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Week 1 – Introductory Week + Workshops and tours

31 Jul 2026 - Gideon Fynn - github, work experience, quality

This post marks the completion of my first week of my 2 week work placement at UCL ARC. A lot of knowledge was gained in this first week!

Project Overview

My project title is “Quality of open Source Software”. This project focuses on analysing different open source softwares that ARC are working on and checking the quality of documentation so that it is presented clearly for people to understand. We aim to check the following criteria:

  • Do they have a licence?
  • Does a ReadMe exist?
  • Is there a ReadMe Description and is it detailed enough?
  • Does the ReadMe include how to install the repository?
  • Does the installation steps actually work?
  • Does the ReadMe include how to ask for help?
  • Does it say how to contribute?
  • Does it specifify anything on GenAi contributions?
  • Does it say how to cite the project?
  • Is the DOI included in the citation?
  • Does the project maintain a change log?
  • Is the project linked to a code of conduct?

All of the above are common criteria that you see in quality ReadMe’s and so the aim of my project is the make sure we can maintain this standard across the open source projects at UCL

Highlights of My First Week

  • On Tuesday, I attended my first meeting with the UCL ARC team. It was very insightful to see what other members on the team were working on. It was also a good opportunity to meet new people and get to know the kind of path they took to get to this position, as someone unsure of what they want to do, it was insightful to hear that everyone came from different pathways, and the advice most prevalent was to just focus on what I enjoy,
  • On Wednesday, I was fortunate to attend a whole day workshop on command line and Git. It helped me really understand the commands and what Git actually is. I left understanding each command that I was previously just copy and pasting in, aswell and understanding what exactly vs code is and its role in the industry. It was a very insightful day and I’m happy I was given the opportunity to join this session
  • On Thursday, I was given a tour around Here East. This might have been the biggest highlight of this week, as i started to realise my interest in robotics. We were given a tour by Mickey, who specialises in robotics and so as he took us around the building, I was able to get a breakdown of the different projects going on and a breakdown of the robots and various buzzwords such as kinematics, control theory, computer vision and tools such as IMU for drones or machines such as a Stewart platform. Seeing the implementations of maths and computer science was quite amazing and I’m glad I was given the opportunity to view this as it’s become another field that I’m interested in. After the tour of Here East, we made our way to UCL East, where we given the opportunity to explore the campus in the form of a scavenger hunt, this was quite an interactive way to get us used to the campus and find out stuff we may not have known about UCL beforehand.

Overall, this past week has been quite insightful as I learn new concepts and skills that will hopefully stick with me for life