OSD600 Introduction

 Hello Professor David Humphrey and fellow classmates, my name is Abdul and I am in my 5th semester of CPA at Seneca. I am taking OSD600 and I am interested in taking this course and learning about and experiencing open source development. Throughout my time in the CPA program, I have been able to learn a lot about programming and software development, however most of the work has been in a controlled, structured and individual environment and with this opportunity in OSD600 I believe it will be exciting to be able to apply the knowledge and skills, I have learned in a more collaborative environment with real world applications. So I am really looking forward to meeting my fellow classmates in this class and learning and working together on some interesting projects. 

As we all know its been a wild year with lots of unprecedented things happening with COVID-19 but I like to see the positive in things and I feel like these unknown times will bring about a lot of innovation. I have grown up in Toronto for the majority of my life and I am still here during Covid. 

During this semester, I hope to be able to experience what is like to collaborate with other developers on open source projects. I feel like working with other developers is one of the best ways to explain my own knowledge base and maybe help others learn something new as well. I also hope to be able to expand my technical skills into new areas I havent explored yet. Specifically I would like to work on projects that involve mobile development across mobile operating systems as this is something I would very much like to be able to become proficient in.  I would also be open to learning about and working on projects that involve data analytics as that is something that has also become an interest of mine lately. 

Going through the trending repos on GitHub, the one that caught my eye was FreeCAD. FreeCad is an open source 3D modeler that runs across Windows, Mac and Linux. The reason why this repo interested me was because at my last Co-op placement, I worked for an electrical and mechanical contractor (PlanGroup) doing application development and maintenance and a lot of my job revolved around creating scripts to manage and automate processes related to AutoCAD and Revit which are other 3d modelling software. So a similar open source variation of those types of software is something that intrigued me right away. 

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog post and I hope to get to know the rest of you better soon. Stay safe!

- Abdul

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