I'm in a Better Headspace

It’s been quite a while since I’ve last written an article because well life happens. As encouraged by Outreachy, I had 3 informal chats with 3 very wonderful people this week.

After reading about Manaswini Das in this interview, a software engineer that has worked at RedHat for 5+ years, I was intrigued and as such, I sought out to send an email for an informal chat. Soon enough she replied and I had my first chat scheduled for Wednesday. We discussed about a whole lot of things, how to traverse life after Outreachy, what it takes to be a good software engineer and she kindly reviewed my resume too.
She highlighted how generalization instead of specialization is an asset to myself and a lot of companies given you have your fundamentals strong. She illustrated this with an example of being like water in a cup that when poured into another vessel, is able to take its shape. I learnt a lot from her experience and will no doubt benefit from having my resume reviewed by such an experienced engineer. Thank you Manaswini!
A little tidbit - She once highlighted the lack of (female) role models in the technological industry a few years back and while that is still prevalent today, I think it’s safe to say she is already one with the impact she has made and continues to make!✨

The next chat I had was on Thursday with Dustin Mitchell, a long time open source contributor with over 15 years of experience that now works at Google. One of the first questions I asked him, was how he felt having been in the tech industry for decades - his GitHub squares have been consistently green since 2007. We also talked about how to contribute to multiple open source communities and I asked him for advice on setting up dev environments for different codebases.
We also had an interesting conversation about programming languages where I learnt that one possible metric to evaluating what is a ‘good’ programming language is how easy it lets programmers make mistakes. He shared some differences between working in open source projects and closed source ones (the usual corporate company) and how companies are more likely to build their own internal tools to do what we might say are simple tasks due to factors like better suitability and licensing conflicts.
At the end of our chat, I shared my interests in gardening with him and one of my favorite books ‘Heidi’. Thank you Dustin!

My final chat was with Ricardo Garcia, another long time open source contributor with 10+ years experience now working in an open source consultancy firm, Igalia. He works mainly with C++ and C, and I was excited to get his insights and advice as someone interested in low level programming. He shared resources on how to learn C and C++ with me and we also discussed the popular youtube-dl project which he was the initial author and maintainer of from 2006-2011. He stated how the project was borne out of him having a slow internet connection and he wanted to be able to download videos to watch them later and then it grew to be really popular.
He also briefly highlighted Test driven development (TDD) concepts and how different codebases have their own testing standards and frameworks. It was a very interesting chat and one of my takeaways is that I can literally just publish code under free licenses and bam, it’s open source. Thank you Ricardo!

A general question I asked all of them was ‘What makes a good software engineer/developer?’ and a recurring point was the ability to learn new technologies fast and write high quality code in terms of readability, scalability and testability. They also all highlighted the importance of making connections and networking within the open source space and encouraged me to reach out if I had any more enquiries.

Adding my experience with my mentor, Sage Ross and the invaluable advice I got, I feel way more confident about life after Outreachy and my career as a software Engineer. I’m looking forward to see how far I can go! 🚀