Group Project

I think this is the thing I am looking forward to the most in this class. All of our discussions around different topics regarding open source software will finally face praxis, and I am eager to feel the direct learning outcomes in my group. I am hoping we can contribute to a project that is used by other developers, because I gain great pride in creating tools that people actually gain utility out of (as characterized by my personal projects.) I know that I can contribute a good source of organization and leadership regarding how we actually go about collaborating with our group contributions, as I have a lot of experience with guiding those sorts of things. I also hope to be able to improve and also apply my immediate technical knowledge that I have been building both in my studies and my own free time to our project.

Small Contributions

Of the few small open source contributions that I have made, I still think my most proud is from our own open source projects that we build in a group, specifically when I updated some technical functionality of our web extension. Beyond that, I have fixed some typos and formatting on the project evaluation template on the course website to increase the quality for other students. However, one thing that I have noted is that I have been very fearful of contributing to larger projects because I worry that I don’t know enough/will be berated for making a “stupid suggestion.”

This is a bit personal, but I guess this fear actually comes from when I was younger, around 14 years old. I was working on my own video game, and I encountered a bug in my movement script. At this point, I had made one game before, so I thought it was worth asking for help in a chat room that I joined specifically for the game engine I was using. Upon sharing my script, the two people that read my code started tearing into it, one of them asking if I “even understood what I was writing.” This ended up shaking me so deeply to my core that I dropped that project, and I still think about it whenever I share my software with people.

I’m hoping that with the benefit of being in a group of students contributing to the same project, I will feel less afraid and alienated, and progressively build up the courage to contribute on my own. I know this sounds silly, but I really hope that this ends up being the case for me, since I just want to feel like I can add something to these projects in a way that matters.