Week 6
They say Commit Early and Commit Often… 
They say to commit early and often in the programming world, but when it comes to commiting to a FOSS project to contribute to, I think several things need to be considered before writing up that final commit message.
$ cd choosingSemesterProject
$ git log --reverse
commit message Monday March 02 2020:
An exciting start. Today I met with the team that I will be working on a FOSS project with for the rest of the semester [@liulanz, @chislee0708, @MichelleLucero ]. We decided in class that TEAMMATES was an interesting project to work on as a group, and agreed to work on the installation steps later that day, separately.
commit message Thursday March 05 2020:
A change of plans. Today my team and I decided that contributing to TEAMMATES would be unmanageable this semester given our skillsets. Upon closer inspection of the project’s contributing docs and opened issues, the project is mostly geared towards Java, Angular and TypeScript contributions. Since none of us has experience in these technologies, we quickly ruled out the project. Unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), this sent us back into project evaluation mode. We spent a few hours separately searching for potential project’s to contribute to, and met for an hour to discuss what we wanted out of a project. We decided that we needed the project to have (in addition to meeting the project evaluation standards outlined here),
- A lot of good first issues
- A decent amount of activity
- A welcoming community
- A preferably interesting function
- And be within our skillsets as a team, with an explorative interest in JavaScript
commit message Friday March 06 2020:
Eat. Sleep. Evaluate. Repeat.. Today I spent several hours searching for FOSS projects to contribute to based on my team’s priorities. I started project evaluations for several different projects, but in the end, only completed three of them due to personal interests. Some of my teammates did the same, and we started a virtual discussion on which ones we were leaning towards. No verdict was made, but we easily eliminated a few of the choices since they were visibly weaker than other projects we were considering. |Cuts: Ember.js, brackets, Leaflet, Ghost] Note: While these projects didn’t fit our team’s needs, they are still pretty exciting.|
commit message Saturday March 07 2020 2:00PM:
Commitment issues. Today I’ve realized that I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for a project this week #thankyoulogging. What can I say? I need my options to be properly vetted and carefully considered–for the betterment of my team, of course. I narrowed down our project choices and proposed three finalists to the group (after a few more hours of close evaluation and consideration). We were between Strapi, Material-UI, and Next.js for the better part of the day. Finally, after brutal consideration and due to overall group interests we decided to choose Next.js because it had a lot of good first issues to contribute to. It is worth noting that this decision was a close one between Material-UI.
commit message Saturday March 07 2020 ~4:00PM:
Finally git commit -m. I just forked the Next.js project into the class repo. Super excited to get started on this project fingers-crossed.
commit message Saturday March 07 2020 9:00PM:
I think I’ve been bamboozled. I am currently running into a ton of errors in installing the Next.js project. In a true moment of weakness, I attempted the installation process for Material-UI only to find that it was–at max–a 10 min process. That being said, I couldn’t give up on yet another commited project, so I of course, stuck it out. As it turns out the short contributing.md file wasn’t short because the process was simple. It was short because it lacked sufficient documentation on the installation process for new contributors. What probably seemed like a straightforward and simple process to the authors of the file ended up costing me hours of sanity. @MichelleLucero suggested that our first contributions to the project should regard this file…#BrillantIdeas. [ Improvements would include suggestions for a clearer installation workflow, better support for cross-platform contributions #ubuntu, #linux, and a troubleshooting guide on how to handle module errors. ].
commit message Sunday March 08 2020 5:00PM:
Sticking it Out. Ahhh, so this is what progress feels like. I finally got Next.js installed and running on my computer. Hopefully I don’t run into any more missing module errors, corrupted file paths, or who knows what. I ran a few example files in the project and saw a lot of puppies that definetly made the entire process worth it 
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Contributions Made This Week
This week I updated a shoe store status, after the previous company went out of business. This contribution can be found in the Contributions tab above. Stay tune for next week’s contributions…there are some exciting things currently in the works.
