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.

My contributions for this week consisted of editing a peer’s blog post from week 8, adding a hyperlink and changing the assignment heading that they had on their page.

My thoughts on Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Prior to actually reading the book, I was confused on what the correlation was between open source and the title of the book. However, after reading the text it started to make sense on why Eric Raymond chose to compare these two things that seemingly have no connection. This idea of a cathedral and a bazaar really stuck out to me because before I had learned about open source, I had the same idea that Raymond had about software. I thought that some of the really important and large pieces of software that we see today were built in isolation and to perfection, essentially, as Raymond would describe it, a cathedral. He then realized, like I did, that this was not in fact the case and that software development looks more similarly to a bazaar with “different agendas and approaches”, and is very collaborative.
There are several points that Raymond made that grabbed my attention. Some of them are:

1. “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.”
   We spoke about a similar idea when Bill Reyner visited, however, he said that when his company doesn’t see any particular value in working on a side product, they might just scrap the whole project. I thought this was interesting because Raymond is essentially saying that ideas can always be bettered and taken further by another person.
2. “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.”
   Similar to the idea above, two minds are better than one and there is always someone somewhere that will have the solution to a problem.
3. “To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.”
   I thought this was an interesting idea because he repeats it throughout the book. He really seems to emphasize that if you do not have an interest for a project, than it is not the project for you.