Extension and Conference Presentations

I felt that everyone did a great job giving their presentations on the extensions they ended up making. Although I do not see myself personally using any of them, I thought the tab down extension was cool and the lobotomy one was also fun. Our group was unable to present this week, but it was cool seeing what ideas other groups had. One of the biggest takeaways I had from this activity is that open source does not have to be some sort of intimidating environment that only the experienced are allowed to participate in. We all created our own open source projects and it made open source less intimidating for me. I definitely want to create a project of my own in the future if I ever run into a problem that I want to solve. Something else that I realized through the group project is that delegating work can be pretty difficult when the implementation road map is not clear. For our group we made a tab color changer and I had a hard time thinking of how we could split the work when it comes to making the simple extension. What ended up happening was I implemented the main functionality and then everyone else added useful features to it. With a small scale project like this I am not sure if there was a way to cleanly and evenly distribute the process of development.

All of the presentations in the OSS conference were well done and informative. It was interesting to see the different approaches to them and the resulting vibes it created. I felt like Kelsey Hightower’s presentation was more anecdotal and like an easy to follow story, Craig McLuckie’s more straight forward and informational, and Linus Torvalds’s to be conversational and low stakes. They all took different approaches to presenting in order to fit their own goals and personalities. I really enjoyed Kelsey’s presentation and felt that it really spoke to the ideals of open source and why people engage with it. I feel like if I was in his shoes and another company basically copied my work and put their name on it I would be frustrated, but his reaction and explanation of the situation was inspiring. Linus was the only person I already knew beforehand so it was kind of reassuring to hear him say that he chose his style of presentation because he does not really enjoy public speaking. I’ve never been the best public speaker and do not have much experience when it comes to group presentations but I have often found that practice and a lot of preparations is the best way for me to feel comfortable going into a presentation.