This week we had a lecture centered at discussing open source projects in multiple fields. It was an interesting activity. I got to know many unfamiliar projects and also learned that the impact of open source might be stronger than we expected. Apart from that, in this week, my group focused on preparing for the final presentation on May 1st.

This week we had one class for group contribution, and another class lecturing on open source in the industry. We learned how open source organizations earn money in multiple ways. This addressed much of my doubt towards this field, and also provided me with insights into how familiar projects or organizations like RedHat work behind scene.

This week we had Christopher Snider, one of whom is in charge of Tidepool, to give us a presentation centered on this public health open source project. Tidepool is a typical example of open source used in healthcare communities, and it is great to have a deeper insight into this field to understand some specific benefits of open source projects. At the same time, for the group contribution project, my team is continuing investigating in issues as well as working on previously found issues.

For Monday’s class, we had presentations by each group describing the progress of our open source project contribution. On Wednesday, we had an inspiring seminar centered on Cathedral and Bazaar. We shared thoughts of programming, the industry, etc. It was informative hearing our classmates’ ideas from various perspectives. At the same time, my groups is constantly making contribution to Sklearn, mainly contributing to automatic parameter validation.

In this week, my group’s contribution to Sklearn is progressing steadily. All of us have finished some PRs, waiting for review. We had regular meeting in class and out class. And during these meetings, we decided new issues to contribute.

On Monday we met Jim Hall, an expert in the field of open source as well as the founder of freeDOS. It was a special experience to hear someone like Jim’s story, which covers the time when computer was just introduced. As for Wednesday, we continued our group work, doing contribution to Sklearn.

This week we started by meeting our team to decide on which open source project to contribute to. After considering everyone’s interest, strength, as well as how welcoming the project’s community was, we selected Sklearn, a python module providing popular machine learning algorithms. I can see it challenging to contribute to it, but I am also sure that we would learn a lot from this experience.

This week’s progress is themed around evaluating and picking potential open source projects to contribute to. Looking over numerous projects on Github, sometimes I am inspired that there are so many talented people working on tons of mature projects making our life easier, sometimes I would also feel pity seeing tons of interesting projects no longer active or not attracting many users and contributors. And in general, it is very hard to pick a project that is interesting, understandable, and has an active community at the same time.

This week we welcomed our first guest speaker, Mr. Mek Karpeles from Internet Archive and Open Library. Mek’s presentation offered us great details into what motivated the foundation of Open Library, how it works, how it contributes to knowledge dissemination and makes a further difference in the society. I haven’t have similar chance to have such a close look into the industry before so it is definitely a great event. For the second part of this blog, I would talk about practical tasks namely my personal routine contributions.

In this week, we wrapped up the Web-extension project by giving presentations. Looking back, there is tons of take-aways from this experience, both for individual improvement as well as getting to know classmates and learning collaboration. It is also an experience triggering my interest in involving in communities to see more open source projects and to learn from more people.

Git is an extremely popular tool for version control in collaboration. It helps programmers to create their own branch, merge their branched version back to the main, as well as helping users deal with conflicts occurred when merging branches. As for me, though I have a little experience with Git before, most cases I experienced didn’t actually include much conflicts or many levels of repo. Therefore, pulling and pushing when there are conflicts remains more or less mysterious to me, and doing upstream is completely new. These two are also the main focus for me while doing the Git activity in class. For the remaining time out-class, my teammates and I continued on building our web extension.

This week we started by focusing on an essential element of a community, the Code of Conduct. It is a document guiding people to behave courteously within the community. And we can see from examples that different companies/organizations may emphasize different terms during different period in the Code of Conduct. Later on, by investing web extension for Firefox and getting our hands dirty, we had a more closer experience to the industry.

Week 1: An Introduction to Open Source

The first time I heard about open source was when I had just known programming, someone told me that there are tons of open source projects on Github that I can learn from. So by my intuition, I thought that open source means that I can view the raw code of a project and I can use the code given to build up exactly the same thing myself. Now, speaking more precisely, by the material we are offered in class, open source “comes with a free software license, granting the recipient the rights to modify and redistribute the software” (wiki), some people also suggest that there are 10 criteria: “free redistribution, source code, derived works, integrity of the author’s source code, no discrimination against persons or groups, no discrimination against fields of endeavor, distribution of license, license must not be specific to a product, license must not restrict other software, and that license must be technology-neutral.” (Open Source Initiative)