Searching for the Right Issue

Over the past couple of weeks, our group has become much more comfortable navigating the AFFiNE repository, documentation, and issue tracker. At this point, our group have started looking through the pages of issues and figured out which one to take over.

Looking at Other Groups’ Experiences

This week was interesting because, in addition to continuing work on our own project, we also looked through reports from other groups to see what kinds of projects they chose and how their experiences compared to ours. It was helpful to see how other teams approached it early on.

Forming Our Group

This week our group decided on a project. We decided to communicate through an Instagram group chat and set a regular meeting time on Wednesdays from 8–9 PM. Our first meeting was held in person on March 4.

During this meeting we mainly focused on getting organized and making sure everyone was on the same page about expectations. One of the first things we completed was our group working agreement, which outlines how we plan to communicate, collaborate, and keep each other accountable throughout the semester. Having this agreement early on helped make the project feel more structured and less chaotic.

Hopes for Our Group Project

For our group project, I hope we can contribute to something that feels meaningful but also that looks like it needs some UIUX fixing. I would prefer working on something still widely used, so that our contributions can realistically be accepted and also for bragging rights. Ideally, it would be something related to web development, game development or education tools, since those are areas I feel more comfortable with.

Browser Extensions

Over the past two weeks, my partner and I worked on building our browser extension. This experience helped me understand more clearly browser extensions even work. Even though the extension itself had it few bugs and more features needed to implement, it felt useful. Dividing responsibilites and given one that suits your strong suit really helped get this project going.

Git Exercises

This week’s Git exercises helped me understand Git a lot better. I already knew Git to a decent level, but I usually don’t use commands like git log to check history. It showed me there’s a lot more I can do with Git, especially for tracking changes and understanding what’s happening in a repository. It made me feel more confident using Git beyond just add, commit, and push.

Team Brown

For our meeting, my team had multiple ideas. The current one we have decided on is a drop-down slider for social media tabs. For example, if a user had two tabs open in their browser—one being Brightspace and the other Discord—imagine being on Brightspace and hovering over the upper-right corner of the screen to have a tiny Discord window slide down where you could chat and communicate. The window would preferably be around 200px wide and half the height of the screen on the right side. It’s like a phone display in the top right when you hover above.

Humans on the Internet Need Rules

When exploring different open source projects, I realized that some are less about strict rules and more about setting expectations for how people should treat each other. It’s interesting looking at how different communities decide what flies and what absolutely does not. Obviously, it’s not always as simple as how monkey see and monkey go.

Why Open Source?

When I hear “open source”, I think of source code that is pubilcly available and contributable. It’s a collaborative space where developers across the world work on the same project together. Open source is exactly like wanting to take apart a toy to see how it works. It’s great for learning especially when considering it’s real world code written by experienced developers from all over the world. It’s also free.