My second blog during Outreachy:
Hello Everyone! It's almost one month into the Outreachy program and contributing to the Apache Airflow project. I am working as an intern for Apache Airflow and contributing to "Rewrite Breeze environment from bash to Python". Time flies so quickly and I still feel there is a long way ahead of me to learn and do more contributions to Apache Airflow. I take this blog writing activity as my time to reflect on my past one-month experience. I had great learning in this one month and a lot of struggles too.
- Technical Struggles:( Learnings actually): I had learned about using Python Click, Shell tab completion, Python dataclass, Pathlib, Rich console. Definitely learning by doing is more intense and interesting. While few of them felt like struggle rather than learning as I was blocked while solving issues in it. My mentors were very helpful in giving me direction, pointed me to the right resources at right time. They made me feel comfortable in asking my doubts. Without their support, it would have taken a long time to decipher on my own. Looking back at my learning, I feel confident and happy about it. Reaping the success of these technical struggles is so satisfying. I am looking forward to more such technical struggles.
Communication: This is an important key to succeed in Open source contribution. Putting down my thoughts, writing down my doubts, and asking relevant questions in Github tasks, helps me to be very clear in my head. This is a more important lesson that I learned in 2021. Contributing code is not merely about writing instructions in a programming language, it's more about interactions happening around the task, going through several rounds of conversation, and making a clear decision before writing actual code. Like one of my mentors has pointed
Code is often a liability, not an asset(github.com/apache/airflow/pull/20066#issuec..). We have weekly meetings and during one of the calls, we discussed Git rebase. This is something I didn't understand for a long time, faced issues when trying and I thought I could learn on my own. But after that call, I understood it would have taken a very long time for me to figure out about git rebase on my own. My goodness, we had that discussion after one of the interns asked about it( Thanks Edith! ). It's then I realized why it's very important to bring up the doubts in a meeting without keeping it to myself and thinking I could do it on my own.Self-doubts: After 1 month into my project, I still have a lot of self-doubts about whether I am capable of doing the task. This gets bigger when I am stuck with an issue. One thing that helped me to cope up with this self-doubt is reassuring words from my mentor. Getting assurance from my mentor that I am going on the right path is all I need on some bad days. Looking back at the almost completed task, it's not just a task but also I have won over my self-doubts to reach that.
Balancing game: Having a balance between work and family time is one of my struggles too. Sometimes I had to work for a longer time to solve my issues, but my baby and family keeps me occupied. That's a guilt trip running between work and family. Striking the balance between work and family was not very easy for me. Sometimes I work less to take care of my baby, other times I work at odd times to finish my task. I am still learning this art of balancing and hope to learn this art. But it seems like a never-ending learning process. :)
- Few things I am more excited about: When I write this blog, I got my first PR merged into Apache/Airflow during my internship. Though I struggle in different aspects, rewards like seeing my PR getting merged keep me going. I am also excited to work along with people from different parts of the world, collaborating with them, managing to work across different timezones. One important thing that I learned through all my struggles this time is consistency in trying to learn. Not to give up my learning if I am set back by struggles.
I will write down more about my experience in the Outreachy program in upcoming blogs. Wish me good luck for more PR's to get merged :) Wishing you the best for the things you are learning and doing too!