In the spring of 2017 I decided I wanted to start contributing to an open source project. I wanted to find
something that I was interested in, but also hopefully something I could really make a difference in. I found Dr.
John Lindsay's (who is a Geography professor at the University of Guelph) project, and thought it looked
interesting. I walked into his office on campus and told him I was
a CS student minoring in GIS, that I wanted to help him, and asked what he needed done. As it turns out, he
wanted the project's dependency on Netbeans removed, but was also in the middle of porting the entire back end
from Java to Rust, and didn't want to do that at the time. As a result, I undertook the project.
I started by writing a makefile that would compile the project. This worked, but it was not an ideal solution as
it was not cross platform. For that reason I then created a python script that would build the project and then
prepare it for a release. It is cross platform (works on Windows, Linux and OS X), and allows the user to build
only specific parts of the project at a time.
In addition, I removed all of the old Netbeans configuration files, and restructured the directories to make it
easier to work with.
Once I'm a little less busy (this summer or fall) I intend to find more place in the project where I can be
helpful.
