Final Outreachy Blog

My Outreachy Internship officially came to an end this past week. It has been an interesting experience.

My biggest fear going into the internship was being overwhelmed by the work, not being able to keep up with the expectations of me, and ultimately quitting. This happened at some point but I believed on the days I felt like quitting, I was going to just show up, and it worked. I also spoke to my mentor when I felt stuck and felt I was not making any progress.

Looking back, my core values helped me stay true to my course. I stated in my original post my core values; Authenticity, Optimism, and Learning. Being authentic in all my interactions, clearly communicating expectations and milestones. Remaining Optimistic regardless of how long I was stuck or far behind I felt I was. At every point I had new information to digest, I realized the more I learned, the more I realized I had to learn.

A super amazing thing that happened during my internship was getting positive feedback on solutions I came up with myself. Before this experience, I always believed in following the rules, this experience showed when It comes to finding solutions, you can create the rules. Every solution to every problem has not been created yet. You can create your solutions and document them so others can learn.

This especially increased my confidence in making open source contributions, it showed me that opinions matter, my perspective is unique and might just be what is needed. I acquired brand new technical skills during my internship; Technical documentation, Quality Assurance, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, Containers, and Container Orchestration tools. I also learned how to diversify and learn based on the problems I want to solve. Instead of learning what is trending. Now I figure out what problem I want to solve, carry out research on what tool will be perfect for solving that problem then solve the problem using that tool.

I grew in communication skills. I learned how to advocate for myself and my work, and how to reach out to people who can help me.

I completed my original project, which was writing tests for the ChRIS_ui, I modified it based on my skillset and the time available. I am glad I did that because it helped manage expectations. I also documented the process so anyone working on it will find it quite easy to build on it. I plan on writing more tests for more workflows. For my technical documentation project, I documented my process and made sure it was replicate able. I also wrote about possible errors and what they could mean. For this project, I plan on editing the CSS of the documentation so it will have a more polished look.

My Outreachy Internship taught me the power of collaboration and now it is my favorite thing to do. Problems can be solved in half the time if another set of eyes looks at them. I enjoyed the Outreachy Internship and I will advise anyone looking for an opportunity to learn and grow in the Open Source community to give it a shot regardless of your background or tech experience.