Open Source Education
Contributing to a platform thousands of students depend on.
Contributed 1,000+ lines to Expertiza, an open-source peer-review platform used at NC State and universities worldwide. A large, mature codebase — the kind you don't control, you navigate.
What it is
Expertiza is an open-source educational platform used for peer review and collaborative learning. It's a large, mature codebase — TypeScript frontend, Ruby on Rails backend, Docker for containerization — the kind of system that has evolved over a decade and reflects every decision ever made by people who are no longer around to explain them.
I developed the team section, wrote unit tests for CRUD operations, and contributed over 1,000 lines of code to the project.
What was technically interesting
Working with a codebase this size taught me more about software architecture than any greenfield project. You understand design decisions better when you have to live with their consequences. You develop a different instinct for risk: a change that looks small can ripple through parts of the system you didn't think to check.
Contributing to open source requires a different discipline too. You have to communicate your changes to people who don't share your assumptions, write pull request descriptions that are genuinely useful, and be comfortable with the reality that a reviewer might have a better idea than you did.
What I learned
Good documentation isn't just for other people — it's for the version of yourself who comes back six months later confused.
Also: peer review of code and peer review of student work have more in common than you'd expect. Both require feedback that's specific enough to be useful without being so prescriptive that you're just rewriting someone else's thinking.