Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Marco and I'm in my third year of Computer Programming and Analysis at Seneca College. I'm currently searching for co-op opportunities as I enter my last year at Seneca.

I enrolled myself into the open source development course at Seneca for several reasons. My first reason is that I liked the idea of getting to work on real world programs that countless people use. I like the fact that I can make contributions to a project that can help improve the experience of everyone using it and help out the development team while also learning valuable skills from them. This brings me into my second reason, with the experience I get from this course it can count as real world experience which I'm hoping would help make my hunt for a co-op position a little easier. Since, I haven't been all that lucky so far. Lastly, I use an open source project every day on my phone called Tachiyomi. Tachiyomi is an Android app that allows its users to read comics and manga off the internet. Here's a link to their website if you're interested, Tachiyomi. I've been interested in making contributions to the app for a while now, but I'm unfamiliar with how open source works. So I also took this course to also learn how it works and so that I can one day make contributions to the project after I have completed my Android development class this semester and teach myself Kotlin. Since my class covers Android development with Java.

This term, I'm hoping to learn Java development for both Desktop and Android applications as well as get my foot into the world of open source. As you've probably guessed from the above, I got myself into programming because I wanted to make applications that anyone can use, whether it's something essential to someone's day or an app to use to just read like Tachiyomi.

Searching for open source projects that fulfill this need of mine was a great start to look into the open source world. During my search I came across a trending project on GitHub called Open Interpreter. Open Interpreter is an open source project that meets this need of mine by using LLM's like ChatGPT or Code Llama. The idea of the project is that you can use something like ChatGPT to help make your day more productive by allowing it to run the code it creates in the terminal, as shown in the demo video. I downloaded Open Interpreter onto my computer and played around with it for a bit. It was really cool watching do simple things like setting my computer's theme to light mode, and asking it to do things I would consider a little time consuming like converting several word docs to PDFs. As some of the job applications I've applied to require submitted files to be PDFs. So it's definitely a project that would be really useful to a lot of people.

That about wraps up my blog post for this week, thanks to everyone who read it! I look forward to sharing more with everyone in the future in hopefully shorter posts. Thanks again!