OSS Pulse

OSS Pulse: Uniting Open Source Globally, One Contribution at a Time!

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Inspiration

It was a mixture of different motivations. What better way to bring people together than to leverage the GitHub API of all things? It's also kinda cool to look into the API of a program that I've been using to house all of my other major programs like it's Inception. I was also looking for the chance to learn Flask and Angular, which fit into this application well. Most of all, I'm graduating this December and am in the great midst of applying to (part-time) graduate school for Data Science/AI and this project gave me the opportunity to explore a little bit of that too.

What it does

OSS Pulse tracks and analyzes open-source contributions from around the globe (or at least from the data that GitHub provides). It aggregates the results from the top contributors, visualizes that data, and forecasts predictions of how that data will either increase/decrease in the future.

How we built it

Other than the previously mentioned tech stack, I first drew out all my ideas using the Obsidian note-taking app, which is another thing that I've been meaning to get better at - and if you've never heard or tried it, I would definitely recommend it! However, even with the idea and the general timeline of what components needed to be built first and whatnot, I definitely jumped around a lot. And by this, I don't just mean going around different files in my program. At some points, I was literally doing more math on my paper and going through Microsoft AI tutorials for basic linear regression.

Challenges we ran into

Being a single-person team and taking on new technical material was one thing and so the errors that I would face like "NG0203: inject()" weren't too much of a surprise. Rather, it was the non-technical work that I had to balance alongside this hackathon that made it very tiring (but super fun!). Exhibit 1: Intern Work (the classic Friday time-stealer) Exhibit 2: Last-second tutoring and volunteering calls to attend to Exhibit 3: Dog steps on poop 3 minutes in a walk outside There were many more random, small instances that bundled up together which made this hackathon unique for me in the sense that I wasn't just sitting in a room coding my mind away for X amount of hours. Heck, I would take that over battling with my friend's huge dog with its poop paws in the bathtub any day now that I experienced it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was really glad that I was able to do this hackathon alongside all the other activities this weekend. It all felt really fulfilling and it was great to really be put in an environment where I can really focus on and study new material like DS/AI, even at the most basic level.

What we learned

Hackathons are definitely more fun, chaotic, and tiring with a group. And so when I go back to school this fall, I'm definitely grabbing 3 others and a case of energy drinks. Also, having blue light glasses saved me.

What's next for OSS Pulse

I would like to add greater insights into the data rather than just visualizing what's given. The forecast statistic is a very small glimpse into that and I would also like to incorporate more statistics than just contributions. Some features that come to mind are languages and active projects, and then there would be a feature to recommend a user a project based on their past projects or filter for ones that might interest them based on certain criteria.

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