Preparing For The Contribution

Hi everyone,

Last week I made a presentation to inspire and teach the group about Apache Cassandra and the benefits/ use cases of distributed architectures. Everyone learned a lot, and we all had a lot of fun doing it. I have also made the presentation open source, so anyone can have access to its content and teach/ use/ and modify it under the MIT license. My reason in doing so is so others interested in distributed systems, perhaps people I have never met, can use it as a resource to either learn or teach. That way they won’t have to put in the effort I did into making it and waste time that could be spent advancing the project or their own knowledge.

This week, originally the plan was to make another presentation. This presentation would be an in depth look at the architecture of the project. However, as much as I would like to teach more and create another open source slideshow, I realized making that presentation would actually be a lot more work then making basic contributions. Also everyone will be able to learn more if I don’t make it. Active learning is extremely important to growth and it will be better for everyone.

The new plan of attack is to split the team into two. One person to draft the documentation and the other to make it presentable and to follow the procedure of the pull request. This includes communicating to the people in the project, being assigned to issues, and knowing/ following the procedure and workflow for contributing. I believe with this new plan of attack it will distribute the workload evenly and give everyone a chance to learn, be challenged, and become better. This is the point in the end. Let’s see how it all goes !

I also recently decided to contribute to wikipedia. I thought it might be an interesting side project while I was working on Cassandra. I began by reading the contributing to wiki wikipedia page. Something I found interesting were That a wiki article isn’t expected to be perfect. That they are supposed to be a work in progress. This was surprising because they all seem really perfect and it made it hard to start contributing. A way to contribute to wikipedia is writing small articles about things which appear as a red link in an existing article. For example, I think I could write a basic article here about a tour the band Weezer performed. It will be easy because no one has written anything on it yet.