Peer Extensions

This week, we were tasked with creating and subsequently presenting our own open-source projects with a group of random partners. I had a great time collaborating with my project partner to develop our own extension that we could actually get real utility out of, but I don’t want to talk about us.

Rather, I want to talk about the extensions and presentations created by the rest of the class. In observing all of these presentations, one big thing that I recognized that even with very tight scopes, most of these projects always had emergent issues or new features that needed to be developed. What this shows is the true scale of open-source for larger projects, and it opened my eyes to the fact that all of these contributions are actually solving real issues, as opposed to just being made for the sake of it. I even saw this in our group’s project, in which the minimum viable product was quite small.

Professional Open-Source Presentations

As for the presentations viewed in the Wednesday class, I was pretty interested in what had to be said by each of the speakers respectively. Ultimately, the two main points touched upon were the open source philosophy of building so that others could expand on your work, and the future of AI integration with open source projects, and why we need to tread carefully.

The topics themselves were interesting, but I think a decent portion of that can be attributed to the style of the presentations. I noticed that all three of them felt very conversational in nature, almost like a podcast at some points. Even though only two of the three had graphics, this conversational nature was enough to keep me actively engaged in all three. I think adapting this conversationality into my own lecture/presentation style could help with engagement of people in the crowd, as well as my nerves by making the environment feel lower stakes without being too casual. I’m interested in integrating this into my tactics in the future.