This week in class, the groups working on Preswald and Huggingface presented on their contributions to their respective projects. Both groups were incredibly productive in the short time that they had, and I’m very impressed.

Preswald

Preswald is an open-source framework for building interactive applications with Python. Created and maintained by Structured Labs, an early-stage startup, Preswald is promoted in open-source communities to garner contributors. In fact, this is how the group found the project: on an open-source subreddit.

Over the course of the semester, the team was able to add a few features, including LaTeX support in AI chat and adding an export button to interactive graphs. But they also struggled with finding and claiming issues to work on, with issues often being stolen by other contributors. Unfortunately, my team is also struggling with issues. In our case, the core team often fixes issues without claiming them. One solution they took was to make their own issues, and this seems like a great idea to me!

Hugging Face

Hugging Face is an AI community that maintains a few open-source AI libraries.

The team working on this was incredibly productive in the short time they’ve been working on the project. They’ve been able to submit a lot of issues and PRs, and it’s inspiring to see. They’ve been able to ramp up incredibly quickly, and they credit using LLMs as a helpful tool for being able to do so. My team is struggling to get PRs in and might also try their strategy out!