The Fundamentals Every Software Engineer Needs to Know
12 May 2021Open Source Projects
A lot of software developers and students know what GitHub is. Many students such as myself have used github to store their own code for their own projects. But when it comes making project with other people on GitHub, it’s a different experience for many students. There are many ways to go about distributing the work amongst the team memebers such as assigning “issues” or requirements that need to be met to different people. However, the one problem with this is that everyone will have a different piece that might conflict or work with each other. So having good and efficient communication with your team members is crucial for getting any substantial work done.
Being Uniform and Having Standards
There are going to be many difference in how code looks during the development of the project. This could lead to conflicts or other team members not knowing what the code will end up doing. That’s why having a set coding standard for everyone is good for keeping the code nice and uniform throughout the project. It makes code easier to read and understand so that people even outside of the project team could be able to understand what is being done. It is the equivalent of making an outline for an essay and following the outline.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
There isn’t much that could go wrong in a open source project other than conflicts between commits. These problems are easily solved by communicating with your team members. However, there was a recent case where a group of people were testing other people by committing purposefully buggy patches to see what would happen. These patches got the people who were working on this open source project to be furious and banned them from contributing to the project any further. This leads to the question whether or not that ban was warranted. I personally think that this was an unenthical thing for them to do without telling the people contributing to the project in the first place. Had they told them first before submitting patches, it would have been okay in my opinion. However, the pro’s outweight any of the cons for open source projects and working together by tackling small issues to build up is a very good way of managing and working on a project efficiently.