Week 7

Plot-Twist @ Half-Time

Caught by remote surprise. Amid the growing concerns over the spread of COVID-19, all of our in-person courses are in the process of being converted into “distant-learning” formats for the remainder of the spring semester. As I write this now, I’m currently unsure of what that format looks like, and even less sure about what that format means for my team’s collaboration workflow for our Next.js contributions. Admittedly, while I do prefer face-to-face collaborations, it will be interesting to see what challenges in communication we face as a team and how we choose to adapt and overcome them. If this course was going to give us a true taste for the Open Source Developing World, then what better way to practice true remote communication?

Becoming One with the Project: Part 1

`$ cd Next.js`

`$ git log --reverse`

`commit message Wednesday March 11 2020`:

Test Driving the Product. My teammate shared this awesome next.js crash course. I have completed about 25% of the video so far, and hope to complete the entire crash course by the end of next week.

`commit message Saturday March 14 2020`:

No one’s perfect. Even the most well-thought out projects are bound to have some issues and Next.js is no exception. Unfortunately it appears that most of the issues flagged as good first issues fall within three categories: they are either pretty involved, they already have a decent amount of people working on them, or they were opened years ago. This at face-level can seem pretty daunting, so our group plan’s to organize a discussion about this next week. I spoke to my teammates, and we are currently monitoring the activity on this backlog issue and communicating if we want to take action on it. Other issues that are interesting but rapidly changing are

Open Source is Not About You

The frustration in this rant is palpable, but I suppose after reading some odd 100 or so different issues and pull requests across dozens of projects, I understand where it’s coming from. Some of the complaints that I’ve seen from the community are just either petty, vague or downright mean. After seeing a few hundred of these, I can see how it can drive any core-maintainer nuts. However, while I do understand that it’s ridiculous to expect the “inventor to [become the] community manager,” it’s perhaps an unavoidable cost for any artist who puts their work out there. It’s to be expected that one’s work–no matter how much time and resources they poured into it–will be criticized. It’s expected that the integrity of the work will have to be defended and protected. You can’t please everyone–and honestly–you shouldn’t aim to. An easily irritated or flippant group of maintainers isn’t fun for contributors and community members either. A little bit of kindness on both ends of a FOSS project can go a long way. My favorite quote from the piece was “If you want things, make them”. I can relate to the above with some of the challenges that I’ve faced with the Next.js installation process. If I see something that can be improved I should just do git .

Wikipedia

One of my greatest concerns about contributing to an Open Source project has been that the quality of my contribution won’t be on par with industry standards. After reading Wikipedia’s contributing guidelines, I can easily see the appeal of contributing to an article. The community encourages you to be bold in your contributions, and go after changes that catch your eye. It’s refreshing to read about a community that is more welcoming of poorly written first drafts than any of my past English teachers .

Surprising Tidbits

I was surprised to find that the collaboration workflow on Wikipedia, along with its practices of creating edit requests and edit messages for every edit to be very similar to the Git contribution workflow.
I was also surprised to find out that Wikipedia is NOT a crystal ball .

Contributions Made This Week:

As promised, exciting things have been in the works as far as contributions go. Here’s this week’s contributions at a glance:

Decided to share all that hardwork spent evaluating extra projects last week with the world, so I made a pull request to the nyu-ossd-s20/project-evaluation repository for the Ember.js project. In can be found here Pull Request #82.
Made three OpenStreetMap contributions. Added my favorite restaurant to the map, added the name to a historic church on the map, as well as modfied it’s landscape.
Had the opportunity to suggest some sentence rephrasing to a peer’s blog and learn more about their interests, experiences and FOSS goals. It’s always a pleasure to read about someone else’s story.
Started to explore possible Wikipedia contributions using their citation hunt tool.

‘Til next time,

Shania

Written before or on March 15, 2020