Thoughts on an open source project to contribute to

I think my first contributions to an open source project should be documenting/commenting code. I know there are people out there who prefer the “tl;dr version” of reading instructions or documentation of projects, since some of them can get long and unnecessary. Being one of those people, I think working on concise documentation can be helpful to everyone involved in the project. I also think creating examples/demos of the project (if they don’t already exist) is something else I would like to do, since they are useful to anyone who wants to use or work on the project.

The ideal project that I would support is a humanitarian project. My goal is to improve documentation and add examples/demos to help others who are working on (or want to work on) the project.

Summary of course-related activity

Friday, February 1

We discussed the “four freedoms” mentioned in The Free Software Foundation’s Free Software Definition, analyzed the points made in Kevin Fleming’s talk from CppCon 2015, and talked about Git (the idea behind it and some basic commands).

Tuesday, February 5

We discussed a simple Git workflow, talked about the purpose of CONTRIBUTING, LICENSE, CODE OF CONDUCT, and README files in GitHub repositories, and did a simple Git exercise in teams. The exercise required us to clone a remote team repository (different for each team) into our local machines, add/edit files in the local repo, and push our changes to the remote repo (we also had to take care of merge conflicts after pulling from the remote repo). Finally, we each forked our respective team’s repository into our own accounts, and then added the fork (using git remote add) and pushed a file change to that fork from our local repo.

Contributions

None this week.