This week, we have listened to Christopher Snider’s presentation on the Tidepool project, which is designed to help individuals with diabetes to better manage their condition. His presentation made me realize that open source is much more beyond coding on GitHub, but also a commitment to the society.

Christopher Snider and Tidepool

One of the most impressive aspects of the Tidepool project is its commitment to open source principles. Despite being a commercial venture, Tidepool has made all of its code available for others to use and build upon. This not only makes the project more transparent and accountable, but it also allows for greater collaboration and innovation.

Another highlight of Christopher’s presentation was his infectious passion for the project. As someone living with diabetes himself, he understands firsthand the challenges faced by those managing this condition. His enthusiasm for making a real difference in people’s lives was evident throughout the talk. I believe that as the project continues to grow and evolve, it is sure to have an even greater impact on the lives of those living with diabetes. Also, it made me realize that open source is not only about sharing code, but also about making real convenience and commitment to the society.

Scikit-learn Progress

We have been continuously contributing to scikit-learn also in the past week, and there are indeed challenges. Though we are able to do the maintanence issues (validating public functions) as mentioned in my previous posts, most of our past pull request are not being reviewed, and there are not many new issues to work on. Regardless, we will keep doing the maintainence issues, which are repetitive and simple yet siginificant in the sense of open source. Also, we have been actively communicating with the maintainers via Github, for instance trying to participate in their discussion about some greater issues. There is indeed one about transporting a feature in scikit-optimize (which is not being actively maintained) to scikit-learn, but maintainers haven’t agreed on whether to do so. They may either decide to move this feature to some other projects such as scikit-learn-extra or to try to find new maintainers for the original scikit-optimize project. No matter what, we will keep an eye on this and try to get involved.

Overall, it is not likely that we lack new pull requests thanks to the maintainence issue, but we are definitely willing to make some different and more interesting contributions as well.

Summary

In this blog post, I have shared my thoughts and lessons learned from Christopher Snider’s talk and the Tidepool project. I have also briefly mentioned our progress of contributing to scikit-learn and some challenges we have encountered. Finally, thank you very much for your meticulous reading and hope you enjoy it.