UCOSP: Ingres Geospatial
Thursday, September 17, 2009

For this fall semester, I am going to work on an open source GIS, Geospatial by Ingres under Andrew Ross and UCOSP, which counts towards my CSC494 credit. I am very excited about it and hope that I can contribute successfully in Geospatial by the end of the term.

This is so far my second time cooperating with an open source organization. Recalling from some very precious experience from my first time working with HackyStat, I have answered the following questions to myself.

What skills do you think you will need that you do not have yet?

  • Working with project using Scrum
  • Using a profiler
  • Code reading cramming with little support of documentation
  • Co-operating with a team of tester instead of a few

    Which of your strengths will help you?
  • I am not shy to ask questions
  • I write code that has been receiving feedback with the phrase "code with a second thought"
  • I always use a diagram to illustrate ideas well enough that are complicated to demonstrate

    Which of your potential weaknesses will be ones you need to watch out for?
  • Need to polish on skills to solve conflict in a group
  • Also need to polish on skills to find the right thing to blame for problems that a debugger can't solve

    How do you see this project helping you in your career?
  • Help me to develop skills that I don't have or not so good at which are essential when I start my career after I graduate
  • Obtaining connections to open source organization which are also essential to me

    What in particular interests you the most about this project?
  • The project itself!
  • It is an open source project
  • The technologies that it is used
  • The experience that I can get from contributing into the team

    Posted byA nerdy girl at 7:59 AM 0 comments  

    Education with open source
    Tuesday, September 15, 2009

    Today I have attended a talk by Mark Surman, the director of the Mozilla Foundation, at the Centre for Social Innovation with a couple of grad students. This talk is one of the series of Toronto NetTuesday, and the topic was about Mozilla Service week and CiviCRM.

    It was very kind of him to spend more time with us, the students to have a separate talk. It was about how open source has been co-operating with education to improve the quality of participation and commitment nowadays. Also, he talks about the importance of commitment and openness in open source organization, regarding those two as the key philosophy of open source.

    However, it leaves me a message that it is getting harder to participate into open source if you are new and not very well-known to the industry. Your ideas to contribute will either be cruelly banned, or accepted but with a harsh future. People need to fight very hard for their ideas in order to get funded, which means it's very not likely that they will share until they get the fame/funds that they want. That exactly violates the key philosophy that Mark has proposed. Does that also explains the low men:women ratio(0.1%) in open source area, which women care more about relationships while men care more about goals? What I take away from that talk with Mark is that somehow at sometime, the culture in open source needs to be more open in order for it to be prosperous.

    Posted byA nerdy girl at 6:52 PM 0 comments  

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