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.

I think I’m particularly interested in developing skills in low-level programming, so I’d love to do something that uses either Rust or Go, or some other low-level systems language. I want to do some really hard tech stuff, and I’m thinking along the lines of either financial high-frequency trading or deep AI work. However, all of these are difficult to work with teams, considering that it requires a relatively high level investment from everyone.

Overall, I think I’d love to contribute to the Google Quantum Project; that one’s really cool. I’m also seeing a lot of really cool stuff in the AI space, especially with OpenClaw. Though my understanding is that their codebase is a horrible mess to navigate, I think something like Nanoclaw instead would be really cool as well.

In the Browser Extension Project, I was in charge of building out a system that would identify the score portions, calculate running tallies and keep track of this data in browser memory. That was pretty cool to work on. It wasn’t difficult actually, and it was just kind of something that nobody else really wanted to handle that I found kind of fun.

Issue with the smaller contributions I’ve made is that they don’t feel very fulfilling. It’s mostly been like reporting an issue here, fixing a documentation issue there, adding some stuff to Wikipedia or fixing mistakes… I feel like I’m not really building any skills in the process, and yeah, I’m making valuable contributions, but I think I really measure my success by what I’m developing in the process personally as well as to the community. I feel like these small contributions don’t really give me as much of the personal skill growth. By going into the open source contribution section of this course, I really want to contribute to a difficult piece of work that will help me build actual hard engineering skills.