Looking for a Unicorn FOSS Project

Those that Got the Axe ( Eliminated + Why ):

• Stellarium : Stellarium is an open source 3D software application that renders a realistic sky. It brings a real-time planetarium straight to your computer.
  • Reservations : The project at a glance seems to be super cool. However, while it has a LICENSE, CONTRIBUTING file, and README, the lack of a CODE_OF_CONDUCT file is evident in the maintainers’ response etiquette. After examining both the project’s closed pull requests and closed issues, the maintainers’ responses seemed curt, short, and perhaps a bit discriminatory and insensitive. Now, this may be an example of a straight-forward community that likes to get to the point, but it ultimately eliminated the project from my list of potentials.

Promising Candidates:

• Emoji-Filled Commit Messages
  • Postwoman: Having had the opportunity to work with Postman, this project instantly caught my eye (in a humorous and unexpected way). It’s advertised as a lightweight and faster version of Postman for developers with “low-end” computers. Like Postman, it is an API request builder with a few more customization features. The community seems to be super bright and cheery, and overall I get good vibes from them. The CODE_OF_CONDUCT, CONTRIBUTING, LICENSE and README files are easy to understand and straight-forward. I’m all for improving access to lightweight educational/workflow applications so that normal people (who can’t afford to use fancier mainstream applications due to limitations in resources and hardware) can still be productive and explorative. So, it’s no surprise that I find this project exciting. (Plus, I’ve never seen a repository with so many emoji-filled commit messages! Honestly, it’s fun to just read the messages alone.)
• Checks Off A Lot of Boxes
  • freeCodeCamp : There’s a lot to like about this project. It’s purpose is learning motivated, it has a friendly and welcoming community that is moderately active (with issues and merges occuring within the past few hours of this post). Plus, I can instantly see a bunch of ways that I can contribute to it right now. It touches upon my interest in contributing to an educational open source project, and I can easily apply my tutoring skills here to get started.

Contributions This Week

This week I made several contributions to OpenStreetMap. I added a new Comfort Inn hotel to the map, in addition to a local deli, a Dollar Tree store, and an exotic lighting store to the map. The specifics of these contributions (including a link to the contributions themselves) can be found in the Contributions tab above.

I also had the opportunity to make a pull request to a fellow student’s blog post this week. Here, I suggested a few amendments to sentence structure for clarity, rephrased a few thoughts, and got captured by my peer’s story. Proposing blog edits for a peer was a lot more fun than expected. It was a great opportunity to actually read someone else’s thoughts on FOSS projects and learn about what their interests were. I also had the opportunity to learn about what projects I should stay away from !

‘Til next time,

Shania