upcoming week!

Getting started

By looking through the evaluations, I realized that, to avoid wasting my time, I need to start with the most obvious requirement I have set for a project and work my way down to the least crucial. So, I first look for projects that use languages I already know and can freely use. Then, I make sure the project either truly excites me or, if it’s not super thrilling, at least offers clear benefits (I think either scenario is fine). After that, I usually head straight to the issues tracker to check out the labels; this, I’ve found, is the quickest test for how friendly the community is and what kind of work they expect contributors to do. Finally, after checking If the last closed request was more than a month ago, I note that and decide whether I should keep this project close to my heart or move on.

Git

Local dot-git stores
Confusion lurks in merges
Use single quotes now

Stella, Chuqiao, and I are working together on creating an extension for FireFox. We have made a lot of progress since Monday, even though it might not necessarilly feel that way, which, I believe, is something that often happens with any kind of work that poeple do - they tend not to appreciate how far they’ve come 🪷

Part 1 - Go Project, The Contributor Covenant, and Eclipse

The Go Project’s Code of Conduct provides a throgouh and well-polished structure for anyone who wishes to intercat with the Go community. Following a familiar format seen in many codes of conduct, the document is divided into subsections covering every aspect of communication. Most importantly, in my opinion, the code provides valuable resources (such as contact emails and links) for assistance when issues of inappropriate behavior arise.

What do I think when I hear “Hey, it’s open source!”?

To be honest, whenever I heard that something was open source, I didn’t pay much attention to that aspect—at least not until later in my CS degree. Back then, it simply meant to me that the project or software was free to use at no cost. Now, I understand that open source is so much more than just free: it provides all sorts of freedoms - freedom to contribute and experiment without subscription, budget, time, or experience limitations, freedom to reach out to the community, and freedom to ask any kinds of questions.