This week, I had the chance to read “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” the much-lauded essay by Eric S. Raymond. It was a delightfully interesting read, made even more fun by the constant references to people I’ve long looked up to.

I’ve always found the early Internet era to be particularly alluring. Something about the culture of it seems so wonderful. Usenet forums, dial-up, IRC channels, groups of engineers who, by and large, did this for fun. As Raymond himself writes, the “users are hackers too.”

This week’s focus was on project selection and progress. The project choices were really diverse and interesting, I think the spread from useful daily libraries like Pandas and p5.js to learning platforms like Oppia to deep cryptography stuff like Keycloak is super fascinating.

This week was mostly focused on building our open-source projects. I’m really happy with my team, and I feel like we’re all relatively aligned on what we want to do and what we want to get out of this. It’s been really satisfying to pick a project and identify what our skill sets are and how they might have potential synergy. I’m especially really excited to see that all of us know how to use Python and to pick a project that I think will be useful going forward, not just for us but for actual users. Nanobot seems really interesting. I really like the fact that it seems to be a much more trimmed-down version of OpenClaw, which I think is one of the most interesting technologies to come out recently.

This week has been much more focused on choosing a project, and it’s given me a lot of things to think about. One of the main factor I’m considering when choosing a project is deciding on the types of skills I’d like to develop. This is a great learning opportunity, and if I can work on a project I find important while developing skills I find valuable would be ideal.

This week was really fun. It was great to see the progress made by my classmates on their respective projects - I particularly enjoyed the brainrot video editor and I found myself thinking of fun ways to contribute to it. I thought the one that used Gemini to provide motivation was super cool too, it’s insane that they were able to tap into an LLM integration that quickly. I’d love to see how this can be adjusted to use local LLMs though and the RAM cost seems brutal.

I’ve been using git for a loooong time. My Github account is probably almost half as old as I am, and before this lesson, I considered myself intimately familiar with many of the details of how git works. After all, how many people have had to prune commits out of a git history? Knowing the state of modern software engineering, probably many, but my ego persists nevertheless and I did truly think I understood git quite well.

Over the last week, I’ve had the priviledge of working with a great team (Ben and Willow) on a new browser extension. It was very rewarding doing the practice activities together - while they were simple, it was my first time developing an actual browser extension, and I was glad to see that we were all using Firefox. We haven’t made too much progress yet, mainly just outlining our goals and setting up the repository. I’ve had an active role in that - I set up the repo myself, while Willow managed the initial commits, populating the gitignore and README.md and Ben and I worked on deciding on an idea.

This week, we went over the ethics and ideology of open-source contribution in more detail, specifically focusing on the communities that facilitate those contributions. We spent a considerable amount of time on leadership structures and licenses, discussed the pros and cons of each, and most importantly, defined how they affected the communities that contributed to open-source projects.

When I hear the term open source, I imagine Richard Stallman yelling at me. I also think of the many arguments I’ve had with my friends over which open-source license is best, of flipping through the long list of “credits” at the bottom of some big-studio game with a whole section dedicated to open-source software, Discord disputes over which Firefox fork is truly the most “free,” devastation at Mozilla’s recent moves to becoming more and more corporate.