This week, we made a report on our contributions to scikit-learn. We were also able to learn about other groups’ progress and their experience. Moreover, we discussed about The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and there are plenty of lessons that I learned from it.

The Lesson from The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

This is really inspiring and I do think it points out the core of open source. Superficially, it talks about the importance to treat the development process also as a product. Even if a project gives a perfect product, if its code is poorly commented and structured, its features are poorly documented, or its guide for new contributors is not complete, it will not be a succesful open source project even if it is a successful project.

Moreover, treating users as co-developers can motivate users to make contributions. Normally, people will look for other products if one product does not satisfy their need. However, if they are granted with the power to modify that product so as to fit their need, many people would be willing to do so. This is essential in open source, since only in this way would a project be able to build up its contributor community.

Group Stand-Up Reports

This week, we have also made a stand-up report about our open contributions, and also listened to the reports of other groups. Generally speaking, we have had little difficulty installing the development environment and making contributions (maybe due to the simple nature of Python). It is also good to here that most of the groups have already started making small contributions or planning a huge one.

Our communication with the maintainers are mainly in GitHub issues and pull requests. The contributing documentation mentioned that scikit-learn is a loose group working in spare time, so we have not tried to reach out to individual maintainers. However, we have seen that many other groups have achieved success by this means, for instance getting a relatively large milestone to work on. Given the situation that some of our older pull requests are infinitely pending and we are currently working only on small (kind of repetitive) issues, we may try to come up with something more significant in this way.

Many groups impressed me a lot. For instance, MAPLE seems to be working on a significant new feature. I’ve always been looking for something like this to work on, so in fact I admired them a lot. Also, I’ve always been interested in the Linux group. It would be amazing if they are finally able to contribute some new features or fix some bugs to such a huge and well-developed operating system. Overall, the ways other groups narrow down issues, communicate with maintainers, and work on their contributions indeed broadened my horizon and provided me some potential ways to proceed in the rest of this semester.

Summary

In this blog post, I have talked my favorite lesson in The Cathedral and the Bazarr which I believe touches the core of open source. I have also reflected on the progress of my own group, and expressed my thoughts of other groups. Finally, thank you very much for your meticulous reading and hope you enjoy it.