Week 1 - Use the (Open) Source, Luke!
Why I am taking an Open Source class: exploding chickens && procrastination
A Coder’s Journey Begins
To explain why I decided to take this course in Open Source software, first I myself must know how I made that decision. Although that may seem trivial at first (open source is cool & I can get practical experience by contributing, duh), much like bugs in complex pieces of software, this decision has more going on behind the scenes. Also, that short of an answer does not exactly get me credit for this blog post, but that’s besides the point. Backtracing through the tree of decisions that brought me to this course, I’d have to say it all started with a chicken.
The Prequels:
Skip to the next section if you just want to get to the open source part of my path without pesky background experience context.
Cue (hopefully not too) long-winded backstory of how I got involved with CS:
The chicken was virtual, of course. We were tasked with creating an animation of a chicken walking as the first assignment in an introductory computer science course in high school. We used a program called Alice, a partially open source, object-oriented educational programming language with a drag-and-drop IDE very similar to Scratch. I loved being able to simply put together some lines of logic to create worlds, and to this day I remember how great it felt going beyond the assignment and adding whatever I wanted to that project (I won’t bore you with the details, but exploding chickens and dinosaurs were definitely involved). The class eventually shifted into learning Python, but from that moment I knew I could pursue building cool stuff by following a computer science track and I would try to participate in anything that gave me a chance to do so.
I only truly began seeing myself as a programmer / software developer rather than simply a computer science student after participating in a summer intensive with the organization All Star Code. That experience made me realize there was nothing stopping me from directly creating and working on software projects on my own. I adopted the idea of learning by doing, and even today I strongly believe the best way to learn any language/framework/paradigm is to actually create some sort of project using it. I mostly got into web development from then on, because it was the most accessible area of software development to me. I developed a habit of inspecting almost every webpage I visited, and trying to figure out things like how the site was created, how the code was organized, and how certain features worked.
Is Solving Procrastination NP Hard ??
Through many tech events, some professors, and adamant friends, I received a pretty decent exposure to the concept of Open Source throughout my first semesters in college. However, as I write this now I have yet to make any actual contributions to open source projects. I didn’t make it a high enough priority, as other work kept getting in the way of really diving into open source — somehow I even managed to miss Hacktoberfest two years in a row. I wanted to learn more about the open source ecosystem, but just couldn’t manage to put in the time.
Interestingly enough, I observed the creation of this course as a passive bystander about two years ago, when it was in the ‘petitioning the department’ stage. I noticed emails and posts in the Hunter College CS Facebook group about gathering interest for running an open source software elective. I couldn’t fit it into my schedule then, but it did stay on my radar for the future. Lo and behold, while in the process of switching up some of my courses three weeks before this semester started, I realized a certain CSCI 39586-01 in the course search list had a nice green circle right next to it. And the rest is history the present.
This has all been a very roundabout way to say: this course is an opportunity for me to better all my skills as a developer while helping build and maintain cool things. I figure I can no longer avoid getting involved with open source if I am required to academically. Learning about the history and philosophy behind open source is just an added bonus. In some ways, I was always interested in open source, but just didn’t know it yet.
Thanks for reading…
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