This week’s presentations

Watching each presentation, my main thought was “would I download this”? Admittedly, I am more interested in extensions that can better the tools I already use than purely aesthetic ones. This aligns with trying keep my working environment unbloated and efficient. While a browser-intergrated language model could be handy, having it take up all of my RAM wouldn’t be.

Two projects that stood out to me were tab-down, made by Sebastian Capellan and Angela Gao, and highlight, made by Aisha Roslan, Yuxuan Qin and Ruilin Guo.

• tab-down is a browser-in-browser tool, allowing users to keep a tab in the corner of their screen that can be displayed when hovered over, and is visually similar to the MacOS Quick Notes feature. Except you can’t run web-apps or load sites in the notes app.

• highlight is a neat extension that allows you to make highlights on the fly across different sites, and find all of them in a central place. I think it would be cool to add export functionality to the highlights, incase you want to cite them.

Neither project attempts to pack in unwanted features, and does what they intend to do.

Open Source Summit reflections

I found the keynote with Kelsey Hightower entertaining. He emphasized the importance of the communities behind open-source projects and encouraged corporations to contribute. Even if core contributors have such great differences that they end up branching off, it is important to understand that it is the nature of open-source, and to keep co-collaborating.

Craig McLuckie, in the second video of the summit, spoke more about supporting open-source communities. What he considered important for corportations to do though was to adopt the projects they value and to “vote with your wallet”. It is important for OSS communities to be recognized for their work, because otherwise, who are they making the software for?

The final video was with Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel. Their conversation highlighted that open-source development still has it’s drawbacks. When a project becomes huge, the code’s integrity can outweight many of the benifits of open-source development, such as public, cross-colloboration (in regards to Linux’s security incident response). Working on these kinds of projects can also be very time consuming, and are not always what you may want to spend your life working on.

Presentation style notes

Oftentimes, when I present, I feel as though I am there to deliver on keep points. And I believe that may the case for my peers in class. But after watching the keynotes, I realized that a much more entertaining and captivating presentation is one that has a story or a narrative. Something to keep the audience engaged. Both Kelsey Hightower and Craig McLuckie had anecdotes in their talks, and much of Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel’s Q&A included reflections on the past, relating to the topics they were discussing.

Having a story to tell or take the audience along with you on makes for a far more engaging presentation, and this is something I want to work on. When the time comes, I hope to add a little of this to my presentation.