This last week I took the time to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond and found some of his points quite interesting. I will paraphrasing my notes below:

1. Developers should plan to throw some of their work away. In open source (and even closed), it is inevitable. Getting stuck with code because you fall into the trap of the sunk cost fallacy can be detrimental to a project’s development and trajectory.
2. Building as simple as possible. Similar to the principle of Occam’s Razor which states that the simplest solution is probably the answer, the simplest solution is probably the best solution for feature development.
3. Refactoring can be incredibly benificial. “Perfect design is not when tou can no longer add more, but when you can no longer take away.” Refactoring allows you to reduce bloat and complexity, but also truly understand the project, its technical strengths and also its pitfalls.

As for contributions to our group project, I began work on a draft pull request to implement translation of default themes. This is proving to be a tough issue because:

1. It is difficult for me to understand.
2. The system and application is complex. Translation is done dynamically, meaning everything is imported piped in with variables, making the code difficult to follow.

But the good thing is, it’s learning opportunity. Here is the link to the PR.