Hi everyone! It's me again, your favourite Outreachy blogger. This time, I'm going to talk about my struggles during the Outreachy application and contribution phase with the hope to encourage you to never give up without trying.
How I struggled during the Outreachy application period
In my previous post, I talked about how I got to know about Outreachy and applied for it. I never really talked in-depth about what I struggled with during my application process.
Essays and writing generally have never really been my thing but the application phase was all about it. I had to read through a lot of articles online and also, I had to think really hard about how the essay questions were related to my life experience. After preparing a draft of what I was going to write, I applied for the internship. The waiting period wasn't easy. I was scared that I might not be picked because thousands of people apply every round and the probability of me being chosen was extremely low.
But viola, at the end of the day, I was chosen. Yahh! My joy that day was enormous.
How I struggled during the Outreachy contribution phase
After my application was approved, another hurdle came which was how to pick projects to contribute to. I looked through all the projects that I felt I could make meaningful contributions to with my skills and I ended up picking Wagtail. That was the best decision I ever made. After picking a project, I tried to set up the Wagtail demo site on my computer but I experienced so many issues getting it to work. After so many tries, I reached out to the Wagtail community. The mentors and other Outreachy applicants were so helpful. We had meetings where I explained my issues and they were debugged. After a lot of trial and error, I finally got the Wagtail demo site to work.
Can you imagine if I hadn't reached out and asked questions but rather, decided on trying to fix everything myself? I'm very sure I would have been discouraged and might have probably given up on the internship. My advice to anyone reading this is, never stop trying in whatever you do. If you're stuck on something, reach out and ask your community questions. I'm sure you'll find someone that has a solution to that problem you're facing.
After setting up the Wagtail demo website successfully, another issue cropped up. I mean, this period was really hard for me. This was the point I asked myself questions on what issues I wanted to contribute to. I felt my skills weren't good enough to make any meaningful contribution and I had imposter syndrome.
There's this friend I have, he's my personal cheerleader. So I went to him and poured out my frustrations and fears and he was like;
Girl, what are you talking about? You've come this far and I'm not letting you give up now. You were selected out of thousands of applicants to move on to this stage. So my dear, you definitely have those skills. You can do it! Just start small then move on from there and remember, I'm always here for you!
We had a video call which allowed us to talk in-depth, we laughed, joked around and I showed him the available issues on the GitHub repo. He told me to start with the easy ones and when I'm more familiar with the code base, I can move on to more complicated ones.
So I took his advice and looked for something very simple and easy to do. I started off with something as simple as removing a dot from a line of code. I honestly can't put into words the amount of joy and excitement I felt when my first pull request (PR) was merged. After that, I moved on to fixing other issues that were still beginner friendly. Whenever I got stuck trying to understand something, I would always message the mentors or some of the friends I made during the contribution round.
Vocabulary learned during the contribution period
One thing I learned about during the contribution phase was unit testing with Jest. Unit testing is a way of testing small pieces or blocks of code to make sure that they are working correctly, such as functions, classes, methods, etc.
There was an issue that I worked on and I had to move a function from a core.js file into its own TypeScript file with the correct types. After doing that, unit testing was required to ensure that the function was working as expected.
That was the first time I had ever heard of that term. I was confused but as usual, I checked Google and watched videos on YouTube. The resources I was able to find were different from the use case I needed them for. So I chatted with the mentors and also asked for help from other Outreachy applicants I noticed worked on something similar and they shared resources with me. With the resources and different explanations, I was able to come up with a PR that was reviewed by the mentors. I was able to improve on that PR from the reviews the mentors gave. This was the major PR I made during the contribution phase and when I think back to it now, I'm happy with the fact that I didn't shy away from the challenges nor did I give up halfway. I still use that knowledge now because it's required in the project I'm working on.
My advice for anyone reading this is that everybody struggles. You are not alone. The most important thing is that you don't let it weigh you down or discourage you from whatever it is you're trying to achieve. Trust me, you'll be grateful that you didn't give up.
Thank you so much for reading!! I hope to see you in my next article!