Week of April 20th, 2020 - April 26th, 2020

Vicky Brasseur’s Talk

• Prior to Vicky Brasseur’s talk, I did my fair share of research on her. I looked through her website and read through her “About” page and her resume. My first impression of her is that her work is extremely impressive. I then stumbled upon the presentations section of her website and started listening to one of them titled “The real costs of Open Source Sustainability”. Her voice instantly soothed my ears. I was astonished at how much her voice pulled me into her presentation, it felt so calming to listen to, and it made the points she brought up a lot more intriguing. From the bits of the presentation I’ve listened to, her passion for open source seems extremely admirable, and it made me look forward to her talk even more.

• After Vicky Brasseur’s talk, I can reaffirm my prior intuition that she is indeed very well-spoken and easy to listen to. Again, I find her passion for open source very admirable, but I also love how she presents herself. I don’t know how to describe it, but she definitely talks in a way that makes her audience feel included. To be extremely knowledgable in a subject, and to be so knowledgable on it to the point where I am able to talk about it clearly and concisely, is my dream.

• I also found it really interesting how she guessed that we already learned some information that was relayed to us, but decided to reiterate the points a second time due to the fact that she knew for a fact, that we probably did not understand the content fully the first time. A second reiteration of some of the content, such as the Four Freedoms and also the Open Source Definition, was really helpful, and highlighted her passion for the subject.

• I noticed that both she and Gil Yehuda used the term “market research” in their talks. Hearing it a second time helped me seriously take in how important users are to an open source project, and that we should always contribute to a project with the consumers’ needs and interests being taken into consideration. What I took away is to be inclusive and to “Meet People Where They Are”.

FOSS Project Progress

[ ✓ ] Installed Atom’s Development Environment

[ ✓ ] Searched for issues within Atom

Work on our issue

[ ✓ ] Find a new project

• Daniel, Boubacar, and I had a discussion with our open source professor concerning switching projects since Atom did not seem to be viable. All three of us were extremely worried that we weren’t going to be able to get in a nice contribution by the end of the semester. Our professor eased our concerns by telling us that all he cares about is that we are having fun with what we’re doing, and that we are happy. That was reassuring to hear.

• The three of us leaned strongly towards OpenCV initially. Computer Vision is a growing skill in today’s tech world, and contributing to OpenCV seemed like a brilliant way to learn more about computer vision algorithms using their tutorials. Daniel told me that we could probably get in a contribution that helps fix errors with some of the manuals OpenCV has. However, Boubacar also brought up another interesting project, called scikit-learn, a Python module for machine learning. Machine learning is definitely a field I want to learn more about and develop skills upon, so this seemed like a very viable choice to me. Based off of their README and Contributing document, they give enough information to easily get new contributors set up. Their contributing guidelines are hefty, but that’s a good thing, because it shows that the maintainers really care about the project and want to maintain it well.

• Another option we are eyeballing is an open sourced Python library called Pandas. It is a data visualization/manipulation tool that I have used in the past. I am pretty biased with this project because I really like pandas. However, I looked through the comments on some issues, and I did not like how one of the contributors was commenting. This person did not bother to type properly, for example they replied to an issue with “pls add a complete example include code that shows the starting data and what u r want to run with results”. I barely understand what this is saying. I looked at other issues, and some contributors were nice and respectful.

• We ultimately chose to plan to try to improve some documentation and possibly the tutorials on OpenCV. More information on that can be seen in Week 12’s blogpost.

John Hopkins University COVID-19 Data Repository

• My open source professor directed us to this GitHub repository, which helps aggregate the datasets for the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been closely eyeing John Hopkins University’s visual dashboard for the last couple of months, so I am pretty familiar with the layout of it. It’s astonishing to see the number of cases growing exponentially by the day. I used to be a Data Science intern at Moody’s where I took data and created visualizations with the data using Tableau, so JHU’s visualization really piqued my interest. It looked so simple yet it stated something so powerful.

• On a side note, I noticed that there are a lot of excel sheets in the repository, and for a long time I have wanted to get back into using Tableau to create visualizations for a web application relevant to the current pandemic. I have not found the time nor motivation to get into that yet. Looking through the issues, it seems that there are a lot of duplicate ones, most of which are not getting addressed/touched. I am interested in helping contribute to gain skills in learning to read through excel sheets, but a lot of pull requests seem to get ignored. I also want to focus on devoting my spare time to do things that make me happy, so I don’t think I want to devote time to this.

Code.gov

• Code.gov is a website hosted by the government that enables the aggregation of open source software. Their goal is to “serve as the community leader in driving code reuse and open source development to decrease code spend while increasing code quality” and “help agency partners and developers save money and increase quality by promoting code reuse and educating and connecting the open source community”.

• At first glance, it seems like the government is greedy for wanting to save money, and that they are trying to mask that greed under “increase code quality” and “connecting the open source community”. However, that could just be my bias against the government, since the federal government seems too fixated on money. I don’t want to get political, I am trying to look at this objectively. I think this is a good move by the government, they realized how important code is, and how useful open source software is, and tried to accommodate. I find it interesting how someone like me can contribute to a project hosted by a government agency. Though, I don’t think I would want to work for a government agency as a software engineer due to the risk. I know somebody that used to work for the government, but got laid off recently due to the pandemic.

• This issue seriously piqued my interest. It’s titled “Create Visualizations of Data from API” and it’s hosted by the U.S. General Services Administration. As aforementioned, I used to create data visualizations as an intern, and I loved that aspect of the job. It was so fun. I find it really cool how, in this issue I found, the poster specifically asked for somebody to make data visualizations. It was created 2 years ago, and I assume it hasn’t been touched yet because it was marked as “[priority] low”, but this is definitely something I would like to work on. I will post an update next week.

Other Activity:

• Submitted a pull request to edit a README file that displays a master list of the statuses of summer internships as a result of COVID-19. This project is not exactly open source, but it felt nice to use the skills I learned from this class to contribute to something!

• Submitted a pull request to Denice’s Week 11 blog, fixing multiple spelling mistakes, and one grammar mistake.

~Jessica Wong