Gil Yehuda Talk

I found Gil Yehuda’s visit to our class really inspiring and really informative. He answered a lot of questions I had regarding Open Source. He brought a lot of insight in terms of how companies work with open source. How companies can profit from open source. One interesting thing that Gil Yehuda pointed out that I never thought of is:
If you hire someone and they are using open source code on GitHub, is it the person you hired that is writing code, or the stranger on GitHub?
Gil Yehuda also gave a lot of good interview tips that other people wouldn’t tell you. Advisors at the career development center wouldn’t tell me this advice for interviews, because they don’t have the knowledge to. One good interview tip includes talking about the open source project that you know a company is using or made. If you make a contribution to an open source project, and the company you want to work for uses or made the open source project then you can use that to your advantage.During the interview for that company, mentioning that you’ve made contributions or showing that you’re interested in the open source project can be really impressive in the recruiter’s point of view.
Another tip that Gil Yehuda mentioned is that if a company doesn’t know much about open source or don’t believe in it, then it isn’t a company that you should work for.

Project progress

For this week, we did another video call on discord and agreed to modify the documentation for INSTALL.MD. The reason we’re modifying the file is because the instructions are very vague and not well structured. When I tried following the instructions, I had no idea what to do. There were just commands but there are no indications as to what dependencies are required before executing the command or what operating system the commands will work for. We now know that the commands only work on Linux operating systems.

We have submitted the merge request for the documentations and we are currently waiting for them to be accepted. On our first attempt to submit a pull request, it didn’t pass a test. So the pull request was declined immediately and was not viewed by any maintainers.

We also all agree to work on this current issue here

Thoughts on Folding@home Covid19

After reading the article, I find what they are doing to be very impressive and ambitious. And it seems like they are gathering huge amounts of supporters. So much so, that they need to set up even more simulators because there are so many willing participants.

I think that Folding@home’s work is very important in tackling this global pandemic. It will be a step towards creating a potential vaccine. The more we learn about something, the better we can control it. In this case, I can see why it can be so hard to learn about something as small as a virus, naked to the human eye. Therefore, computer simulations can be the best solution.

Weekly contributions

I helped fix some grammar issues on Umar’s blog. The pull request can be found here