Heyo! This is Chris keeping a record of my experience in CS3108, a course that gives us a taste of open-source development. Since this is my first post, I’ll give a short introduction of myself and my reflection of the work I’ve done so far.

I’m a second year student in the NUS(School of Computing). I’ve mainly had experience creating and maintaining web sites, dabbling in PHP, Ruby on Rails among other things. I believe that technology has developed to be much more than a tool for everyday purposes and now Open Sourced development is a powerful force in driving innovation with limited resources and a whole lot of passion.

I first heard of this course through prof Damith and thought it sounded interesting. but also a little out of my league. considering I’ve only been doing pretty amature coding so far. but I’ve always dreamed of creating my own addon/ contributing to the open source community.

When my friend Simon(link) emailed me and asked if I wanted to join in, I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn!

Anywho, I’ll probably insert bits of my random ramblings among my reflections on the course.

Reflections of the 1st couple of weeks

The first couple of lessons were casual, with us absorbing the experiences of the previous batches, thanks Jason and (link) for sharing their insights with us. getting into the ubuntu environment was a litlle jarring. But at the same time, I found myself spending hours lost in experimenting and tweaking the system, fun times.

after the second lesson I started exploring Bugzilla and the different bugs marked “Student-Project” for Firefox. I quickly realised that it probably wasn’t a good idea just yet. Though the projects seemed doable, it would probably take me much more time than I could possibly find in the semester. So I followed Gary’s suggestion to start to take a look at Thunderbird, Mozilla’s email client.

I started off my actually using the Client everyday, I’m more of a webbased client kind of guy simply because I’m more familiar with the format. But I think there can be some ideas that are implemented in Gmail’s web client that could be ported into Thunderbird. I’ll probably run them by Gary some time this week. Mean while, I found a few interesting bugs that I’ll poke into to get a feel of it.

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