[Outreachy] Setting Out My Tech Career with Systemd
Chizoba ODINAKATable of contents
Hello World! I am Chizoba ODINAKA. I was a high school mathematics teacher, who is transitioning into a new career in tech. When I set out my tech career, learning how to program in ALX - a software engineering school, the concepts to learn were too much. Started out with procedural programming using C. Then there was functional and object oriented programming with Python, and JavaScript. And then SQL and No-SQL. At some point I asked a friend who is a software engineer, “at what point do I call myself a software engineer”, he responded, “when you get paid as one”. Until now, I never introduced myself as a software engineer, although I have built small applications with C, JavaScript, and Python. Today, I am a software engineer intern. I will be blogging about my internship with Software Conservancy working on a Systemd project, and this is my first of many blog posts to come. Welcome!
I first stumbled on the Outreachy website in December 2022. I had earlier applied to a Wikimedia internship opening that year, when I did not receive any feedback from Wikimedia, I was just searching the internet for any information on Wikimedia internship, when I came across a blog post written by an Outreachy alum, who had worked with Wikimedia. From there I learnt that I could actually intern with Wikimedia through Outreachy, I also came to know about Open source, and that there are other open source communities that I could actually intern with through Outreachy. This was the beginning of my journey with Outreachy, between then and now, I had written four Outreachy applications, I have been shortlisted for the contribution stage three times, twice of which I successfully contributed across three open source projects, Git, and LibreOffice for November 2024, and Systemd in March 2025. Since I was not a young graduate, and I had no prior experience in the tech sector, I knew that interning in any of those organizations listed in Outreachy would give my resume a boost, so I persisted with the process until it became a reality.
Contributing to Open source is a school on its own. When I contributed to the Git project last year, I remember one time I did about ten iterations with the community deciding what is the best heading for a commit message - one sentence, about seventy two characters, and about ten iterations. In the open source communities I had worked with via Outreachy, one thing I have noticed about maintainers and contributors alike, is how patient they are with newbies, like parents they carefully and patiently guide newbies like babies taking their first step.
some of my proudest contributions:
This list does not contain contributions made to Git and LibreOffice.
In the three months period of this internship, I will be working with my mentors on: systemd-analyze: improve support for live-debugging of services. My expectation is simple, I hope to acquire enough experience in this internship. Enough experiences to open up doors for my tech career.
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