Rescheduled Open Data Week Event

This week I was able to attend the open data week event Talk Data To Me. It was originally scheduled during open data week in March, but it was rescheduled for this past Thursday due to the snow storm last month.

The talk was hosted by General Assembly and featured three professionals who work in industries where big data plays an integral role. The first speaker worked at a company called Publicis and she presented about how her company uses scraped data to help create the central concepts of advertising campaigns. The second speaker was a managing director at Huge Inc., a company that creates brand experiences such as the online and mobile platforms for companies like McDonalds and HBO. He spoke mainly about how the company is doing interesting things with artificial intelligence in the realm of emotional recognition. I found him to be the most interesting speaker in terms of content and delivery, but his talk didn’t have as much to do with data. The third and final speaker came from dotdash, a rebranded version of about.com. She presented some interesting patterns that emerge in the way traffic to the website changes in accordance with historical events and different times of the year. Following the presentations there was a Q&A with the three invited speakers.

Google Open Source Talk

I thought that the presentation from Tuesday’s class was both informative and engaging. It seems that Google seems less committed to open source practices than the other companies/entities we have heard from, but the way this was presented made it seeem like not the worst thing. They open source where they can in ways that won’t be overly detrimental to the company’s financial success, and they also close-source portions of projects that they think should only be developed internally. To me, it seemed balanced and the speaker seemed genuine in both the positive and negative things she had to say about her employer.

Team Project Progress

This week we began moving forward with the development of our extension. We divided up development roles between the UI, readme, the color selection portion of the backend, the refactoring portion of the backend, and the overall integration of the different parts of the extension. I will be handling the CSS refactoring as well as assisting on other parts of the application as problems emerge with the development. We all created our own branches of the master to develop our respective portions of the app.

Code of Conduct

Having a document of this nature is important with an open source project where the barriers to participation are so low. There needs to be a foundational understanding for how people can collaborate on the project in meaningful, productive, and healthy ways. This prevents the community from becoming unwelcoming and allows productive work to continue.

It’s always good to have an established standard for what kind of behavior is acceptable, although most, if not all, of the rules in the Go code of conduct should go without saying. In a non open source environment, there are undoubtedly similar guidelines established, but there are things like HR that ensure people are working together in positive ways. I would say a Code of Conduct document is more relevant for open source projects where most conversation has to happen facelessly online.

Brackets does have a code of conduct, here’s a link.