Week 5
Throughout this week, I continued my search for Open Source projects:
Although I do not have a first choice, the top three projects I am currently interested in include:
Project Evaluation:
Throughout the past week, my Open Source class has been working on project evaluations in order to determine what projects would be best to work on throughout the course of a semester. I personally believe that the course evaluations were extremely helpful and extended my scope of research. I feel that the project evaluations had me diving through all of the contents of the project and looking for things that I may not have thought to look for originally.
Difficulties I Faced:
In terms of the evaluation, I believe looking through the code base was hard; specifically, understanding what exactly a development environment is and what external additional software modules are. I had to look towards my team members for further explanation in what these questions were asking and learn what I should be looking for.
Additionally, I believe it was difficult determining whether a project should be deemed suitable for beginners. Sometimes the coding language and documentation will be simple and the community will be active, however, the issues will be for those who have more experience in working on Github and in project communities. I believe it took thorough research to determine if a project was suitable for beginners and if an individual was able to work on it throughout the course of a semester.
What I Learned:
With that being said, I believe I learned a lot through the project evaluations. Without the project evaluations, I would have looked at the activity of the project (issues, pull requests, etc) and quickly viewed the community activity (how many people contribute and the quantity of discussions). The project evaluations had me look through code documentation, labels and tags, and even read the content of the community discussions in order to determine how I felt about the project. I feel like I was able to gauge whether I was interested in a project or not, and whether the project was suitable for me, due to the concise questions I had to answer through the evaluations. I believe that I will use these questions in the future as I continue to make contributions to other Open Source Software projects. It is because of these evaluations that I was able to do in-depth research on each and every project I viewed.
Research I Have Done This Week:
I have been extremely interested in learning more about RXSwift, which is Open Source. I constantly use RXSwift at my internship and upon learning that it was Open Source, I was very excited to do more research and learn more about the activity and community of a project I use daily.