So, uhh…this blog post will be…significantly different than the others. And not in a good way. For my first contribution, I contributed to…nothing. I never really found the time to do anything. I’ve had a significant amount of work being demanded of me from all of my other classes, from having writing a game in assembly without that class letting up on homework to an actual complete research project, I’ve got a lot to do on top of looking for jobs. I had to give something the cut and, while all the other classes in my schedule are either required by my degree or a requirement for the minor I want to apply for, I took this class simply to see if I was interested in the FOSS immersion, so it wasn’t much of a contest. This does leave me in an…odd situation. No contribution, no points on the assignment, right?

Why am I even making this post?

As a consequence of this choice (and in an effort to just get whatever I can grade-wise), I have decided to make this post to see how many points don’t require a contribution (sorry in advance for most likely causing a new rule on the assignment). I’d expect it to be zero, but hey, if no one’s done it yet, someone’s going to give it a shot eventually and it’s not like I’ll be worse off for doing it. Consider this a sort of white-hat hacking, I guess.

How much work did I end up doing for a contribution before deciding to do this?

Not much, really. I didn’t really do anything outside of class. I looked through RIT’s open source projects (as I wanted to put in the least effort reasonable towards communicating), saw that some of them had no onboarding process, and then just put those projects into the back of my mind for while. I did eventually think about it more, but that lead to me realizing that those projects didn’t really have documentation issues (at least as far as I could tell) and I sure didn’t know how to write code for those projects, so they were dead ends. I kind of just…stopped trying after that. I could try to learn a new language for the sake of contributing, but again, didn’t really have the time to do that. I would like to take the time here to say that no one, and I mean NO ONE, should follow my example. I may be explaining why and how this happened, but I’m not saying any of this is okay to do. If this post actually gets me anything and I see someone else trying this, I will…be disappointed in you. I can’t do much else, really.

Well, how was doing nothing?

Oh, I still hated it. I’ve been stressed for the past few weeks. I couldn’t even relax during spring break, I was still working on schoolwork at home. I even did less work than I was supposed to other than this. I misread one of the assignment descriptions for one of the two projects I have to make right now in a way that significantly lowered/deferred the amount of work that I had to do. I’m not sure if I would’ve just submitted the version I did or if I just wouldn’t have done the Lit Review (which, by the way, I also considered skipping due to stress at one point as well) if I had read it correctly, and I don’t care enough to want to know. All in all, I can at least be certain I won’t peak in college.

What was the issue?

I don’t know, you tell me. You can’t really do this section without a contribution and I think I already exhausted my “I’m contributing to the assignment itself” cards, regardless of how ineffective they were.

What about the contribution evidence?

Yeah, this one’s also not really possible. What do I screenshot? The myCourses home page? The rubric? The missing assignment email that lead to me actually going through with this?

Okay, how about contribution effort?

This one you can do without a contribution, so I’ll go ahead and say this: Even with the idea that I did literally nothing, I am/did put in an underwhelming amount of effort. I’m pretty sure it’s going to take me 30 minutes of active trying to make this post. Considering that most of this is figuring out exactly what to say, that number should be around twice as large, at least. I am just thinking of words, typing away, and going “that’s fine, next section.” Just lousy, overall.