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.

The course did meet my expectations but also went beyond. I knew that we were going to be making contributions to projects on GitHub but I did not know that I was going to be able to truly understand what open source software is. I feel that I now have a good grasp of the pros and cons, as well as what it means to have a license. I am also glad that we were able to hear from actual companies, like FactSet and Bloomberg, on how they are using open source software.

In my second blog post I had mentioned that I had wanted to contribute to projects whose services I use, like freeCodeCamp or Kodi. I ended up contributing to freeCodeCamp and enjoyed it but I do wish that I was able to contribute more to the codebase. I now see that sometimes it is a little harder to contribute to projects that are bigger, like freeCodeCamp, because you do not know about all the components that make up the project. So I think that for the future, the kinds of projects that I will contribute to will be smaller ones.