openFIRST, the project that was my introducting to open source is undergoing changes. In the past two days, two of this year’s volunteers picked up the pace a bit, and started bug fixing. So far, each of them has solved one bug. We’ve also walked through and traced the cause of some particularly nasty compatibility issues with PHP 5. openFIRST remains a very small project, partly due to the restriction that FIRST places on team websites which are entered for a competition– they must be completely student designed and run. So, that limits the range of students from those in grade 9 to 12 (the ages of FIRST robotics). There is, of course, the FIRST Lego League, but I haven’t seen any volunteers prior to those folks in grade 9.

Overall, I’m quite pleased that they decided to be more active than before, and I’m glad that the project is moving somewhere. Myself, I’ve graduated, so, my role isn’t to develop the openFIRST software anymore, it’s to help with debugging, teach various skills, and do (relatively) boring administrative things like packaging the software and acting as a release technician. I’ve also taken to writing up things on Bugzilla.

The other thing I’ve been doing is helping out with pointing out resources, and getting things together as someone just happened to mention they were trying to start a FIRST team at a local high school (local to them, not to me). I guess every little bit counts, though. Doing all of this FIRST stuff is somewhat nostalgic.