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.

Team Preswald

Team Preswald’s presentation highlighted both polished features and in-progress tooling. They began by walking us through their merged pull requests:

• Interactive Plotly graphs now include a convenient download button, making it easy to export visualizations for reports or presentations.
• LaTeX support in the AI chat interface lets users render complex equations inline, which delighted everyone in the room.
• Updated contribution guidelines reduce onboarding friction: clearer steps, more examples, and improved formatting.

In addition, they shared branches for an upcoming debug panel, which promises to surface error logs directly in the UI, and a PDF export prototype for offline sharing. What impressed me most was how maintainers pre-created feature issues (IDs 174–177), giving the team clear targets and illustrating collaborative trust!!!

Team Huggingface

Team Huggingface’s insane depth of contributions spanned bug fixes, documentation tweaks, and advanced feature work:

• They introduced a time-based strategy for trainer evaluation and logging, which opened new possibilities for scheduled checks during long training runs.
• Multiple team members tackled pagination and indexing bugs in Transformers’ generation logic, ensuring consistent model outputs.
• They improved the Datasets library’s state tracking, fixing tricky edge cases in iterables and caching on network file systems.
• The group also submitted notebooks demonstrating hyperparameter search workflows, covering tools like Optuna and Ray Tune.

It was also interesting to learn that some of the participants had 0 exeprience in working with Transfromers and/or HuggingFace before, and the fact that they still could achieve so much throughout the 2 month period is a proff of a great team collaboration!

Both presentations were a reminder that open source is as much about community, and teamwork, and communication as it is about code and your own skills. I’m inspired to refine my own PR descriptions and documentation before diving back into more issues within our own project. Onward to Week 13!