It’s FLOSS time: let’s get down to it

This was my very first contact with open source concepts, philosophies and community. And I really liked it from the beginning.

Before the expository classes about what is/who is it for/who does/why doing OpenSource, I had no idea about how huge and extense the graph of contributions were. And one the things that got me the most was the “Cathedral and Bazaar” model.

The Cathedral model represents traditional, centralized development with controlled releases by a small group of developers. The Bazaar model epitomizes the open-source approach, featuring decentralized, collaborative contributions from a large community of developers.

Basically the Bazaar model, exemplified by projects like Linux, Debian, etc leads to faster innovation and more robust software and also reaching more flexibility, transparency, and community engagement. On a world where we have so many different people thinking on the same issue, this is the perfect situation for reaching each time better solutions and intersections of solutions for better tools.

Technical limitations

Another thing that I realized throughout the discipline is that if you have a perfect enviroment for development of the chosen project or issue, it is natural that the progress will come quicker and efficiently.

But I was on the other side of this, and felt that all the time, all the classes, I was left behind because of my laptop, but knew that fixing my bugs and machine problems would also lead to a good learning process.

I had to be patient and learn with late steps, and since we ended up grouping, I had to follow up with my groupmate laptop implementations. This made a bit harder to actually go down with testing, implementing my ideas or flowing with the development of the issue code itself.

Grouping and submitting is cool, but overheads are better

During the grouping experience I personally found it very interesting to learn from Lincoln existent experience. Being on a group where one of the members is familiar with the needing enviroments and requisites always helps to follow up with the schedule and getting things done.

On the other hand, I get the feeling that learning comes a lot from struggles and overheads. So, most of what I learned throughout the discipline was from the consequences of my problems during tutorials and other situations, rather than mainly from the contributions.

I have never actually searched, executed, deleted and created so many stuff inside my operating system, so one of the things that I learned the most was about the OS itself and how it works on the real world side.

A cool new project to follow

After the entire knowledge obtained through the discipline, on the beginning of june I found out about a cool open-source project in which I would really like to contribute.

The project is name OpenFHE, and it was an open-source project that focus on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) schemes. You can read more about it here.

The coolest thing about this project is that it diversifies and opens a lot on how you can contribute to the project, from solving issues, to creating new implementations and APIs as well as translating already existing implementations to another languages and experiment with them. You can learn more about it here.

My interesent landed on the C++ implementation, which can be found here.

For the contribution flow, you can find out more here

For the Crypto community this is amazing, especially considering that new implementations are always welcome in post-quantum side.

Sadly, this dicovery was way too late considering the schedule of the discipline, and I couldn’t go through contributions on my on in this.