Brainstorming an Open Source Project

In an unexpected chatting session with my Telegram fellows, we have decided to start an open source project on connecting Hong Kong students looking to study abroad with international students. As the leader of this project, I have to make many decisions for my 20 or so teammates to ensure our project is on the right trajectory.

The first problem is aligning the expectation of all members. Some members are students and their sole purpose is to build an impactful project which looks good on their resumes. Others are working professionals who want to develop new skills outside of their duties to increase their competitiveness. It is difficult to come up with a project idea that satisfies people on both ends of the spectrum, especially under a democratic system.

We have concluded that we will build a public forum enhanced by NLP which seems to cater the needs of both parties. The students may work on the basic RESTFUL API on the backend and React on the frontend, perhaps with some CICD and deployment experience which look awesome on their resumes. Meanwhile the working professionals may spend time grinding NLP and machine learning theories to broaden their computer science knowledge and their working competency with machine learning engineers in future occasions.

I have decided to take up the role to lead the students with limited experience in real world projects as I have participated in several internships and real world projects development. The challenging part is to set up sufficient skeleton code so the beginners have enough grounds to start writing code, but not too much that their codes seem trivial.