Day 3: Some frustration, some celebration. Class Material Editing and GitHub Navigation

        The last few days were a bit stormy for me as I was adjusting to the new workflow and the new team. It was particularly difficult because we were not given what we felt like enough directions at the beginning. This, however, was out of the hands of our instructors who are doing far more than what they had panned out for their summers. Many of the students interning at Berea, including myself, had plans to travel for work/research opportunities at different companies and research institutions across the country. When COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a shutdown of our campus and the end of the internship program, the Computer Science department created emergency spaces in our summer internship and research programs for all students who had been affected. Thanks to the department, I am dealing well with the implications of the pandemic during this instrumental summer on my path to graduate school. I am learning more about what it means to be a research student, a scholar, an open-source contributor, and a team-player. 

        Normally, the internship experience lasts 8 weeks and ends right before the start of the semester. However, we received news right at the end of the May term classes that Berea will be shifting to a schedule that would allow for early beginning and closure of the Fall semester. It was clear that the summer internships had to start as early as possible. Dr. Jan and Dr. Boggs were not prepared for the experience to start one week early and were preoccupied with their commitments. It felt as though the team members, in response, chose to not disturb our instructors about every little confusion we had during the first week of the internship as a way of giving them space to adjust.

        My gut reaction in situations like this is to self-start and organize project workflows. After some discussion, it was clear that we did not have an outlined workflow. Naturally, I started to manage documents in the ways that worked for me before when I contributed to previous classes' materials. This time, we were tasked with outlining the Data Analytics Runestone Book chapters and provide introductions and glossaries. At first, the team wanted to split the book in order to speed up the chapter outlining process, the idea, which I did not agree with at all. I have worked on book editing before, and I know how important it is to have a solid grasp of the material in order to deliver solid work. I communicated to the team that it is not wise nor efficient to create an outline for Chapter 7 before reading Chapter 2 in a book that layers its material, and the team agreed. At the end of the day, we had an outline for recording chapter outlines, introductions, and glossaries, and we finished the first two chapters.

        I was really excited to work on the Open Source contributions today as I learned to navigate GitHub using the terminal. Previously, I have only used GitHub via the website's GUI and apps like GitHub Desktop and GitHub Classroom. Using Terminal reminds me of one of my favorite movies, The Matrix, and generally makes me happy. I also learned to create issues and work with the Lean Development Process using Trello Boards. I look forward to studying more about the Lean Process in software development, and I wonder if it is similar to the Lean Business Start-Up Process, which we studied during Entrepreneurship for The Public Good and Idea State-U Competitions with Dr. Peter Hackbert.