Intro

So far in my academic journey of being a computer scientist and mathematician, I would always come to my classes relaxed because I always expected professors to jump straight into material. However, at Open Source Software Development, the absolute opposite happened: we were the ones talking and telling about ourselves. And honestly, I am eager to further develop my communication skills within a class setting.

In addition, I am excited to develop the practical side of programming. During my time as a cs person, I’ve gotten extremely comfortable with learning and understanding theory. Proving correctness of an algorithm, runtime, how the CPU works, etc. But outside of a couple of personal projects, I haven’t truly looked at code and tried to understand it in depth. I am very excited to begin.

I expect this class to push me hard, and I know that I will come out as a better programmer on the other side.

Open Source

When I hear the term open source, I think about GitHub. I imagine a platform where people can freely use, exchange, modify, and study each other’s code. I would assume that this system has a multitude of advantages, such as having an incredibly diverse group of developers makes any problem more solvable. Among some disadvantages, I would assume that certain actors might not be benevolent in their contributions or in their use of others’ work.

4 Important Open Source Projects

• Wikipedia: Probably the most known open-source project in the world. I use it almost on a daily basis. I absolutely love finding random articles on Wikipedia and expanding my knowledge.
• Pygame: I have used it in the past for my personal projects, as I believe it’s a canon event for every programmer to try to make a game at least once.
• Python: Speaks for itself!
• NumPy: Linear algebra mede easy!