Week 6

Time to start searching for projects

Last week, I was searching through the projects which focus on an issue with the First Timer label for my first open source contribution. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to find issues because there were many projects encouraging the first-timers to contribute for the Hacktoberfest. I completed a few of them, and my pull requests were accepted. I was thankful for what I have learned from the class so far, especially about the Github Workflow and the Markdown. Without that knowledge, I might not have been confident enough to try to contribute.

I decided to take a closer look at the project itself this week, unlike before. I sorted projects according to languages from CodeTriage and Up For Grabs, mainly at C ++, HTML, JavaScript, Python, and Swift. First, I read a brief program description and went through the Github repository to check how active the issues and pull requests are, and then added them to my list. Then I started to take a closer look at each project. Based on the professor’s advice, I first checked the whether there is a license to make sure it is an open-source project, how active the issues and pull requests are, how well the communication with the maintainer was maintained, and how well the project is explained on the Readme file or homepage. I also examined the code of conduct, which can be a signal of welcoming contributors.

After narrowing down to a total of four projects, it happened that two of each feet into the same category. One I liked and another I disliked.

I liked…

  1. Media Player - Kodi
    The description is well organized on the homepage. Clearly, it was an open source project, and it provided a welcoming atmosphere for the contributors as the apparition letter for them appeared on the main page. The Github repository was actively working on issues and pull requests. The maintainer seemed to try to respond to those within a day or less. One thing that was unfortunate was that the instructions of how to install the program/software were not clear to me, so I have not used it yet. I will try to install it again soon.

  2. Business Process Management Software / Enterprise Resource Planning - ERPNext
    I was interested in this type of program because one, I hope to have my own business in the future, and two, I used to work in the accounting / management department before returning to school. The homepage and Github repository are all well maintained. In the issue and pull request section of GitHub, communication seemed at first to not be coming and going, but I found a separate discussion forum later on.

I disliked…

  1. Command-line program to download videos from YouTube - youtube-dl
    The overall management seemed to be out of control. I’ve lost interest in the project because of the lack of communication between them and both the developers(contributors) and especially regular users who might not know even what Github is.

  2. ERP and CRM - Odoo
    Above all, the homepage was cluttered and caused me to lose interest.

   

The guest speaker talk presented by Karen Sandler gave me a lot of insights into the open-source project companies. It reminded me of my twenties, when I was upset by the unfairness in terms of the workplace, not only directly related to the particular work I was pursuing but also the environment for females. I worked in the, how can I say… hmmm… art field? My friends were writers for film, TV series, poems, novels, song writers, painters, graphic designers, and all other forms of artists. There were young and passionate about what they were doing, but they were also naïve. They were happy to share their art pieces with others, but didn’t think of what lay beyond. Their creative works were stolen by others, especially well-known people who had power - It could be their name value, money or something else. I think the tech field and the art scene are pretty much the same, especially, tech in open-source projects. I hope that I can run my startup in the future, but the talk made me a little bit scared about it.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the question and her answer from the talk - “What are some of the ways that you have considered for drawing more women into open source?” I have so many words to share about it and I even feel my heart is beating faster because of a not so pleasant reason, so I would rather choose to be silent.

     

What I Have Done This Week

Written before or on October 9, 2019