Alex Au's Feedback on Developer Test

Feedback

• I felt unclear based on the instructions about what I was doing exactly and what the final product is:

 - What is an XYZ cube? (Is that a made-up name or is it a standard thing)
 - Are there supposed to be bolts in all corners of the cube? (most videos only show 1 bolt going in the cube)
 - Do the bolts need to be capped with a nut? (most videos don’t do this either)

This kind of uncertainty worried me that I was doing unnecessary work.

• Although the tutorials 1 & 2 give a nice overview of FreeCAD tools, I felt uncertain about best approaches to doing the work. I think there should be videos with more explicit walk-throughs of how to think about the work. For example:

 - When you move a tube into place, use the Plane selection to constrain the movement to a particular plane
 - What are the different approaches to moving tubes into the right spot?  What are their pros and cons?
 - To secure a nut, you can select the outer edges that form a point and move it touching the wall, after you have done an axial constraint and plane constraint for the movement.
 - Why do the tubes shift in place when a bolt is put into a hole sometimes? How do you avoid this from happening?

I think a step-by-step of the cube construction in FreeCAD would help people learn the tool significantly faster by contextualizing how to use the tools. This could mean more people finishing the developer test and becoming OSE developers.

• In general, I’m still unclear on exactly what the nature of the work is as an OSE developer, though I’ve read a lot about it and completed an entire test to qualify as an OSE developer. For example:

 - What are the range of research tasks?
 - How much time is spent in FreeCAD vs. other activities?
 - How are product improvements made?
 - How much work gets done in a 40 hour period by 1 person?
 - What skills do I develop when learning to do this work? How long will that take? In what ways can these skills be applied elsewhere?
 - What are the pre-requisite skills for doing this work?

Have a more clear picture of this would contextualize the purpose of doing the FreeCAD developer test and be more motivating because the path can be imagined in greater detail.