Exploring the world of Open Source
Tags: beginners, opensource, productivity, learning
Published: 2023-09-08 20:35:54

## Who are you?
Hello! Great to see that you've found my tiny post in this massive ocean of information. I'm [Nicolas](https://namatuzio.github.io/), a 4th year software development student at Seneca College currently enrolled in an open source class that has piqued my interest for the past 2 years. So happy to finally be able to take it! That aside, I've always been interested in open source technologies. I was always curious what sort of semantics open source really brought. Licensing? Copyright? These are all things I've heard and understand to some degree in terms of products or brands and such, but how do they relate at all to an open source project? On top of that, what would an open source project really entail? I always loved the idea of programmers coming together to make something incredible which is why open source has been one topic I've been meaning to dive into.

## What^2 - Term Work
I'm hoping to learn topics related to open source development as well as possibly develop an open source project. I'd also love to commit updates to existing projects and dive into their innards and understand how they work and the processes / techniques that are used to make it easily understandable. I'm not too picky with the projects I would want to work on considering I'm not too familiar with many open source projects that aren't colossal repos with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Although recently I've been following a project that allows for full-body tracking in virtual reality through a WIFI signal called SlimeVR and the software used to interface with the hardware is an open source project called SlimeVR Server which I would like to dive into since it has been something I've used previously.

## What and Why - Open Source Projects
I've looked into 2 repos that interested me, one was the application I described above, [SlimeVR Server](https://github.com/SlimeVR/SlimeVR-Server) and the other is [DevOpsGPT](https://github.com/kuafuai/DevOpsGPT). 

SlimeVR Server is a really interesting application that creates a server and forwards ports through your WIFI network which acts as drivers for the SlimeVR trackers. They connect via WIFI signal which is very unorthodox for virtual reality body trackers that typically use an infrared signal to track exact positions. I've done a tiny bit of socket and server programming before so I think it will be interesting to find out how it could be handled in an open source setting taking into consideration things like security and efficiency. 

DevOpsGPT takes the tedium of DevOps and automates it using the GPT LLM. The title really caught my eye as someone who just came out fresh from an 8-month DevOps coop. I worked with the GPT model during this time as well, and really want to see how such a solution could exist. It essentially takes project requirements, creates a requirement doc, interface documents, develops code, and finally creates a CI/CD pipeline. I don't quite understand or know how well this could work but it would be amazing to see how this could possibly be done.

## Closing
Well, that's about it for my first post, thank you for reading and I look forward to a great semester ahead!