Reflection on Our Group’s Presentation Last Week

Now that our group has finished our presentation on Lucide, I’ve had some time to think back on how it all went. One thing that really stood out to me was how smoothly we worked together. We divided everything up pretty equally, and everyone brought their own perspective and voice to the presentation. I was especially proud of how we talked through not just our contributions but also the setbacks we ran into. It made the whole thing feel more real and relatable.

One part of the project I was genuinely excited about was contributing icons, but that excitement took a bit of a hit when I got some pretty harsh feedback for missing one of the contribution guidelines. I understood the mistake, but the tone of the response felt more discouraging than constructive. It made it harder to stay motivated, especially since I was making the effort to contribute in good faith. It felt unnecessarily cold, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s frustrating because the project itself is great, but those kinds of responses made the experience feel less welcoming than I expected. It reminded me how much a project’s community can affect your overall impression of it.

As for the actual presentation, I was a little worried we might be speaking too fast. It came up during our practice sessions, and I didn’t want us to sound rushed or make it hard for people to follow. But once we were up there, everything flowed better than I expected. The pacing ended up being just right, and we managed to cover everything within the time limit. I think our energy helped carry it through, and overall I’m really happy with how it turned out.

More Group Presentations

One presentation that really stood out to me was the group that worked on Mattermost. Their project felt super well rounded. They didn’t just focus on one thing but contributed in a bunch of different areas like translations, UI tweaks, fixing broken links, and even backend unit testing.

Mattermost is basically like an open source Slack, used mostly by developers and security teams. What was cool is that the group chose it because the tech stack matched their own skills (React, TypeScript, Go), so they could actually dive into the code and make meaningful contributions. They translated documentation into Russian and Spanish, fixed over 70 broken links (which helped improve the user experience for future contributors), and even made small but thoughtful changes to the interface, like changing a button label from “Copy URL” to “Copy Email Address” when the content was clearly an email.

They were also really honest about the challenges, like how hard it was to set up the full development environment: web, mobile, server, and all. But that made their learning experience even more impressive. I especially liked that they talked about learning how to ask for help, getting over the fear of making a PR, and just taking that first step instead of overthinking.

Overall, their work showed how impactful open source contributions can be, even when you’re not making huge changes. I left their presentation feeling like they really got the most out of the project, both technically and personally.