Process summary
At first, I was very overwhelmed and confused with the open source community. Taking small steps I have been feeling more confortable and I feel that I am now part of a community of contributors.
The biggest take aways from this experience are:
- Staying up to date with the industry.
I had very little insight on this at the start of the unit and I realised I was missing out. There are so many interesting projects people are working on. Staying active and constantly look for new things to take part in and learn brings a lot of value to one’s practice in art and computing.
- Versioning systems
My skills and knowledge about git and GitHub were not great before this unit. Now that I have learned proper practice, I see the why it is popular. As soon as I started working on other personal project I felt the need to use git. I even thought about it when doing projects not related to code. Being able to compare versions and track changes is very useful. I have been thinking about how to create a versioning system for music projects with a friend as a passion project.
- Collaboration
I feel more confortable doing team work with different ways of working. At first I felt it was pointless as my teammate was in a very different time zone. But in the end, working together still added a lot of value to our output and I just had to be more patient.
- Design
I realised too late I had not been careful enough about the accessibility of my design. This is something I will keep in mind for my upcoming work. The user research will take a bigger part of my time spent.
Thinking back on how this unit, I feel very happy with my journey. I think taking part in my process will improve my practice for all the reasons stated previously. I also feel more confident in my skills and it will be easier for me to approach other communities and developers in the future.