Week 3

Week of February 10th, 2020 - February 16th, 2020

I just came back from a weekend-long hackathon, Hack@CEWIT at Stony Brook University, and I am exhausted. It was such a long weekend, but I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot! I had a team prior to arriving at Stony, and I was so excited to find open-source tools to use for building the hackathon project. Unfortunately, my team disbanded once I arrived and so I was alone. Even though I was pretty bummed out about not having a team for the hackathon, I didn’t let that discourage me from doing what I came here to do: learn. Ever since the first open-source class, I’ve always managed to have the topic of open-source slip into my conversations with others every now and then. I was talking to a graduate student attending Stony about computer science related topics and browsed his resume. On there, I saw that he listed one of his open-source contributions, which was that he contributed to DuckDuckGo’s Instant Answer source code and implemented their “Quote of the Day” feature. I thought that was really awesome, and so that led us into a conversation about open-source contributing. Later on, I expressed interest in wanting to contribute to DuckDuckGo’s Instant Answers GitHub repository since their Search Engine isn’t open-source, but unfortunately, it has been in maintenance mode for the last 16 months. On the brighter side, the graduate student gave me another recommendation on an open-source project to contribute to, called “TEAMMATES”, which is a web development project that will help give me a good insight to witness and be a part of the process of project development. In the end, we discussed more and I learned something new from him: Ubuntu is an open-source Linux distribution. It was surprising because, in the past, I have always wondered what the difference between Linux and Ubuntu was. Whenever I tried searching it up, I could never really understand what the results were telling me. I am really glad that I’m taking this course because, after learning more about FOSS from this class, I can now understand the tech articles I read, and I can also have pragmatic and insightful conversations with others and learn a lot from them.

  1. What skills do I have that would be useful for contributing to a FOSS project?
    • Web development skills, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Node, Express.
    • Programming skills, including C++, Python, Java.
    • Organization skills, I really like to keep things neat and organized, such as my notes. The same will go for programming, I tend to keep a close eye when tracking files, to avoid merge conflicts.
    • Writing skills, in elementary and middle school, my past dream was to become a novelist. That meant that I would spend hours on end writing poems and stories. To contribute to FOSS, I want to contribute to the project by helping write useful documentation.
  2. What things are the most interesting to me? i.e., what do I enjoy doing?

I enjoy:

  • Attending hackathons! - I enjoy attending hackathons because I love meeting new people, having fun, and learning new technologies!
  • Browsing reddit - When I want to destress, nothing is more relaxing than opening the app and finding content that makes me happy. Also, reddit used to be open-source, so that’s cool.
  • Being entertaining - Nothing makes me happier than making others smile, so I sought to do things that would make others happy. For instance, to make others smile, I’d tell jokes (or be the joke), play card tricks, tell them a story, or show them something funny.
  • Eating food - I am half-Chinese and half-Vietnamese, so I like to splurge and indulge myself in various cuisines, such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Malaysian, Thai, Mexican, Italian, Indian, you name it.
  • Building computers - Once I found that tearing open a computer and fixing/replacing the hardware was really fun, I decided to buy PC parts on my own and build a computer from scratch. It felt amazing, and now I help my friends with PC building and keep myself updated with information on new hardware.

~ Jessica Wong

February 16, 2020