🎶 Country roads
Take me home
To the place
I belong
West Virginia
Mountain Momma
Take me home
Country Roads 🎶

In this song, Country roads == Open source; Home == Outreachy + Fedora family; Mountain == humongous amount of knowledge I gained.

The last 3 months of my life have not been a breeze, they’ve been a whirlpool and I have been in the exact centre of it! I was finishing tasks as and when they came, was meeting new people almost everyday, all while away in a new city….

But the moment I used to open libmodulemd’s Github and log into IRC, I felt at home.

I started as a self doubting kid and I’m going away as a confident, full-of-dreams kid. Outreachy has made me CAPABLE. I no longer use clip-on wings, because I’ve grown a pair (and that too very shiny ones)! There are a lot of Open Source programs out there, but NONE of them compare to Outreachy for me. Not even GSoC. Every single thing I did in this internship was purely out of passion and the will to get better holistically. I wanted to write blogs, chat with mentors, learn new technology, and network with people.

AND OUTREACHY MADE SURE I DID. They:

1. Sent regular bi-weekly email prompts to write blogs which also provided fantastic topics + tips to write blogs on.

2. Had assignments for mentors too! They DEFINITELY wanted us to fully squeeze this opportunity and enable us in every way possible.

3. Held regular Outreachy chats including all participants, mentors, and alumni on topics like: career, project progress, making connections, etc.

4. I recently heard someone stating that GSoC is where all the “real talent” is, and Outreachy is mere “spoon-feeding”. Yes, I’ve had my mentor walk me through some really tough roadblocks, and yes he has reviewed my code thoroughly at all times. But THAT’S NOT SPOON-FEEDING. That’s just good mentorship (thank you, Sir!). Outreachy projects are perfect for 3-month internships! They’re a right balance of researching and implementation. And FYI, MANY Outreachy projects are ALSO GSoC projects WITH THE SAME SET OF MENTORS!

5. Finally, provide a $500 travel stipend that you could use for conferences and tech events.

I’ll admit I was quite apprehensive how I could possibly manage to dole out “significant” code when I had absolutely no internship experience before. I thought I’d have to work day and night because the concept of a “remote” internship was new to me. Thankfully, Outreachy was super flexible and not hectic at all! I used a MAMMOTH amount of concepts:

1. Object C
2. Unit testing in Python and Object C
3. Dockers
4. Still learning Python Mocks 😜
5. Git Rebase!! (This one was amazing xD)
6. Python Babel
7. Fedora tools like Modularity, Zanata, Koji Builds
8. IRC 😂

My project was divided into 3 major tasks and 1 stretch goal. And I can proudly say that I have completed all the 3 major tasks during my internship period! The library “Modulemd Translation Helpers” is fully functional but just needs a little extra push to make it deployable. I:

1. Converted a Modulemd Index object into Babel Catalogs.
2. Converted translated Catalogs to translation documents and added them back to Index object.
3. Integrated the Koji Build System for dynamic flow of metadata

Now we’re only left to inject this new index object metadata into existing YAML by the use of an OS compose tool called Pungi. Hence then these translations will be avalaible to all Fedora users!

Still, the MOST AMAZING thing that has happened with me during this internship was my visit to Flock to Fedora at Budapest, Hungary and present all of this work as part of the Summer Coding Showcase.

I met my mentor Stephan Gallagher and we chatted on almost everything! I met people from Panama, Czech Republic, Mexico, USA, India (obviously :P), China, Nicaragua and so many more and I discussed everything that happens there and how its different than my culture. We talked tech and how we could improve it further for people, not just pertaining to Red Hat or Fedora. I attended so many talks and workshops related to Translations, Internationalization (I20N), Modularity, and Red Hat. I also witnessed a MIND_BLOWING CANDY SWAP where people got different kinds of candies from their countries!

Just when you thought you couldn’t possibly do EVERYTHING in 3 months, WELL I JUST DID! It’s time to move further and take these experiences with me. Its time to make those shiny wings multi-coloured 🌞