Week 11

Guest Speaker: Vicky Brasseur

Guest Speaker: Vicky Brasseur

On April 20, 2020, we had our third guest speaker, Vicky Brasseur. She is the author of the book, Forge Your Future with Open Source. During her presentation, she shared a couple of people’s stories of their experiences after participating in various open source communities. Since I have not yet been into a disrespectful or unhealthy FOSS community, I was shocked when I saw these two comments: “There were o docs for how to use it and they told me just to read the code“and “I asked them to use my correct name then they spent the next several dozen mailing list messages debating whether my asking that was rude. But…it’s my name.” In the beginning, I thought FOSS is for developers only because it required some basic coding background. Before I take this class, I didn’t know what open source software is and didn’t know what does it meant by open. I changed my mind after Vicky told us that FOSS should be appliable for everyone and meets the needs of normal people. Lastly, the most important thing that I learned from her is open source is a developed model other than a business model.

Code.gov

It was great that the government took initiative in open source to promote code reuse and decrease code spend while increasing code quality. I like the part where they categorized the open tasks by skill level. This way people can easily find the task that fits them the most. I noticed that some of the open tasks had been solved, but the issues on GitHub remained open. For example, Footer Email Reference #235 had been resolved by a merged PR on November 2019, and it stays open. One of the good first issues that I looked at is Reduce Image Sizes. I was surprised that this issue was opened in 2018, and only until this month, someone took a lead and opened a PR. Overall, the community is small and it’s not active. For the project, Code-gov-front, I noticed that it can take up to 20 to 30 days for a core contributor to review the PR and give feedback on it. Also, most of the closed PRs were done by the core contributors.

CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

As I was skimming through the issue tracker, I noticed that most of them had to do with incorrect data. However, one of the issues grabbed my attention, and it’s called THANK YOU #2206. The person who opened this issue wanted to thank the team at Johns Hopkins for putting this dataset together. I found that very touching. Under the README, there are data sources, if I have time I would contribute to this project. There are still 200+ opened PRs waiting to be reviewed and merged. Before I contribute, I should check if someone has already made a PR.