Overview

Choosing an open source project.

Project evaluation: Ghostty

Ghostty is an open-source terminal emulator that touts itself as fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform. Walking through the project evaluation, Ghostty seems to me like an active, welcoming environment with clear documentation. That being said, it’s not a good candidate for me, as I am a Windows user and cannot easily set up my development environment. Still, the evaluation was a good exercise in spotting the things that make a project attractive to contribute to.

Choosing my project.

I’ve done a fair amount of scientific computing, and have developed a number of apps as well as two software packages. With those experiences and the skills gained therein, I think there’s a fairly broad range of projects I could contribute to - as long as I can do it on Windows.

On a more personal level, outside of development, I have an interest in biology, and am an enthusiastic amateur birder. It would be very neat to find an active and welcoming project that is in some way about birding (or something biology-related, at least).

2/24/2025 addendum

I cannot BELIEVE I never realized iNaturalist was open source. I am now dead set on contributing to this. How did I not realize? Bashing my head against my desk. I have been using this software for years. The NYU Urban Naturalist Club gives out stickers for iNat observations. And I didn’t know. Disgraceful.