Our First Open Source Project

What I like most about collaboration is that people can genuinely learn from each other. When team members have different skills and mindsets, they bring perspectives that others might overlook. This week, our group had a healthy conversation that pushed our progress forward. We talked about what our browser extension would become. I got a lot of inspiration from my teammates about the basic implementation approach and several feature ideas, such as saving and sharing the highlight.

We also talked about how to write our documentation—such as the README, CONTRIBUTING guide, and Code of Conduct, and we decided to adapt the Contributor Covenant like what other projects do. After that, we planned the tasks we need to complete and divided the work.

We faced some common “first open-source project” questions that aren’t really about coding. We discussed what license we should use. We initially used the GNU license, but I don’t think it’s the best fit for this project but the MIT license might be more suitable. We realized that licensing is not just a formality—it affects how others can use, modify, and share our code. Another question was whether we should fork or clone the repository. We learned that if we’re working on a shared repository as a team, cloning makes sense for direct collaboration. Forking becomes more relevant when outside contributors want to propose changes through pull requests without write access.

During this process, I found myself paying attention to the non-code parts—like documentation and contribution workflow. A project can have great code, but if people don’t know how to set it up or how to contribute, it becomes difficult for others to join and help improve it.

My biggest contributions this week were mainly on the process and documentation side. I raised questions about how to choose an appropriate license and what contribution style we should follow. I also shared my opinions on what to include in the documentation.

One surprising thing I discovered is that I ended up spending more time on non-coding work than I expected. I also didn’t realize how important licensing is until we discussed and learned it in detail.

We haven’t dived into the implementation and coding details yet, but this week helped me understand how open-source collaboration works.