Git Intern Week 12: Informal Chat With experience OpenSource and Software developers

For the past few weeks, as part of my Outreachy internship, I have had several interesting informal chats with some amazing and experienced Open Source and Software developers outside Git, where I am interning. I met Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez , who is the Coordinator of the GPU driver development team at Igalia, and Dustin Mitchell, who is currently a Software Developer at Google and also the creator of interesting Open Source projects like Taskwarrior and Taskchampion. I also met Tilda Udufo, an Outreachy organizer—someone whose emails I always look forward to reading.

I really enjoyed my chats with them and asked several questions, seeking advice about their experiences in Open Source. One thing they all had in common was their excitement about Open Source and their passion for contributing to it.

I asked Samuel about the impact of Artificial Intelligence in the engineering world and the possibility of it replacing engineers. One of his most interesting answers was when he told me about some of his work at Igalia, which involves reverse engineering—something that current AI would not be able to accomplish.

I asked Dustin for his take on the Rust programming language and why it is a good language to learn or use in a project. One highlight of our conversation was how Rust could potentially reduce memory issues, which are common in languages like C and C++. However, he also pointed out the difficulties involved in interfacing Rust with common systems that use C or C++.

Tilda did a very good job of explaining how she manages to juggle multiple activities and projects. One interesting point she mentioned was the importance of knowing how to prioritize effectively when involved in many projects or activities.

They were all fascinating people, and I really enjoyed my time discussing with them.

My Internship Update

The patches for my project have been completely merged into the Git master branch. You can check them out here: Git commits. You can also follow the discussion on the Git mailing list here: Git mailing list.

Although I have completed my internship project, I will continue contributing to Git. I am already working on other tasks, such as removing the the_repository global variable. You can find the discussion on my patch on the Git mailing list here as well: Git mailing list.

P.S.: I took the above picture with Samuel during our conversation. Besides being a maintainer of one of the Linux subsystems, he is also a big fan of Linux. It was fun meeting another Linux enthusiast!

Thank you, and see you next week!