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Showing posts from April, 2026

CST462 - Service Learning Reflection: LibreOffice

 Service Learning: LibreOffice Software Development Reflection           Throughout my service-learning experience with LibreOffice, I gained a much-needed and hands-on understanding of what it actually means to engage with a large, long-lived open-source codebase. One of the biggest victories was simply learning how to navigate the environment--getting the project to build, understanding the workflow through Gerrit, and becoming comfortable using tools like "git grep" to locate and modify relevant code. These may seem like small steps but in a project of this scale they are foundational and non-trivial. I feel very prepared to dive into another huge codebase where I must accept that I simply will not be able to understand much of what I see and instead will have to drill down into one specific focus to gain understanding and contribute efforts.           The most impactful parts of the experience were seeing how rea...