Skip to main content

Wrapping Up Internship

Wrapping up internship ... Unwrapping Contribution

The one fear I had about the internship was not making it past the first month. Not only did this not come true but I made it till the end of the internship. The amazing thing that happened during the internship was the sudden boost in my self-esteem.

Outreachy internship helped me improve on my communication skills through my mentors; who are my accountability buddies and managers. It was easy to communicate progress, blockers, and feedback. The internship helped grow my debugging and problem-solving skills through blockers.😅 I always tried debugging issues while awaiting help from my mentors. I would go ahead with other tasks and take short breaks to debug...see if I'd catch something new.☺My coding skills did improve as well, through study (code learning and online learning) and practice. My mentors also had me explain my code sometimes to be sure that I understood what I was writing.

My Outreachy mentors helped me get help in situations where what I needed was not their specialization. They helped improve my writing and coding skills. I learned accountability while working with them. I picked up some tricks on replying to emails as well.😁 Outreachy helped build my confidence in making open source and free software contributions through the opportunity and platform to contribute to a project. I was able to publish 9 articles and cultivated the habit of scribbling ideas/notes on articles. I was able to cover 11 parameters(with many test cases) for integration tests for the API. 9 out of these changes have been merged as of today.😎

The next step for me is to continue with my contribution to the tests and pick up other tasks when I am done. I also intend to apply as an Outreachy mentor within the month. More to come

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Entangled Strings - Some JavaScript wisdom for when you get entangled

I get these Strings entangled sometimes. You gotta know your stuff well enough to speak to computers these days. They don't argue with you. They just do as you type, maybe say in some cases. Let us debug 👩🏽‍🔧 str.charAt(index) !== str[index] in some cases and here's why: str.charAt(index) returns "" if no character is found at the given index BUT str[index] returns undefined instead. Do you even know what to do when you find me? This never logs because I am at position 0 and that's falsy . All you had to do was check for negative vibes. Now, you know I only do positive vibes yea?😏 Let's try this again. We found her! This logs because I check for negativity   instead. Using  str.indexOf(searchValue)   means to expect -1 when the search value is not found or a value >= 0 when it is found. Now, I know you heard stuff about  str.substring(2) === "POSSIBLE" being true. Yes, POSSIBLE is in fact a substring of IMPOSSIBLE. He...

Experiences applying to Outreachy

Guess what! You are not the only anxious one! Applying to  Outreachy  was challenging for me too. I enjoy learning. I was motivated to apply because I saw an opportunity to grow while working on products that are in use by hundreds of thousands of people. I was hell-bent on participating. "We help newcomers to Free and Open Source Software" - this sentence caught my attention on the application page . The thought of making contributions to projects in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities got me excited. Ask! Times when you are not so sure, are great for questions. So are times when you do not even have clues of what you are to do. Ask questions when in doubt. That way, you don't spend too much time in the "Confused" state.  Google  (or any other search engine)  is your friend. Make out time to interact with it. Also, make it a habit to reach out to your mentors with updates, questions, and blockers. Outreachy accepts people who are new t...

Feedback makes the difference

COMMUNICATE your opinions. Feedback is someone giving their opinion(s)  on what you are doing or have done. Feedback is used as a basis for improvement. Some go further to tell you what could be improved. Feedback is my sixth love language . I get feedback from friends, colleagues, mentors, bots, software applications and others. I request feedback of people I work with because I strongly believe it aids my growth . I also give feedback; pointing out the fact that the opinion is personal because different feedbacks(views) can be given on the same issue/scenario. This is why I refer to giving/receiving feedback as an exchange of personal opinions . I give constructive feedback. I prefer to get constructive feedback as it is specific, helps me understand what is to be improved on and what I already do well. Feedback goes a long way. During the  Facebook Mentoring program, my mentors gave feedback on my performance at the end of every session and I have improved on areas like...