Week of March 30th, 2020 - April 19th, 2020

Gil Yehuda’s Talk

• Prior to listening to Gil Yehuda’s talk, I did a little research on him. I perused his Linkedin and Quora profiles thoroughly and stumbled across this Quora response that had the privilege of getting published on the official Forbes website. Mr. Yehuda discussed in this article how the company he was interviewing for did not have their shit together. This is because each interviewer had different perspectives on how the job was defined. As a result, he was seriously questioning whether or not he should work at a company that does not know what they are doing, and he addressed that exact concern with the recruiter. The recruiter knew and understood completely, and that is exactly why they needed Mr. Yehuda, because they needed somebody that could see issues that the others couldn’t. My favorite quote from the article was in the last paragraph, when he wrote “I said “If you make me an offer I can’t refuse, then I won’t be able to refuse it.” She came back 15 minutes later with an offer I could not, and did not refuse.” At that moment, I looked back through the article a second time and realized a couple of things…

  • Mr. Yehuda is an excellent writer. As expected from somebody with over 1,000 answered questions on Quora, but wow. I am truly impressed with his word choice. From this, I assumed that he was going to be a very well-spoken speaker.

  • He is valuable in the tech industry. Why else would the company specifically need him to fix the problems within the company? Why else would he have been given the offer on the spot? Once I realized this, I knew right away that his talk was going to be extremely insightful and interesting to listen to.

• And those realizations proved true. I really enjoyed listening to Mr. Yehuda’s talk because he was well-spoken, very knowledgable about open-source, and a fun guy! So it was very easy absorbing information from his lecture. It was fascinating hearing about the evolution of how companies viewed open-source software, and how he expressed the distinction of fear versus love in the open-source world. It was brilliant.

• I did not want to disrupt him in the middle of his talk to make remarks, so I left my questions until the very end. I had one typed into the chat, but I hesitated on pressing enter for the longest time out of anxiety. You’re probably wondering, how could I be nervous in an online class? Well, I was mainly worried that my question would sound silly and my then peers would have internally judged me. I am not trying to say anything negative about my peers, I know that the chances of this happening are very low. This is 100% a personal problem of mine and I am actively trying my best to overcome my anxiety.

FOSS Project Progress

• Boubacar, Daniel and I have decided that we are probably going to abandon the issue we opened here concerning making major fixes to Atom’s manual. The issue got triaged and is probably going nowhere. An option is to ping a maintainer, but we realized that this issue is huge, and if anyone is going to make a major update to the manual, then it would have to be somebody with true expertise on Atom (so either a maintainer or core contributor).

• This is bad. We should have realized this a lot sooner, but choosing Atom made our lives extremely difficult. The issues aren’t as “beginner-friendly” as we had originally thought, the community isn’t too responsive (a lot of pull requests get abandoned and not merged), the installation was a huge pain, and since all of us primarily use Visual Studio Code, opening up new issues wasn’t an option. We might make a major decision and switch to OpenCV if we cannot fix the Atom issue we chose. Daniel has looked into it extensively since he works with this software for his Computer Vision course. He says that the installation process is as easy as a pip install opencv-python command and that there are a lot of markdown/tutorial issues that we could easily tackle. We are hesitant on switching right away in fear that we will reach another dead end.

[ ✓ ] Installed Atom’s Development Environment

[ ✓ ] Searched for issues within Atom

[ ??? ] Work on our issue

• Currently, we chose this issue to work on for Atom. Initially, it seemed easy enough. It concerned creating a manual page for the apm command. This was a great issue since it would help combine our technical and writing skills, both of which all of my teammates excel in. Until we realized…this is going to be a LOT harder than we thought. When we were in a video call trying to figure out how to create man pages, we found a lot of “possible” ideas through research, all of which have led us nowhere so far. We have looked into the possibility of using yargs, looked into the source code for Atom’s install-apm command, looked into npm’s cli source code to see if we could find anything, but ultimately, we were just really confused. If we cannot get past this obstacle, then we may have to rapidly transition into OpenCV.

Other Activity:

• I read Folding@Home’s Covid19 Activity. Honestly, it was hard paying attention to what was written in the article, because I kept getting lost with all the scientific words getting thrown in. I had to re-read the paragraphs a few times over to fully comprehend what Folding@Home’s plan is, although I still do not fully understand the science aspect of the project. I can comprehend the general idea though, and I commend this project for trying to help tackle COVID-19. I built myself a decent computer, but I do not want to run the risk of degrading my parts (assuming these ‘simulations’ do the same damage as Bitcoin mining does). I hope they find others to help them run an abundance of simulations to put towards their data.

• I have started to binge-watch a classic anime series called Naruto. This show was the epitome of childhood amongst most of my friends, and I have definitely missed out on a lot. I only wish I watched Naruto a lot sooner because this anime is fantastic, and now I finally get to talk to my friends about it.

• I made three more contributions to Wikipedia which can be found here. Now that I have attained the minimum number of required Wikipedia contributions needed for my open-source class, I am finally relieved of the pressure to contribute something. Now I can focus on making more major contributions to Wikipedia that aren’t just grammar edits and typo fixes.

• Fixed some typos on Matthew’s blog and opened a pull request.

~Jessica Wong