Extensions and Presentations

All of the presentations were so interesting to listen to. I am not going to lie: in every other class, when I had to listen to my peers present, I would usually either zone out or be too anxious about my own presentation to focus on what others had to say. But this time, I was genuinely so into everything that my classmates were presenting. Everyone did such a good job, and it was so cool to see people showing off their creations. For example, the extension that lets you hover over a part of your screen to open another tab was super cool and very useful. But the most memorable extension was definitely the “zoning in and out of consciousness while watching YouTube videos”. I need to fork the repo.

Teamwork take-aways

I would say the two biggest take-aways from working with my team are: communication and work distribution. Anytime I work with other people, I am reminded of how important it is to have productive, frequent communication. For work distribution, since my teammates were much more experienced than I was, it would be really easy to start relying on them too much. I’m glad I didn’t get too comfortable, but I always could contribute more.

OSS conference talks and take-aways

This week, we were assigned to watch three talks on Open Source. The content they covered was very diverse, but I would like to comment on their conversation around AI. I haven’t really thought about what the hype around the technology means for Open Source, and it was interesting to find out that now bad actors have more tools to harm or benefit from OSS. Another memorable thing that actually made me chuckle was when Dirk jokingly told Linus that an AI model would replace him, and Linus said, “Finally.” It was good to hear that one of the most important Software Engineers in the world is skeptical of claims that AI will take over our jobs.

My biggest take-away from those presentations in terms of the art of public speaking is definitely from Kelsey Hightower’s talk on Open Source. The way he talks very slowly is a skill that I’ve been working towards ever since my freshman year of college. Every time I present, I always try to speak slowly and not be afraid of pauses, but I always end up talking too fast. Seeing him in action was a great reminder to continue my pursuit, given how good it looks from the side.