Week 11
It’s a TON of Coordination 
$ cd Next.js
$ git log --reverse
commit message Tuesday April 21
:
As expected, our meeting with Prof. Weiss proved invaluable to figuring out the best way to navigate this example contribution as a team. Our new project structure involves having a branch on our hunter organizational fork called with-mongodb and forks from the organization repo stored locally for each team member. The goal is to have our mongo feature branches from our local forks compared against the with-mongodb branch in the organization. I have been experiencing internet connectivity issues, but I hope I don’t lose too much progress in the next few days over this.
commit message Tuesday April 24
- 
:
We realized today that it is better to stagger our PR team review sessions because they are dependant on one another. So we spent most of the afternoon submitting our PRs one after the other, reviewing each other’s code, adding code review comments, and merging it to our with-mongodb branch. The foundational MongoDB concepts have now been added to our example 
!
commit message Saturday April 26
:
Today I updated our Trello Board to include new cards to our task workflow that was not initially anticipated. We should be finishing most of the code for the example by the end of the week. Once that is done we can delve into testing, deploying, and adding explicit documentation to the repo before we send it off to be reviewed.
Vicky Brasseur and Open Source 
Brasseur’s talk was the one that I was missing this entire semester in learning Open Source. I hear it from my peers. I hear it from my professors. Open Source this, Open Source that, propritary software sucks. While I love the concept of Open Source, many FOSS projects that I’ve been exposed to before pursuing a CS major wasn’t spectacular. It’s no secret that proprietary software takes something from you in order to provide you with the free services and great user-experiences that it does. So once or twice, I was privileged enough to know that I should seek alternative options and became acquainted with the term Open Source. Today, I am truly grateful to be able to read code and understand what even a small portion of it means to a big project. But back then I couldn’t. So any attempt to use Open Source Software was usually met with user-unfriendly interfaces and clunky design schemes. Unfortunately, I had often opted-out of struggling to use these tools in favor of some Google-flavored free proprietary software. If I noticed the program glitching, or slowing down, I trashed it. I didn’t report bugs or issues on GitHub or GitLab or SourceForge. I am privileged to even know what half of the previous sentence means today. Not everyone does. In fact most users won’t. So if you openly flinch when your users report bugs and request features that they are not privileged enough to be able to fix “themselves” or create “themselves”, then you are isolating a big portion of your community. I appreciated that Brasseur touched upon this aspect of contributing to Open Source projects and the importance of usership.
2019 Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Data Repository by Johns Hopkins CSSE 
After spending some time sifting through the issues on this project, it is clear that many people rely on this info being accurate for research conducted worldwide. It reminds me of another COVID-19 Tracker website that I had seen a few weeks ago in response to COVID-19. The project definitely seems simple enough to contribute to, however, I would take great care to ensure that the data that I’m correcting is accurate. When it comes to changing data that could impact millions of people, accuracy is important. I also noticed that the project contains repeated issues and misinterpretations of data reporting times, so I suspect it would require a little more delving to understand the updates that JHU is making to their tracking system.
+ 
= Code.gov
This was an interesting site to look into because I didn’t know anything like this existed. After scrolling through Code.gov’s issues tracker, I noticed that the comments occuring on these issues seemed to reference protocols and teammates associated with both general and specific Code.gov projects. Before contributing, I would need to read up on all of these nuances, but the source is expansive.
Contributions Made This Week 
In my research for understanding how environment variables work in the Next.js project, I stumbled upon the project’s newly released docs on their next.config.js file and submitted a PR to add this resource to the README related to environment variables for the project.
Last week I mentioned commenting on an issue for Cloudflare Workers. Since I encountered a few missteps in their Quick Start tutorial for working with Workers, I sumbitted a PR to the Cloudflare Docs to update these steps. I suspect that this information became outdated during a client-side update.
I’m surprised by how naturally suggesting edits and engaging with Open Source communities has become within the past few months. It is definitely something I will take with me long after this course. For that I am grateful.
UPDATE 04/27/2020
My Cloudflare PR was approved this morning! This was the first PR I made with no strings attached (i.e. not for class, but just because), and I’m humbled by it 
! It’s nice to know that my change had an impact.
