Last Tuesday was the last day of my Outreachy internship :(

Beginning

It all started last December. I was at the Recurse Center when Sonali told me about the project. At first I was sure I was not good enough to contribute to a real-life Open Source project, I shouldn’t even bother trying. But I was at the RC, which means I had a great support network and I was able to talk with Sumana about my doubts. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like:

• What if it takes more time to mentor me to fix a bug then to just fix the bug directly?

• Mentors know what they are signing up for and they think it is worth it. They think of it as part of their long-term investment in the project.

I decided I should at least try to contribute once, and after weeks of window shopping for bugs in Bugs Ahoy I finally got started.

A-team

I felt very welcomed on the a-team. No one asked for my credentials, no one assumed I was not able to code (even when I made mistakes or asked silly questions!).

Everyone was very nice with me and they helped me whenever I needed it: I was mentored by jmaher, ahal and armenzg on different bugs. mcote, camd, emorley, jfrench, Kwierso and mdoglio helped me with PRs. RyanVM and jgraham gave very useful feedback about mozci. ekyle helped me get started with ActiveData. vaibhav1994 and chmanchester helped with mozci. And there are a lot of people with which I didn’t work directly but that were very nice to me whenever I interacted with them.

For the past months, the #ateam IRC channel was my office and reading the conversations made me happy, whether they were about techinical issues, the weather, cricket or anything in between.

Internship

I knew the team was very nice, but I wasn’t expecting my mentor to be so awesome. armenzg helped me so much: he gave me fun projects that helped me grow, he arranged for me to go to Toronto, he guided me whenever I felt lost, he trusted I would be able to finish projects completely outside my comfort zone, he arranged for me to give a presentation (achievement unlocked: I have my own AirMozilla URL). Having a mentor I could trust made the whole internship a much better experience.

I followed maja_zf’s advice and kept a daily log of my internship. Now I can look back at what I did. It was an amazing Winter!

tags : Mozilla