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.

One group we looked at chose to work on Keycloak, an open source identity and access management system. It seems like their process started similarly to ours. In their case, they considered options like ActivityWatch, Pandas, GIMP, and Keycloak before ultimately deciding on Keycloak. Our group also spent some time comparing different projects before selecting AFFiNE.

Comparing Project Setup

On a similar note, both our teams managed to set up the development environment early. The projects themselves seem quite different in terms of complexity and focus. Keycloak is centered around authentication and identity management, which likely involves more backend-heavy systems and security considerations. In contrast, AFFiNE is a productivity and knowledge management application that is more focused on document editing, organization, and user interface features.

The Keycloak group mentioned exploring things like theme descriptions, translation support, and compatibility with bcrypt hashing for legacy databases. It’s also crazy to think that their group has already started making contributions. Though it’s ok if our team is starting out slow and steady.

Our group focused on browsing through the AFFiNE issue tracker to find smaller bugs or improvements that might be manageable for first contributions. Some of the issues we identified include things like adjusting the position of UI elements, fixing font-related problems, and improving how images or lists behave in the interface. These seem like good starting points because they are smaller, clearly defined problems that we can investigate without needing to fully understand the entire codebase yet.

Reflection

Overall, it seems like many groups are going through a similar early phase of open source contribution: choosing a project, setting up the development environment, and trying to understand the codebase well enough to find a first issue to work on. Even though the projects themselves are very different, the general workflow appears to be fairly consistent.

Seeing another group’s progress also reassured me that it is normal for the first couple of weeks to involve a lot of exploration and preparation.

Over the next week we plan to continue using the application, read more of the documentation, and start interacting with the project’s community through discussions or issues. Ideally, we will be able to either open a new issue or begin working on a pull request for one of the existing bugs we identified.