Toward Open-Source thru Outreachy

Who am I and What is Outreachy:

Hi there! First thing first, I am Sulagna from Bangladesh (Helloo! So excited you are here). I am a rising third-year international student in an undergrad institution called Mount Holyoke College, MA, USA. I care about collaboration, growth, and sustainability. I consider myself a learning machine who constantly look around the environment with an open mind to learn something new.

I am here to talk about Outreachy — maybe…a little about Open Source too. Outreachy provides remote and paid internships in open-source and open science. It provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technology industry where they are living. It does not care about where you are from and what age you are of.

And I am interning at Wikimedia Foundation through Outreachy this summer - working on writing a ruby gem library for analyzing Wikidata edits.

I am excited to share my journey toward it today! Everyone’s journey can end up being quite different.

Struggles to start open-sourcing:

What attracted me to Open-Source? The simplest answer is the word “Open” and collaboration. I learned about Open Source in a youtube video and was always eager about it. Throughout my up-down relationship with Computer Science, contribution to open-source was always back in my mind. But I was lacking the activation energy to narrow down to the question “How ” and “Where”. I sat down once or twice just to search for a project but never could create a commitment to start contributing for either I don’t know/understand 1% of what’s happening or I can’t find a consistent schedule with my other commitments on my plate.

Outreachy was the source of my motivation toward finding the “How” and “Where”

I applied to Outreachy in early January after I saw the initial application was open on LinkedIn. I wrote about the underrepresentation of girls like me involved in tech from my home area as well as the underrepresentation of people with the same identities as me involved in tech from my college. I wrote my authentic answers straight-cut and to the point.

Around Early March, I hear back about the initial round result! I was excited and at the same time, very confused about how my contribution period will go. For the first few days, I was asking myself why I did not start contributing earlier! I had other commitments going on, so I decided to set out 1 hour every day to sit for contribution - strictly 1 hour: not thinking about anything else, just for the sake of learning.

At first, I looked at what are my current skills and values, then I sat down and shortlisted the projects which at least use the tech stack I know. I learned about Ruby on Rails in a computer science course and React Js in a hackathon project before. WikiEducation Dashboard uses both of them. As well as “Open Education for all” is what I am always motivated to work for. Another project I was looking at is Mojaglobal which works with the environment but I did not feel confident in my Python and Data analysis skills. I decided to go on with only one project throughout the whole contribution period - the project I am currently interning for.

Contribution period with Wikimedia:

I had to struggle with setting up the development environment for a couple of days. But instead of getting discouraged, I kept a log of every error I faced and the steps that worked for me. Even though I did not understand where in the actual code I can contribute, my first Pull Request was about updating the set-up documentation. When the first PR got merged, I was so happy!

I enjoyed asking questions over Slack and getting help from the community. I asked which beginner-friendly issue would be helpful for me to work on and focused on solving one problem at a time. I read the previous comments and the file changed to get an idea of how previous newcomers contributed. In a large codebase, it’s hard to even find the file I want to start working on - that’s why looking at previous similar contributions helps a lot!

I tried researching the project and learn as much as I can before creating the final proposal. Previously accepted proposals are best to learn the structure. Also, ChatGPT helped me too in all my questions related to specific coding practices I was not aware of.

After the contribution period ended, I was not confident about me getting into the internship. All I knew was I gave my best. I kept looking for other opportunities for the summer. But on May 4th, I got the email that I got the internship! And that’s the best news ever.

Conclusion:

Currently, I am working on my project and really enjoying the process of it. I am extremely grateful to my mentors (Sage and Will) who are there to support me throughout the process. Shashwat and Amineh are contributing as a part of Google Summer of Code at Wikimedia too with the help of Sage; I look forward to sharing my progress with all of them every week and asking questions whenever I am stuck. Last but not least, thank you for reading my blog!