Reflection on Open Source Software Development course
One of the reasons that I had listed as to why I took this course was because I was unsure of how to begin contributing and became overwhelmed when attempting to do so. My first blog post allowed me to see just how much I learned during this course. Through the different assignements and presentations, I have learned where and how to look for different projects to contribute to, as well as how to evaluate them. Having experience actually going through the process of searching for a project and contributing to it, has allowed me to no longer feel overwhelmed because I know where to find the information that I need. Prior to this course I did not know how many different ways there were to contribute, and I am glad that I am aware of this now and that I can find different ways to make a difference. For example, I made a lot of contributions having to do with spelling or grammar mistakes on Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and GitHub. While these are very small contributions, they allow for a project to appear more professional and overall creates a sense of trust from the user.

Summary of Week 13
This week I made two contributions to freeCodeCamp. After looking through the GitHub issues for one involving curriculum, I found one regarding JavaScript prototypes. The issue suggested that the JS challenge about prototypes left out some detail that made the explanation unclear. I created a pull request on 11/21 that added a link within the challenge to an article that discusses prototypes in detail. It had been a while since the issue was proposed, and I did not immediately hear back after creating the PR. After a couple of days, I reached out to a maintainer that was part of the issue discussion and although I did not get back from them, I heard back from a different maintainer. The maintainer thought that links within challenges should be avoided and ultimately removed. He suggested that the sentence in the challenge explaining prototypes should be edited and he requested changes. I edited the PR and it was approved and merged on 11/25.

Summary of Week 12
This week I was looking through the open issues on the freeCodeCamp GitHub repository. I have been making contributions in the Basic JavaScript curriculum, and I saw an issue about an “unclear description” regarding a switch statement in one of the challenges. I saw that the issue had 10 comments and I became a little discouraged because I assumed that the issue might have been taken care of already. After looking through all the comments, I saw that no one had been assigned to it and no one had referenced it in a pull request so I decided to take on the issue. I created a pull request on 11/14 and within a couple of hours one of the maintainers had requested some changes. The same day, after making the suggested changes, I got a second approval from a maintainer and the pull request was merged.

Summary of Week 11
My thoughts on Kevin Fleming’s visit.
This week Kevin Fleming of Bloomberg visited us and discussed Bloomberg’s involvement in open source projects. He discussed the different open source software that the company uses, such as Project Jupyter and Apache Solr. I thought it was interesting how Bloomberg hosts an Open Source Day, which is one of its approaches to giving back to the open source community. Even though FactSet encourages its employees to contribute to open source projects, I think that having an Open Source Day is taking a bigger initiative as a company to contribute to open source. Kevin also spoke about Bloomberg’s work with the Software Freedom Conservancy and Outreachy, which are programs that are making big strides in the open source community. I think that Bloomberg shows characteristics of being a “maker” in the open source community while FactSet is more of a “taker”.

Summary of week 10
We started looking at ways to contribute to Wikipedia pages, and this started as being a little difficult due to there being so much content on Wikipedia that I did not know where I should start contributing. I had trouble looking for pages that might need editing because the few that I did look at, all looked very well crafted. I then started looking at pages that were generated under ‘Random Article’ and many of these were lacking information or they had many issues. I put the ones that interested me on my Watchlist to be able to go back and add information to them.

Summary of Week 9
As mentioned last week, I chose to contribute to freeCodeCamp because I support their mission to educate individuals on computer science topics at no-cost. After looking through some of the issues on the project’s GitHub page, right now I am mostly interested in fixing issues or creating issues having to do with challenge instructions. Because I actually use the website, I read the instructions to challenges and there are times when I am confused about what is expected of me. A very recent issue was proposed about this very topic to have clearer instructions, as seen here. Looking at one of the maintainer’s comments under this post, it seems as though the project welcomes and encourages these types of issues to be proposed which is reassuring because these are good for my first contributions. I am thinking about working on this issue, and any that come up like it having to do with the basic parts of the curriculum. I have been filtering through issues, looking for ones that are labeled “good first contribution” or “help wanted” because these are ones that are up for grabs, but there are not many that I have found, which makes me think that I will have to propose my own.

Summary of Week 8
This week we made a decision of which open source project we are going to work on. After looking at a few projects, I narrowed it down to freeCodeCamp. Additionally, this week we were visited by Bill Reyner who spoke about how open source is being incorporated into companies like FactSet and how they profit from this. He really emphasized how, at FactSet, they try to encourage their engineers to contribute to open source projects. I thought this was pretty cool of the company because sometimes engineers want to make a difference outside of their place of work. At the same time, they might be benefiting the company in which they work by contributing to a library that their software uses, becomming a win-win situation.

Summary of Week 7
This week we practiced evaluating an open source project using the evaluation template. I found this to be a very useful exercise because it helped me to look for the aspects of a project that are important in determining whether it is a good fit. It also allowed me to practice searching for certain information about a project on OpenHub and GitHub.

Summary of Week 6
This week the class had Karen Sandler as a guest speaker. I found the topics that she spoke about to be interesting because her push to make software open source comes from a very personal issue. She brought up that she was concerned about the software that was running on her defibrillator, and this was something that I had not thought of before. This made me think about all the different things in our lives that require software and how there is so much of it that we depend on and do not even know how it runs. I thought her talk was very eye-opening.

Summary of Week 5
This week our class focused on the GitHub Workflow. We did an in-class activity to practice this workflow with peers, which I felt was useful. I found this exercise to be very useful because I became more comfortable with the GitHub collaboration workflow. Since we did certain steps several times, such as posting an issue and submitting a pull request, I feel more confident in this process. The activity was a little difficult to follow at first, but after doing the steps a few times it became easier. This week I continued contributing to OpenStreetMap by adding details, such as the name and hour times, of a local church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Summary of Week 4
In class we were shown how to work on GitHub repositories through our local machines using git. Using this knowledge, I was able to edit my blog post for Week 3 through my local machine’s command line. I also contributed to OpenStreetMap adding the names to a couple of pathways in a cemetery. This week I edited a peer’s blog post using the procedure in Collaborative Editing. I fixed spelling mistakes and changed a sentence for clarity. The work flow that is described in the Collaborative Editing Procedure differs from the one described in GitHub Workflow Activity because we spoke about in class that it is smart to reach out to the maintainers of the repository to let them know you are changing a certain aspect, to reduce the risk of merge conflicts.

Summary of Week 3
In class, we reviewed the different types of software licenses that exist, as well as the formal definitions of “open source software” and “free software”. We also began contributing to open source projects, such as OpenStreetMap.

Summary of Week 2
In the class we reviewed the history of free and open source software. Additionally, we looked at different ways to contribute to open source projects.

Summary of Week 1
In the class, we discussed what open source software is and we created our account names for GitHub, Wikipedia, and OpenStreetMap.