Spring break was a lot of fun as I got to catch up on much-needed sleep. It was also fun to be back home and spend more time with my family. I took the whole break off to relax, away from computers and technology. I have noticed myself being glued to my screen a lot more these days. But that is a topic for another day. Before the break, my group and I discussed which issues to focus on to start our major contributions. After the break, we found a promising issue to work on.

I have really enjoyed reading about how other groups came to their project idea. I noticed that some groups decided to have some general projects that were interesting to them and then chose the projects that were easy to set up and did not give a lot of issues at the start. Furthermore, I think this is a crucial point, as projects that are difficult to even set up often imply a lack of proper documentation. Working on such an open-source project could become a burden later down the line, given the short time constraint we have for the class. Having to have the open-source software cloned and set up for testing and development fast is crucial in deciding what project to start the open-source journey with as a beginner.

Starting to contribute to open source project as a group is a fun and exciting task, but deciding what project is work on is often the hardest part. All of us have different experience with different languages. To figure out which project to work on, we have all decided to have a meeting and write down all the projects that came to our mind. After spending about 15 to 20 minutes we have started crossing out the projects with not many issues or projects without a good-first-issues tag.

Contributing to the open source projects used to seem daunting to me. Most of these open source project seemed that the contributors had everything figured out. From the programming lanuage to the projects tech stack. But after starting to do a bit of research and seeing how people still ask questions and have welcoming discussions for beginners it was reassuring. After contributing to a few projects, I feel more comfortable in navigating the open source space. I have started to contribute to some of the projects I use in daily basis, one of such being webview-kiosk. I have participated in an open source discussion for a feature request. I am proud of this contribution as this was my frist contribution for a project I use personally. I am also planning to ramp up my contributions in the coming weeks after for various other tools I use like openfoodfacts and openStreetMap. I think the biggest challenge right now is getting used to the codebase of a project. Figuring out the coding style of a project is difficult at the start, especially when there is no coding style document. But I guess it would be a good practice for me to get better at reading codes written by other people which is one of my goal for contributing to open source.

This week our class presented all the browser extensions we have made. There were a wide variety of extensions from the likes of funny to serious productivity boosters. The presentations were done very well and I have personally enjoyed the Q & A session at the end of each presentation. In our presentation the questions gave us new features to work on, something that people eagerly want. I have personally found the project tab-down to be really cool and something that I am willing to use when released. This extension makes it easier to have multiple tabs open without switching tabs!!

I have been using git for a long time, but I was surprised to learn what is the proper way of using git. I was mostly familiar with the 3 most commonly used commands of add ., commit -m "", and push. In class we learned that relying too much on add . command is not conventional and often disliked by people, as this could lead to adding files you don’t want to be tracked ending up being tracked and becoming a hassle to remove later. I have experienced this first hand today where I unzipped a large file inside the git repo but before checking the size I added all, committed and when trying to push it failed. Getting back to untracking the files and resetting without losing my changes took a lot of time, which could have been easily avoided if I added the files I needed manually and not used the add . command.

I have always been a big fan of FireFox. As an avid tinkerer, I like how Firefox gives users the ability to change a lot of default config as they wish. This is unlike browsers like chrome where there is not a about:config that you can go to stop built in trackers. This week was my first time building a browser extension and knew nothing about how to even load an extension to firefox. After spending a few minutes reading the docs, I was suprised by how well written the docs where! I was able to finish building the demo extensions within a few minutes.

In open-source software development, people from all over the world collaborate to contribute to the software. As such, people from different backgrounds and skill levels can have different ways to approach ideas. It is crucial to have a code of conduct because it lays out the foundation for the community on how to interact with other people. It limits people from making mistakes or gussing the code of conduct, when it is written out in plain text and the same for everyone. I think it is crucial for every open source project to have a code of conduct page, as it makes interacting with the project much easier for everyone.

When I hear the term ‘open source,’ I think of a repository where I can view the source code and the license of a particular software. Open source software makes it easy for anyone from any part of the world to see the source code of a software or script and contribute to it to make it better.