Commarch Results

My group and I decided to take a look at the Monogame project and see how good it is at maintaining its open source presence. Let's find out.

A little about the Project

I think it is more pertinent to let Monogame speak for itself.

Here is also a link to their repository for the main branch on Github.

Who manages the repository

There has been about 8 main contributors over the course of the project, with 4 main contributors still maintaining the project on Github. These people are as follows: Steve Williams, Tom Spillman, Andrea Magnorsky, and Jacob Anderson. Tom Spillman seems to be the main lead responsible for managing the commits to Monogame and is probably the leader for the project overall. The repository itself has around 138 contributors with over 6,000 commits between them.

GIT by a bus/ Calloway Coefficient of Fail

So we tried to use the Git by a bus program, but that failed spectacularly as we couldn't find a computer to handle the process outside hijacking one of the computers they use to calculate collisions with black holes. Seeing as we would like to remain students, we just went with what we could get.

The Callaway Coefficient of Fail was....interesting as there were rather huge swaths of points taken off for some fairly minor things. I don't know that I agree with the final assessment. Regardless, the results are as follows:
[Callaway Coefficient of Fail]:
--------------------------------
Size: +0
Source Control : +0
Building from Source: +50
Bundling: +0
Libraries: +20
System Install: +20
Code Oddities: +20
Communication: +15
Releases: +0
History: +10
Licensing: +10
------------------------------
145 - So much fail, your code should have its own reality TV show

Just past the benchmark for that result

Front and Back End

As Monogame is more a library, it doesn't really have a specific person dedicated to the front end part of the project. That said, between all of the contributors, there is probably only one or two people as most people work in their own separate forks for the project. Which sort of leads into the next point...

More relevant issues

A large majority of contributions are in their own separate forks on Github with several admittedly lined up to be merged, but that doesn't change the fact that the project is rather spread thin between all the forks. It makes it hard to know what is actually been implemented and what actually needs working on.

Trending?

It is trending rather highly as there are several game projects coming out that are being made or ported with Monogame which is drawing more and more people to the fold.

The Raptor Test

This is getting to be a case of too big to fail in some regards. There are enough developers and members of the community that I do believe that something like a meteor striking every core team member dead, there would still be a fair amount of people that could still contribute to the project. That said, there are a large amount of commits and contributions attributed to a small number of people.

Start-up?

Monogame has...not all that much for the purposes of getting people really involved right off the bat. The barrier to entry could be a little better, but that is neither here or there

Monogame's Communication/Documentation

For the most part, the greater portion of Monogames discussion either happens on their forums or on the issue tracker on their Github repository. This is a fairly active community and the developers seem to comment often, so it does well enough in that regard. There is also a decent amount documentation, though it is holdover from XNA itself rather than specifically made for Monogame.

Would you like to contribute?

I...would rather not. I don't mind developing with Monogame, but that is completely different from developing for it. It just doesn't really appeal to me.

Final Conclusions

Monogame is a fine project and I would like to see where it goes. It has a lot going for it and will be a cool framework to work with in the future, but I don't find the community itself very appealing. The large sense of independence is both a benefit and hindrance depending on your skill level.

Here is a link to the powerpoint that we presented with

Meet-up Report: March 14th meeting of Linux Users Group

This was interesting. The Linux Users Group is a club on the RIT Campus that meets on Fridays in the Golisano college. The group itself is roughly 5 years old according to the club's President. The general meetings seem to be centered around spending the first hour giving a presentation teaching some aspect of using Linux and the other hour spent as an open forum for its members.

The subject of today's meeting was installing and compiling the Linux Kernel on the member's laptops. I would have joined in if I wasn't afraid of straight bricking my laptop. Not exactly the best idea with work to do later. Regardless, the presentation itself was a fairly interesting one even if I wasn't able o follow everything exactly. I feel like this probably wasn't the best initial introduction to the group for an inexperienced user like myself.

The presenter was very knowledgeable about the subject and presented from a slideshow, but the presentation itself was rather lacking overall. I don't know if this is just usual fair for the group, but of the eight regulars there, many were jumping in and either adding to what was being said or commenting on what was going on. This would be fine for a different activity, but doing something as complex as compiling a kernel, it was very distracting to the entire process.

Overall, I felt like I learned something, even if it isn't enough information to do something with. I could see myself coming back here in the future if only to see if I can't learn something new. I will try to come back in the future.

Commarch Team Proposal - Monogame

It is time for a Commarch project:

Members

1. Daniel Shumway (drs7453@rit.edu)
2. Liam Middlebrook (ljm2906@rit.edu)
3. Brian Escriche (bke2759@rit.edu)

Project

As stated, we will be working on analyzing the Monogame project. Monogame is an opensource framework for C# that is replicating the XNA Framework. The main reason for this is the abandoning of support for the framework by Microsoft.

Roles

At current, we have yet to decide roles for the group because we have yet to sit down and have a full meeting. It will probably happen fairly soon.

Source

Monogame is hosted on Github here

Mentors

While Monogame does have an IRC, it is fairly inactive and as such we will probably be looking more at their Github contributions. Of note is an Ethan Lee

The Easy

• Monogame is fairly active overall
• There is a large community

The Hard

• They haven't had a large update in a while
• There may be a communication issue as time goes on

Overcoming our obstacles

We have a fairly resourceful group and I am used to scrounging around for information and contacts

Career Fair and Company Talks

So this last week was Career fair at RIT. As per normal, every dresses to the 7's and prints off their resumes and business cards in the hopes they will stand out from everyone else doing the exact same thing. On the converse, the recruiters have set up shop trying to present themselves to be the best white collar pencil pushing station for the aspiring students. A big game of cat and mouse really. On a side note, I'm not sure why we still are required to have class on either day, it just makes things stressful for everyone trying to make time for everything or skipping out on class.

The other festivities of course include some of companies giving talks to about their companies to people to raise interest and awareness of what they do. Of particular note is the company Hudl which not only presented a talk in the GCCIS building as well as our HFOSS class. I much prefer things like these as it switches the focus from both sides trying to peddle themselves off. The talk itself was rather interesting, I hadn't actually heard of the company before. All in all, I more enjoyed listening to people giving advice about the career fair.