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.

In terms of contributions, this week I made grammatical changes to a classmate’s blog post from week 5. In this same blog post, I also added some changes to make the blog post meet the requirements for the assignment.

Open Source Projects I looked at to potentially contribute to:
I looked at quite a few projects that looked interesting to me. I looked at the project called, Offline QR Code Generator. This project looked very interesting but also the project seems to be pretty active where recent commits, PRs, and issues have been made. The maintainers seem to be very supportive of contributors where they express their gratitude for contributions. The programming language that this project uses is JavaScript. I have basic knowledge of JavaScript and so I only really see my contributions to this project to be more about documentation rather than coding. However, I would be interested in looking at the code and determining whether I could contribute to that area.

Another project I looked at was FreeCodeCamp. I am very familiar with this project’s mission because I have used their services. Commits, issues, and PRs are all very frequent, making the project very active. Being that the project posts coding challenges using very basic JavaScript, I can see my contributions being part of the coding curriculum. I also looked at the project called Notepad++ because I am also familiar with it. While it is active and the community of contributors seems relatively friendly, there are so many issues and PRs that have been left open. This makes me think that the project is very big and the maintainers will most likely not look at PRs from beginners. Another project I thought would be interesting is 30 Seconds of Code because it seems like the type of project that needs many contributions because there is always content to add.