Week 1

Olá!, Welcome! I'm Naomi and this is my blog as an Outreachy intern working with Wikimedia (under Wikimedia Movimento Brasil (WMB)) for the June to August 2025 internship round, and in this post, I will be sharing a little about myself and my Outreachy journey.

My first introduction to Outreachy was in 2022 when I started my transition to tech from a non-tech background, I tried applying but never made it past the initial application stage. Then between 2023 and 2024, I applied thrice, and in those times, I once got past the initial application, but when I saw the tasks for contribution phase, I panicked and felt that the projects were too hard, so I didn't attempt them, and another time, after I contributed, I still was not picked. But in 2025, after applying for the 6th time, I passed both initial application and contribution phase. Now you may wonder why I kept applying all this time?

It was because I had seen the impact Outreachy has both in the tech ecosystem and also in the career growth of individual interns, and I wanted to be a part of that, for myself and my career too, and that was what motivated me to keep going. During contribution period, I especially enjoyed applying to Wikimedia because the programming languages required by the project were languages I had some experience with already, plus I could see and understand how my work(if selected) would affect the Lusophone community using Wikimedia. Outreachy preaches inclusion and Wikimedia Movimento Brasil (WMB) makes sure that the Lusophone community gets the information on Wikimedia correctly translated into Portuguese, especially as they are not native English speakers. So I felt that my work would directly affect a very specific group of people and that was a big deal for me.

One thing I learned during contribution phase was to stick to project specifications. If a project says to do "xyz", I should first make sure that "xyz" are correctly done before I trying to do anything else on the task.

My proudest contribution would be the fact that on the Wikimedia tasks, after doing them, I was able to write tests for them and still write short notes on my GitHub, explaining both what my codes and tests do, so that even someone relatively new who finds my GitHub can actually have an idea of what my contribution and the task is about.

In the weeks to come, I expect to contribute significantly to the Wikimedia community, write code that solves problems listed on the Lusophone wishlist, improve significantly in my code reading, writing and understanding, and in my problem solving skills too, and in summary learn more to add to what I already know, so that I also in the not too distant future, will be able to provide mentorship for someone who is still finding their feet in the tech space.