Week of March 23rd, 2020 - March 29th, 2020

Day 7 in full isolation. I haven’t trekked outside since. I wonder how the outside world is like now. I’d imagine darkness, fire everywhere, buildings destroyed, citizens running around and screaming. The line that my professor Stewart Weiss ended off with in the lecture last week said verbatim: “It’s a different world now. Just try to work with it.”

Anywho, let me talk about some different things. My experience in contributing to Wikipedia, Kevin Fleming’s Talk, and my FOSS Project Progress.

Wikipedia Contributing

• I made two contributions to Wikipedia this week and I feel impactful. (I just hope my contributions don’t get reverted)
• More specifically, I:
  • Fixed multiple grammar errors in the Monster Hunter: World Gameplay section. My edit can be found here.
  • Updated the acceptance rate of Hunter College, corrected the name of the Yalow program and fixed a minor grammar issue. My edit can be found here.
• While investigating Wikipedia pages, I found it extremely hard to find new content to add to. When thinking about what contributions to make to Wikipedia, I kept stressing over which content needs to be polished or updated. I kept giving myself anxiety over whether or not more sections should be added to a designated page. My problem was, that I kept worrying about making a contribution, that it took away from the joy of contributing. I ended up contributing to a video game’s page and Hunter College’s page, but I still feel like I could have done so much more. I hope that my next contributions will feel a lot less forced and more fun, now that I feel like I’ve gotten the hang of it.

Kevin Fleming’s Talk

• Wow, I don’t know how to put into words how excited I feel right now. That lecture was empowering in so many ways. In one way, I am very impressed with how knowledgeable and well-spoken Fleming was. In general, I really admire people who are very well informed in a subject that they are passionate about, That’s why Fleming’s lecture hit me really hard, because one day I aspire to be just like that. I want to be an expert in something I am passionate about and be able to pass on that knowledge to others. Right now, I’m eyeballing a specialization in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or Big Data, but I still have time to decide what’s truly right for me.
• Not only was Fleming’s passion inspiring, but the new technologies I have learned were fascinating. More specifically, I enjoyed hearing him talk about some open-source technologies used at Bloomberg, such as Theano, Apache Storm, TensorFlow, and Kuberbetes. I was even more electrified after the presentation because there are so many new technologies to search and look into. He also mentioned quant computing and market data. I have a passion to learn so many new things, but what gets to me is when I realize there’s just so much that I’ll never know. Boubacar and I were talking about this topic, and he said something really amazing: “It’s okay though, because we can learn enough about what matters.”

FOSS Project Progress

[ ✓ ] Installed Atom’s Development Environment

[ ✓ ] Searched for issues within Atom

• I am currently basically finished with Atom’s flight manual and learned new interesting things.
• Currently still contributing to Daniel, Boubacar and I’s collective collaborative file in order to organize all of our progress, resources, and editing. We all got on a short 30-minute call to review what next steps we should take. We decided that we still wanted to work on Atom’s flight manual and make edits to it because we think it will be beneficial to all new contributors to Atom in the future. Our plan was to ask our open-source professor for his thoughts on that and see where to go from there. Update: As of Monday, Daniel, Boubacar and I finished typing up our Atom issue and we are currently awaiting maintainer approval to work on the issue. All three of us played rock-paper-scissors to decide who posts the issue. Boubacar won. For next week, we are planning to go about searching for coding contributions.

[ ] Work on our issue (update next week)

Other Activity:

• I read Why to Report Bugs. It was interesting reading a brief rant about an open-source veteran’s thoughts concerning issue reporting. Although I have no idea what LLVM was, and I have never even heard of the D programming language, I was able to follow what the blog is trying to say pretty easily. The author is basically encouraging us (as users) to report bugs, because that’s what makes an open-source project successful. I appreciate the fact that the author admitted his mistakes in “assuming it would work” for users on multiple platforms, I appreciate that he admitted that he was wrong. I think a key part of being a programmer is admitting when you are mistaken, because that’s how you’ll truly be able to grow as a developer. I also find it kind of funny how he mentioned that one of the reasons why users don’t report problems is because They assume that someone else has already reported the problem, which is exactly what Daniel, Boubacar and I think whenever we encounter likely issues on Atom.
• Submitted a pull request for two typos on Shania’s Week 9 Blog.

~Jessica Wong