14th of August marks the end of my Outreachy Internship with Mozilla. During this short 3 months, I have learnt a lot about how to network, code, write blogs ;), and generally how to engineer better. It is truly an experience I will cherish. Thanks to my wonderful mentors, Dustin, Eli, and Hassan for picking me among all other competitive participants and for all the guidance throughout the project workflow despite the huge time zone differences, the project won’t be a success without you guys.
It’s been more or less a week since the last day of my Outreachy internship. Reflecting back, I had never once imagined working with awesome bunch of people. I loved everything about my simple, beginner friendly project, Codetribute, Mozilla, Firefox and most of all, my amazing mentors and the people at Mozilla, so much so that I plan to just hang around as a volunteer even after my internship ended.
I feel like I gained a lot from this internship. I learned how to collaborate with others on a large open source project during the application period, learned how to write code with good practices, learned to google issues, and most importantly, I learned not to be afraid to ask questions, thanks to my mentors who were super patient and very kind to me. Having mentors like that and being able to learn by asking any questions I had, without any fear of judgement, is what I liked most about my internship.
While it was my Outreachy application and project that introduced me to things mentioned above and taught me how to be a good contributor, I believe it was what I choose to do after my internship ended, that will expand my education. I would like to contribute during my free time, after settling down to my new workplace, Shopee.
I have also received tons of questions through FB, Instagram, Linkedin, and emails about Outreachy, my technical skills level when I apply, how to start, what project to choose, and what criteria they use for selection. Thus, I decided to create a separate blogpost for it in the form of an Q & A while I still remember all those details. But still, I believe nothing beats checking their site regularly as it contains the most updated information (at least more updated than mine) about the administration process.
Anyway, if you are interested to apply for Outreachy, start early! Visit this Codetribute site, find issue to work on, introduce yourself, and ask to have the issue assigned to you! All the best! Ping me if you need help setting up Git, I will try my best 🙂
Before I end my post here, I’d also like to extend my thanks to the organizers of the Outreachy Program, the Outreachy coordinators at Mozilla (Lizz and Dustin) and friends who encouraged me to apply. Thank you!