Last post before spring break!

Hello, so I’ve made some progress with the Julia project. As mentioned before, I’ve been working on the documentaion issue and I’ve managed to draft out a small documentation for a part of the issue. I’m just trying to get the format of the documentation as close to the previous accepted documentations before pushing my commits and opening up a pull request of my own. But nonetheless, I am very close to submitting a PR and might be doing that as early as next week. Hopefully they’ll be accepted by the reviewers and I’ll be ecstatic as I will have made my first ever contribution to an open source software. The thought of it is very motivational as an novice in open source. Yes it’s only documentation, yes it’s just a small step, and yes it’s not even that intricate of a code base but we all have to start somewhere. I don’t think anyone’s just started out writing perfect code and making significant contributions the first time around. The first steps are always the hardest. But I’m really focusing on the positive of this whole experience and hopefully after this I’ll be more comfortable in actually writing code and ‘contributing’ to projects. I’m already getting more and more comfortable with the Julia code base and I’m learning a lot about the development environment of these software projects in general. At the same time, I still have a lot to learn and still get lost in the huge code base and have a lot of trouble understanding each class, each definition, each method. But all in all, I’m learning an invaluable skill that my professor mentioned - to be able to read code. In school, we’re only taught how to write code and debug code and test code but we’re seldom taught how to read code and to interpret and understand what the code is saying(doing). As I’m working on this project, I’m having to do so much reading, searching, watching, practicing, and generally just staring at the beast(code) in the eye and trying to figure what’s going through it’s mind(logic). But it has been a good learning experience so far I hope to get some PRs going soon. Oh and I’ve found another good documentation issue and I’ve started working on it as well. It’s actually similar to the original doc issue that I’ve working on so it makes sense to tackle that as well.

As for class activities, we’ve been discussing contributing to wikipedia and the concept of HFOSS(Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software). It’s really interesting how software and technology can help humanitarian efforts and aid in the betterment of humanity. There are numerous projects out there and they’re really impacting and helping so many areas of need. It would be philanthropic to contribute/volunteer in those projects. As for wikipedia, we were asked to do some ‘non-trivial’ edits and so I scoured the site looking for articles that needed some minor edits and were of interest to me but came up kinda short. So I just picked one of the articles from the wikipedia cleanup project site and tried to fix some syntax and grammatical errors in the articles listed. I don’t know if what I did counts as a trivial edit but I did the best I could do with the information I had on the subject matter. The first article I worked on was called the “French Development Agency”. The article was literally translated through an automatic French to English translator and had very bad sentence structure and choice of words so I just fixed those. The second article that I worked on was one of personal significance to me. It was on the “Druk Star F.C.”. The reason is because I used to play for the soccer club back when I was in Bhutan. I had no idea that the club had a page but it’s very poorly written with no reference links or citations at all. But whoever made the page did a pretty commendable job of gathering information on the subject matter. Of course, I don’t really know much about the soccer club at all, except that I played with the team for about 4 years when I was in my teens but I have a lot of memories associated with the organization. So for now I’ve only corrected some syntax and diction for the article but I am going to work on the article again in the coming days and collect more information and sources and try to document the whole article much more that how I found it. It’s kinda like a side project of mine now. So that’s all for this week. Thanks for checking in!