Talk by Kevin Fleming

This past week, we had a group workshop day and a presentation from Kevin Fleming. I really enjoyed his presentation because he went into a lot of detail on the use of open source within Bloomberg and the greater tech community. He was very honest about the benefits and dangers of using open source and extremely informative. The most surprising thing I learned from his presentation was the fact that Google sponsors or hires engineers that solely work on open source projects that aren’t actually being used by Google. I thought that was very admirable of the company to support the community to that extent. The most interesting part of the talk was the portion where he mentioned that immense network spike within 9 seconds. I’m very interested in distributed computing and large scale projects in general, so I really enjoyed hearing about that experience.

Personal Progress Towards Team Project

For the project we’ve been doing, I confirmed with the original issue poster that the fix worked as they intended. After that, some people commented on my pull request so I continued to work with them. There was an issue with my pull request because there were some cases where it didn’t work. I investigated the issue and realized that there was a generated div that had static dimensions assigned to it. I needed to access that div and change those values, but it did not have any unique identifiers attached to it. I had to access a different div and then go up to the parent to modify that one. The problem is that I couldn’t do this through CSS and had to write it in JavaScript. This led me through a rabbithole of trying to figure out the best place in the code to write this solution. This fix had to change all previous messages as well as all incoming ones. This meant that I had to check for incoming GIFs in a way that didn’t affect the performance of the app. I commented my findings on my pull request and awaited further discussion with the community.

I learned a lot about style rules in CSS during this week. I especially looked into all the reasons why CSS doesn’t have a way to access parent elements and how easy it would be to make mistakes with that ability. I also realized that the lack of a communication channel for Caprine was very detrimental to my progress. I had to wait for someone to comment on GitHub every time I had something new to say. It was very time consuming.

Next week I hope to close this pull request and work on some more issues. I’ve already been looking into new ones, but many of the issues are Mac dependent and I only run Linux on my machine. :(