Week of March 9th, 2020 - March 15th, 2020

Wikipedia

• Contributing to Wikipedia seems intense, due to the wide scope of it, but after reading through the Getting started guide on Wikipedia, I feel a lot more confident in making my first contribution. They addressed some of the issues that I was tentative on, such as the fact that it’s okay to not understand everything at first.

Some Wikipedia pages I think I might be able to edit are:

• Subtle Asian Traits - This is a huge Facebook group that garnered over a million members, connecting Asians worldwide. I think contributing to this page might be within my area of expertise, since I am an administrator of a sister Facebook group that has over 10,000 members, named Subtle Asian Tech. In this group, we provide resume review and career advice to a large tech community!

• League of Legends and Riot Games - League of Legends is my favorite video game, and they are made by Riot Games. I believe that contributing to either Wikipedia page might be within my area of expertise. Riot Games recently published a new game, called Legends of Runeterra, so I think it’ll be wise of me to be one of the first contributors to it!

• Tous Les Jours - This is a South Korean bakery that I go to on occasion. I think I might be able to add some pictures to give users an idea of how the inside of a typical TLJ bakery looks like.

• Bún Riêu - I am part-Vietnamese, and my mom loves making Vietnamese noodle soup dishes such as this. I would love to provide more insight into this dish and hopefully add more pictures.

However, in the future, I would love to make a contribution to a larger name. The hardest part for me, was trying to figure out what was within my area of expertise, and what was truly feasible for me to contribute to.

FOSS Project Progress

[ ✓ ] Installing Atom’s Development Environment

• I left off last week with an unfinished Atom developer environment due to my main blocker being that I could not open the Atom environment on my laptop. Luckily, last Monday, Daniel was able to help me by showing me exactly how he got the developer environment set up on his laptop, sending me via iMessage the exact command I had to execute. I really admire Daniel’s intelligence, and I am really glad that I am working with him on this project. Last time, I got an error that “Atom” couldn’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software. I searched this issue through GitHub and was able to smoothly fix it by right-clicking on the Application in the directory and manually opening the software from there. That seemed to fix the issue. I would guess that it’s similar to Windows, when you have to force an application to run as administrator. Then, I followed this GitHub issue in order to get the atom shell command to work, and, finally, I ran this command: atom --dev /Users/jessica/Desktop/CSCI\395.86/atom and got the development environment to run! (Yay!)

[ ] Searching for issues within Atom

• Daniel, Boubacar and I all got together on Saturday, March 14th (Happy Pi Day!) and got into a video call that lasted around 2 hours. We spent the entire call rummaging through Atom’s entire GitHub, and looking through most of their core packages and community packages. We were trying to find specific package repositories to possibly contribute to, rather than contributing to their core repository. After almost an hour, we realized, hey, this document file within their core repository delineates the Core Atom Package structure, AND they listed out all of their packages, their number of open issues, open PRs, and when they were last updated. This document was completely outdated, so we thought that we could do a “2 for 1”, we submit a PR updating each package’s information on the document, which puts a contribution to our name, and by doing so, we can learn more about each package in the meantime, so that we can choose which packages would stand out to us. But then we realized that the entire folder is obsolete anyway, so our PR will likely be ignored. All three of us sent an email to the team asking to get invited to their slack channel, to ask if we could do it anyway. We are still waiting to hear back from them.

• It was a long two hours because all of us kept throwing ideas out there, but they weren’t all ideas we were sold on. We kept bringing up potential packages to work on, such as teletype, one-light-syntax, whitespace, and others. In the end, all three of us finally came to a consensus, to try and all collaboratively go through Atom’s Flight Manual and try to find things to contribute to on this manual. For instance, Daniel realized that the version of Node they told us to use was outdated, so that’s a potential open-source contribution. This will help us get accustomed to how Atom’s internal technologies work, and the technicalities of them, and will also help us find indecencies in the information. That’s our plan, and we also have a collaborative document to record all potential finds.

[ ] Other priorities to be determined

Other Activity:

• I read up on this article titled “Open Source is Not About You”. Prior to reading the article, I could already assume that the article was going to regard a contributor’s feeling of entitlement towards open-source. For instance, one might feel as if their pull requests MUST be accepted, their issues HAVE to be addressed, or that projects MUST pertain to their area of interest, otherwise, the project is beneath them. After reading the article, I think I figured out somewhat closely, what the moral of the article is supposed to be. I hope you will take what I say with a grain of salt, because I want to speak in the most objective way possible, without generalizing too hard. I say this because, I have thought about this before, and others probably have as well: “Contributing to open-source will make me feel like I have done something meaningful, therefore I will feel really good”. Now, I still believe that making an impacting contribution would be awesome, but I do not think in the exact same perspective anymore. I am not entitled to feel good, and I am not entitled to receive anything at all. I don’t want to jump into contributing with the idea that “I have to contribute because I have to” but rather “I have to contribute because I want to”. Also, I really like the new perspective I gained after reading the article. No one in the community has to have to answer to me, and that’s okay.
• Merged a pull request for Boubacar’s blog, fixing a minor grammar issue.

~Jessica Wong