Week of March 2nd, 2020 - March 8th, 2020

This week, my team: Daniel, Boubacar, and I agreed to contribute as a team to Atom after several days of incredible pondering.

On Monday, March 2nd, my team and I were given almost the entire class period to decide on an open-source project to work on. Daniel took the initiative to make a document where we listed out all the possible projects there were for us to work on, and we each took turns crossing out certain projects off of that list based off of personal preference, community activity, meaningful discussion, language familiarity, appeal, amount of doable issues, and other related factors. We ended up narrowing it all down to Visual Studio Code, Django and Atom. On Thursday, March 5th, Boubacar also brought up another viable option: Electron, but we quickly got rid of the idea since we don’t know much about that project. We ended up making our final verdict that day:

• Visual Studio Code
  • Since all three of us actively use Visual Studio Code as our main IDE, we thought that it would make sense to work with software that all of us were familiar with. Also, Visual Studio Code is mainly written in TypeScript, and since all of us were familiar with JavaScript, it felt reasonable. What really strayed us away was that there were 4,000+ issues, and most of them are user-reported bugs (which are mainly people complaining about certain features). So that’s why we had to cross it off our list, as we didn’t really think we would find a project within our scope.
• Django
  • Django sounded like an exciting option to us since it’s a Python-based open-source web framework. All of us have at least some experience with Python, and I personally love web development, so contributing to a web framework sounded amazing in theory. However, they use their own issue-tracker, which is quite hard to get accustomed to, and the issues don’t seem beginner-friendly.
• Atom - Winner
  • We considered this since we were all familiar with the primary language (JavaScript), and we were also very impressed with how friendly and active the community is.

FOSS Project Progress

[ ] Installing Atom’s Development Environment

• Now that my team and I picked an open-source project to work on, now it was time to set up the development environment. I was coordinating with my team this past weekend to update each other on our progress. I followed Atom’s flight manual which gives me step-by-step instructions on how to set up the development environment. For the first couple of steps, it was okay. I cloned the forked repository and downloaded the bootstrap scripts. Then, it was time to run the development environment! Wow, that was quick. I was really hyped that the process was so seamless, but I spoke too soon and was completely wrong. The next step was to run atom --dev path-to-open and my first thought was: What in the world does “path-to-open” mean? I had to communicate with my team again to gain clarification on what that actually meant. But, that doesn’t even matter. What did matter was that my terminal wasn’t recognizing the atom command. I was confused because the steps did not say that I needed Atom on my laptop at all. But okay, I went to another Terminal tab and ran brew cask install atom. Then I tried running the command again, and then I got a popup saying:

  “Atom” can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.

At this point, I was about to flip my table. I am still in the process of communicating this issue to Daniel and will try to talk to him on Monday about it and hopefully, he can help me out before class starts.

[ ] Other priorities to be determined

Other Activity:

• Added my favorite local Japanese restaurant to OpenStreetMap.
• Opened a pull request, fixed some typos on Daniel’s Week #4 blog.
• Went to a tech meetup recently and found out about an open-source phone made by Purism, called Librem 5. The concept is fascinating.

~Jessica Wong