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”.

Going through the recent issues on the project’s GitHub page, I saw that there were more issues related to curriculum this past week than prior weeks. I think that this might have been some of my doing, because the issue that I created last week brought up some other issues regarding the actual code in challenges. This week on freeCodeCamp I created another issue related to the Basic JavaScript curriculum on their website. I created this issue on 11/12, as it took some time to go through the coding challenges and find things that should be edited. The issue relates to the description of the .length function in a JavaScript challenge. Due to the challenge being for beginners at coding, I felt that the description of the .length function needed to include that spaces are taken into account when calculating the length of a string. I created a pull request to resolve this issue. The checks that need to be passed for the pull request to be merged into the master branch, have been passed as of 11/13. I am now waiting for a review and an approval from one of the maintainers of the project.

This week we began contributing to Wikipedia by editing pages on the website. One of my favorite movies is Beaches and so I decided to investigate the wikipedia page for this film. There were a few grammar mistakes present, so I edited the page by correcting these errors. I also came across the wikipedia page for the book It’s Kind of a Funny Story. This page also contained grammar and spelling mistakes, and my corrections to the page can be found here.

My Thoughts on System76 introduces laptops with open source BIOS coreboot

The article discusses the importance of System76’s move to create an open source BIOS coreboot. This move is a big deal because, as the article mentions, most of the firmware sold today is proprietary, while Coreboot’s code can be viewed, as well as modified. Those in the company that are advertising this product, claim that the firmware is “secure”, “faster”, and will “mov[e] technology forward as a whole rather than requiring individuals to constantly re-implement what’s already been accomplished.” I think that the latter is a good point that was made and reminded me of the ideas presented in Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, where having more eyes on a project might be a better bet. I am curious to see how the products are received by consumers because often times people think that security is compromised when a project is open source. I will be trying to stay up to date with the products.