Presentations

This week we presented our browser extensions in class. Our extension was on the simpler side, but it still had all the required components for it to be a open source project. The biggest takeaway from our project is value of in person collaboration. Although we all had busy schedules, we still found time to meet and work together in the library. It allowed us to talk through our ideas and communicate much more efficiently than over text or zoom. It also made debugging easier since we can directly look at each other’s screens.

The extensions and presentations by the other groups were all fabulous, it was fascinating to see the creativity they had and the different problems they solved. I realized the scope that could be done on just a browser is much larger than I previously thought, especially if I use apis to further integrate backend services or LLMs.

OSS Conference Videos

Wednesday’s class was asynchronous so we watched select videos from the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit. One of my concerns that I had for a long time with open source projects was the security, which was discussed directly by Linus Torvalds. He believes that the community factor is the most important, citing the recent XZ backdoor incident as a positive sign since the exploit was caught before doing much damage. He argues that such cases of community vigilance comes directly as a result of the project being open source, whereas for hardware and hardware related bugs, the secret nature makes it hard both for malicious hackers to plant backdoors and for developers like Linus to work on such bugs. Craig McLuckie also points out how people are using AI to generate large amounts hostile packages to flood package registries. This threatens the trust that open source projects rely on to thrive and that we need to choose our dependencies wisely.

Presentation Styles

From the presentaions I’ve watched this week, I realized that sometimes the technical details isn’t as important as I thought. When I present, I should be more focused on shaping a clear core idea to the audience and make the presentation easier to understand, even for people who aren’t so familiar with the topic. To do so, I should to relate to the audience more, use more analogies, and explain the logic behind certain decisions.