Hello!

I'm Joshua, a 4th year college student at Seneca College who is taking DPS909 (a course on open source development). I'm young and inexperienced, I got no idea where I'm going. But the one thing I do know is I love coding. I wanted to take this course because I felt like there was a whole world of programming I didn't know about and I needed to take a bit of a jump to see it. I'm completely out of my comfort zone and I feel like I literally know nothing while everyone else knows everything, but that is why I want to take this course. My professor's course introduction video really hit me on the mark the entire time, I just felt called out the entire time! But it also showed me that I'm starting in the right place.

Open source is interesting to me because I know that there are so many projects that are open source and are literally some of the best products/projects out there. Open source covers so many types of things and I can discover many cool projects through it. But I just don't know where or how to start with any of these. It's all incredibly overwhelming, so I wanted to take this course to push myself in the right direction and gain the skills to know what's going on or how to learn what's going on.

As for where I'm at, I'm still living at home in the GTA so fortunately for me I'm not stuck overseas or anything from the pandemic.

I'm not really sure what specifically I am hoping to accomplish from this term. I don't really have any grasp of how the open source community is, so I'm not sure what to be looking for. I guess in that sense I am just hoping to learn lots of new things and see many cool projects and get involved. I'm hoping that this course will help me just dunk myself into the ocean that is open source development and maybe I'll find some amazing stuff that helps me find a goal.

After just taking a look at some of the trending repos in GitHub there were many cool looking projects that sounded really awesome and also at the same time I had no idea what was going on. One repo that really caught my attention was TrinityCore (https://github.com/TrinityCore/TrinityCore). TrinityCore is a MMORPG Framework that is based in C++. It is derived from MaNGOS (Massive Network Game Object Server) but is now its own individual project. I have been enjoying playing the MMO FFXIV for about 2 years now and over the summer have been watching some MMO streamers and just listening in on some of the new MMOs that are coming out. So this repo caught my attention while I'm in my MMO hype phase. I was curious how an MMO framework would work and what was involved.

I'm curious to see what other projects I can find throughout this term and what kinds of things I will learn from this open source course. I hope I can gain some great experiences and start to find a spot in this vast ocean that is open source. So until next time, take care!