Week 4 progress In class, the Git exercises helped me better understand how version control works in real projects. Practicing commands like clone, add, commit, and push made the workflow much clearer. I also learned why it is important to pull before starting new work and how branches help teams work safely without breaking the main code. The professor’s discussion about merge conflicts was especially impressive to me. When two people edit the same location, conflicts happen. It is fair that Git requires manual resolution, but the process can be troublesome and time-consuming.

After evaluating several open source projects, I noticed that different projects vary greatly in size, documentation quality, and community activity. Large projects like Brave are very active and well-structured but can be intimidating for new contributors, while smaller projects are easier to understand but may have less community support.

I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to real-world software used by many people. Working on an open source project allows me to collaborate with experienced developers and improve my skills.

The biggest challenge will likely be understanding large codebases and navigating complex contribution processes. To overcome this, I plan to start with small contributions such as documentation fixes and gradually work toward more complex issues. I will also carefully read the contribution guidelines and learn from community discussions.

Overall, I believe contributing to open source will be a valuable learning experience！ Team Project For the project, we selected the theme I chose — Tab Color Changer, an extension that can change the color of the whole browser tab area. I first implemented a Chrome version but discovered that Chrome does not provide an API for changing tab colors directly, so I created a workaround using tab grouping and labeled the first tab with the selected color. However, the team thought we should keep the original idea instead of using grouping, so they pivoted back to the original concept and implemented it in Firefox. Based on their work, I implemented the reset color button. I also wrote the CONTRIBUTING file and the README.