Overview

The beginning of group contributions

So, despite my earlier gung-ho-ness (if that’s a word) about contributing to iNaturalist, the group comes first. Or rather, consideration towards my teammate comes first, as part of a two-person team who are both relatively new to open source contribution. The Open Food Facts simply has more comprehensive resources, and it seems best to minimize barriers when we’re already trying to learn a number of new tools.

The Open Food Facts organization has a number of projects we can contribute to. Since my teammate has some experience with mobile development, we are starting with the Smooth app. If we’re both able to successfully set up the development environment and contribute, we will proceed with this project; if not, there are many others under the Open Food Facts umbrella that we would be interested in working on.

My teammate has more experience with mobile development, whereas my experience in this area is limited. We will both have to learn to use the Flutter framework, as well as the Dart language. Since we’re both already familiar with the process of learning new programming languages, I expect this to be a surmountable challenges.

I believe my teammate has already successfully set up the dev environment. I almost have it, but I need to fiddle with Android Studio and the Android Emulator to run the app. Afterwards, I think following along with the Learn Flutter resource will provide an entry point that allows me to try contributing to Smooth.