This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by mpa-LHutchinson
Introduction
Hi, my name is Liam. I'm in my 4th year of my software development program at Seneca Polytechnic. I've had an interest in computer science and software development since high school, and I hope to take the skills I learn from my time at Seneca to be a web developer or game designer.
I am writing this first blog post since I am taking open source development as my professional option this semester. Here I will go over why I am taking this course, why open source has appealed to me, what I hope to accomplish in this course, the types of projects I expect myself to work on, and finally I will provide an example of an open source repo from Github that caught my attention.
Why am I taking this course?
The main reason I am taking this course is to get real world, hands-on experience with working on large software projects. This will be practical for me in the future, as I can mention that I contributed to large, well known projects in my resume which will increase my chances at landing a favorable co-op position or job.
Why does open source appeal to me?
Open source is appealing for a variety of reasons. Asides from the aforementioned career potential, working on an open source project is something I've been curious about. Previously all my software projects have been closed source, meaning I either worked on them alone or with a group privately, no one else having access to our work. This will be a completely new experience for me. Another thing that's nice about open source is the feeling of community that comes with it. When there's so many different developers contributing to one project, there's a lot less pressure on each individual dev to write large quantities of working code for a project. Sometimes, a contribution to a project can be as simple as taking one line of code and changing it to fix a bug. The community also allows you to reach out to more people about troubles you're having, making you more likely to get the help you need.
What do I expect to accomplish in this course?
By the end of the course, I expect to come out with a better understanding of the process of working on open source projects, as right now I am a complete beginner to it. Reading the course README file, I expect to understand open source tools, licensing, and create projects that interact with existing open source software.
What types of projects do I expect myself to work on?
To be honest, I'm not sure right now. There are so many different open source projects out there and since I'm new to all this, I want to do more research into existing projects. One trend I've noticed is a lot of projects are related to artificial intelligence, taking advantage large language models like GPT to develop helpful tools for developers and consumers alike. Since this is the case, it seems like working with AI related projects is a good way to go.
Example Project
When searching through the monthly trending projects on Github, one caught my attention. It's called "Deep-Live-Cam", and it uses AI to create deepfakes. The user takes a photo or video of a person, then replaces it with a photo of someone else that the user provides. On the homepage, there is an example video of someone taking webcam footage of themselves and replacing themselves on video with Elon Musk, only using a picture of him. The quality of the deepfake was scarily accurate, looking pretty much like the person in the photo. Here is the link to the original repo, as well as my forked version of it:
https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam
https://github.com/mpa-LHutchinson/Deep-Live-Cam-Forked-
I chose this repo simply because I was so impressed at the quality of the deepfake in the example. It kind of scares me to be honest😂. Aside from that, the repo is seeing regular changes to this day, so the community for it is very active.
Conclusion
This is the end of my first blog post for my open source course. I'm a little intimidated by the whole prospect of working on such large projects, but we all have to start somewhere. Thank you for reading and have a wonderful rest of your day. 👋
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by mpa-LHutchinson
mpa-LHutchinson | Sciencx (2024-09-06T22:38:25+00:00) Introduction blog. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/09/06/introduction-blog/
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