Thought Process on Searching for an Right Open Source Project

Searching for Open Source Project

2048

I am interested in game design, so I looked up “open source project game” in the browser. I saw 2048 as one of the choices. I have played this game on my phone before, so I continued looking at its repository. It has a README, a License, and some Contributing documents, but it does not have a Code of conduct. I looked through the issue tracker and there are issues that haven’t been closed or resolved since 2014. The most recently closed issue happened in 2018. There were two pull requests in the past month, and that was the most recent activity shown in “Insights”. At this point, I can tell that it has an inactive community. The installation of this game is simple, but the code itself hasn’t been updated for six years.

Codezilla

After looking at project suggestions created by Professor Stewart Weiss, I clicked on Codezilla. First of all, it has all the project documents: code of conduct, contributing, license, and README. It uses C++ as one of its main programming languages, which is the language that I know best. When I look through the issue tracker, people lost their habits on putting tags next to the issues. Many issues did not have a clear description, and some did not even have a description at all. Someone requested to have a standard template in 2018, and that issue is still open. The last time an issue was closed was in December 2019. The community was very active in October 2019, but now there is dead silence.

Other Contributions

After making my first contribution on Open Street Map, someone left me some questions and suggestions on how to improve and fix my changes. He suggested to refer to the Department of Buildings when resizing the building area, which is something that I did not consider before. Having someone comment on my changes makes me feel as though I am part of a community, and it gives me an opportunity to learn something new. He was super polite when raising his points. I also did fix my errors right away.