This year as an alumni mentor I guided a small team along with working on some specific issues. The issue I’m most proud of is issue 4030 on the Scorecard repo. Amongst all of the documentation fixes we did, 4030 was the only technical issue we fixed where we had to understand and modify code functions. We spent about a week on this issue to find out the fix was just one line of code. It was a little frustrating because it involved a concept I just learned more about this year involving inheritance. Kemon, Jordin, and I worked on this issue a lot independently and Kemon found a solution and presented it to us. We then opened our PR, had to update our commit message, and got our fix merged. It was satisfying to have the checkpoint of completion.

We worked on a few documentation issues, both opening and fixing some. This part of the program reinforced my idea that text can be interpreted in as many ways as there are people reading it. It’s essential to communicate as thoughtfully as possible and really put time and effort into proper grammar, common phrasing, and overall conciseness of your documentation, and comment when communicating with others. We worked on issues updating docs, and making text more clear to understand and I think it was a very valuable experience and hope the other members keep the lessons they learned with them.

OpenSSF Scorecard is definitely much more difficult to contribute to when compared to p5.js. The one thing that makes me prefer OpenSSF however is the incredibly quick response times from the maintainers. I think the barrier for entry frees up a lot of their time for communication. I really appreciated how the maintainers would provide resources when engaging in discussion with us. Spencer was a very big highlight for my experience with OpenSSF.

Coming back, I didn’t anticipate any difficulties teaching others open source. I’ve tutored before and thought the experience would translate fairly easily, but it didn’t completely. I’d add a fair warning that when it comes to something as complex as open source you’ll need to be prepared to repeat steps to guide others through making contributions. You’ll also need to consider that not everything you know will be as obvious to other, and that sometimes giving hints can make the situation more confusing. I’d also add that this experience will help you become comfortable figuring out how to make progress when you and/or your team are feeling a little lost. Asking questions will do nothing but help you get back on track to making progress.