As the title has suggested, this blog marks my “return” to the world of open source. After having a challenging but fun adventure in OSD600, I decided to continue to part 2 of the series in OSD700 as a way to practice my skills and test my knowledge. I was debating if I should take the course at the end of last semester and the decision became harder to make when I accepted the offer to do coop in Winter term because I was not sure if I could handle the workload in good manners. However, professor Dave has been supportive and he encouraged me to take it as he believed it will help me a lot in the long run. Also, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to learn from him again. So here I am now doing both coop and OSD700 with the hope to get the most software development knowledge I could in the next 4 months. I look forward to having another fun adventure and becoming a better developer at the end of it.
The structure of OSD700 is a bit different compared to OSD600 in the sense that you won’t learn many new skills but rather than to apply what you have learned in OSD600, put those skills into practices and polish them. OSD700 also has no quizzes or tests or final. The course is divided into two main grading criteria “Technical Contribution” and “Management/Leadership” . While the “Management/Leadership” focus would be on Telescope, the “Technical Contribution” part is your choice to make. You would need to pick a project and contribute to it. I have a very clear idea that I want to continue my contribution to Telescope as well, so I can spend all of my times learning about a single code base. Another reason is because Telescope team has been active and would be willing to help when there were problems. My goal is to learn how the app works thoroughly, for both backend and frontend and start contributing to the analytics part of the app. It has always been something I want to work on and add to my skill set. Maybe after that, I can even help to apply some ML/AI implementation on Telescope if we decide to develop the app into an platform for open source with social elements involved.
As Steve Jobs has said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”, I will be hungry to ask for bigger assignments and I will be foolish to ask many questions. I am ready to take the next leap and become a valuable contributor/maintainer of Telescope.
Thank you all for reading!
Tony Vu.
