Modifying Expectations

I am now past the mid-point of my internship and It's time to take a look back and access my progress so far. My original internship project outline had big plans. I truly thought I was going to come in fire blazing and shoot down all my goals with not a strand of hair out of place. A minute of silence for that.

For the first two weeks, I was just floating around doing a lot and somehow still getting nothing done. At some point, I legitimately considered quitting because I felt I was under qualified for the job, and other smarter, better candidates deserved the position. It took me a while to figure out how to get around the code base, how to execute my tasks, and how to ask for help when stuck.

My original project involved me picking a testing framework, writing unit tests and E2E tests, creating a new feature, and testing out that feature. So far I am very proud of my progress. I figured out the different types of testing frameworks that existed and picked one that fit my project's needs. I figured out how to write E2E tests and how to write GitHub actions for my tests. This was a herculean task for me. Writing out GitHub actions for my tests took a longer time than I anticipated. I assumed it was going to take about a day but it took me roughly a week. This was mainly because I had to include plugins in my actions which was a complex task for me.

If I could start the internship all over I will spend less time doubting myself and more time reading the documentation.

My plan for the next half of the internship is to start other projects that will build the skills I want to learn. As I have wrapped up my first project and my code has been merged, inserts dance emoji, I have the time to do this. Along the line picked up another project because I wanted to learn how to read and work with documentation. This project involved using tools I had never worked with before, Asciidoc and Antora. Along the line, I started collaborating with another intern from Red Hat on this project, and let me tell you, whoever discovered collaboration deserves a Nobel prize.

During the course of my internship, I figured I want to explore a career in DevOps and my next project reflects that. I am currently learning about Kubernetes and Open Shift while trying to create a developer's sandbox for our community to make it easier for contributors to set up and start contributing.

I am quite positive about this project because even though I am paying attention to the timeline, I am also trying my best to be thorough. I have learned how to learn by knowing that consistency breeds success, reading the documentation always helps and I know how to ask for help when stuck. Armed with these skills I believe anything can be done.