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.

Thoughts on Jim’s Talk

What impressed me the most was how Jim began doing all these computer programming stuffs as a physics major student. He described that as a physics student, he had to do a lot of mathematics, so he thought it would be perfect if a computer can do all these demanding works for him. “Though I ended up doing more maths,” he says. Motivated by such idea, he started a long-lasting career as a programmer.

This actually reminded me of how I decided to take Computer Science as my major. In my freshman year, I initially tended to major in Interactive Media Art, a major playing with visual design, games and models. My first course required students to use softwares like Blender and Unity to design some animated models. During this process, there was a situation that I had to deal with some programming-like tasks to define the movements of an object. This was how I found that for most fields nowadays, people can hardly avoid learning programming. And this was also how I realized that I do like playing with building things out of simple logics like “AND”, “OR”, “NOT”, or specifically, in the modeling one, if an object should move after or before another.

But one thing made Jim great was his persistence. We have many sources today. We can learn to program on YouTube, StackOverFlow, etc. But Jim needed to figure out most things by himself. So it impressed me that, while many people can have similar motivation to do create a certain thing, most of them may just give up in the middle, the hardest part is keepign going.

Group Work on Sklearn

We took and finished an issue in the past week. For this week’s meeting, we were focusing on looking for other proper issues for future contribution. There were a lot that seemed interesting, but some had already been taken, some were still being discussed by the core developers when we asked. So we ended up taking 3 issues. They are not very complex. Therefore we decided that each of us is mainly responsible for one of them. But of course we are all open to discussion if someone encounters any problems.

It could be difficult to get familiar with all the process like doing tests, as we have no such experience before. I believe things will get smoother as we practice more.