Week of February 24th, 2020 - March 1st, 2020

On Monday, February 24th, my teammates Daniel and Boubacar worked on completing a project evaluation for GNOME Clocks. It was brilliant, it felt like the perfect team. Everyone was doing their fair share of work as we split up to tackle various parts of the assigned questions from the evaluation template. Boubacar introduced us to this beautiful website called HackMD, which is a collaborative real-time editor where all of us can work on answering the questions without ruining the markdown, and without any merge conflicts. Yes, I understand that this is a lazy method as opposed to using version control, but all of us were collaboratively working on it at the same time, adjacent to each other, so it was the most convenient option possible.

Now, I initially had this naive thought that everything was going to go perfectly as planned due to this method. My team and I finished all of the questions 5 minutes before class ended, and the markdown looked completely fine on the markdown previewer. So, I copy and pasted everything into Visual Studio Code, and pushed the changes to my remote repository. Then, without checking, I quickly made the pull request. After the pull request was accepted, my team and I came to the realization that the markdown got completely unformatted in the process. The links weren’t working, and the numbering was all wrong. We were all in a state of panic, and we tried desperately to get to the heart of the issue within the last 4 minutes of class. Unfortunately, we couldn’t fix the issue before the end of class, but we did spend the next couple of days communicating with each other regarding the markdown problem. However, the biggest frustration for me was that not even the live Visual Studio Code markdown preview accurately corresponded to what is seen on GitHub. So, to check if my markdown was correct, I had to keep pushing the markdown file to my remote repository and check for formatting issues there. It was very tedious and stressed me out, but I ultimately fixed the formatting issues, which made me feel really accomplished.

Apart from these massive formatting bugs, I have learned some things from this project evaluation. For one thing, I learned that the issues tab in GitLab is at a completely different location than in GitHub, so that took a little more time to find. I also learned more about how to navigate the files in GitLab. Personally, I am not really interested in working with GNOME Clocks. I have nothing bad against this project, the community seems tame and they are pretty active, but I just don’t have this sparking passion towards this as I do for others (which I will get into later).

Answering these questions with my Daniel and Boubacar was a great warm-up for Thursday’s activity, which was doing the same evaluation on a completely different project. I was working with Daniel again, and we chose the project called TEAMMATES. This time, I was able to answer the questions a lot faster because I knew exactly what to look for. This exact project was in my last blog, and I considered this project because it looked extremely beginner-friendly, and because it was a full-stack application, which is the field I want to specialize in. This project has great documentation and I admire the friendliness of this community. I am strongly considering working on this project.

My top three preferences for Open Source Projects:

• freeCodeCamp - This project is beginner-friendly and leaves a huge footprint on the tech community, which is one of the main things I am looking for. The community also seems very welcoming, and I have a biased towards this project since I go on there a lot to read their articles.
• TEAMMATES - They have over 200 issues for me to dig into, and it is a very beginner-friendly project with such a friendly and active community.
• material-components-web-react - I love web development and I would love to write documentation for Google’s Material Components Library.

Other Activity: I added another establishment to OpenStreetMap called CoffeeRx. I go here every now and then because it’s a great place to sit down and do work while sipping on a great cup of coffee!

~Jessica Wong