Learning Git

I just started using git more extensively last semester, as a paert of my Operating Systems class, so I really enjoyed learning more about what the different commands do and how git as a whole works. Truthfully, I was mostly going through the motions of git without a strong understanding of what happened in the background, so it was super helpful to learn about the specific of each command, how git works has a distributed version control system, and the different stages that git manages. It makes me feel a lot more confident.

Project Evaluations

As a part of the class I’ve looked at 2 different projects: Game Zone and Jellyfin, which I feel like are two complete different ends of open source projects. Game Zone was less collaborative, with individuals developing their own web games and then adding to the repository. There were less interactions and the project as a whole was much smaller. Jellyfin is a huge project, with over 1,000 contributors and lots of active issues and PRs.

Looking at the two of them, I’ve begun to develop a better undersatnding of the type of projects that I’m interested in. Namely one’s that aren’t too advanced, since I am a beginner to the open source world, and then I can ensure I make meaningful contributions and ones that I feel like I would use myself. I really liked both the ideas behind Game Zone and Jellyfin, but would rather just use Candy Crush on my phone than a website and don’t need to be able to stream my own media across devices since I am blessed with friends that invest in every stream service and are quick to share if they want me to binge watch a TV show with them.

I also really want to prioritize community within a project, especially because I am a beginner. One thing i liked about both Game Zone and Jellyfin is that they were very encouraging; however, Game Zone didn’t really have “community” because the project was more a collection of isolated projects. That’s made me think deeper of what “community” looks like in open source, and has made me realize finding a beginner-friendly, communicative, and active project might be a little harder than I thought. Even then, I still need to push myself to be an active member of the community and not feel intimidated or nervous to contribute. I think getting more experience contributing to our class website is the first step in that process, and something I plan on incoprorating into my daily routine for the next few weeks to build the habit.