Outreachy report #10: June 2020
June was a surprisingly good month—it’s been great to witness the growth of our interns every two weeks when we sit down to talk to each other. They are always very kind and eager to learn and to share, so it’s really reinvigorating to pass time with them. It makes me reconnect to the person I was during my own Outreachy internship—and, in retrospect, be amazed by own past work whenever I need to help someone by referencing it.
I’ve been working more closely with Sage to address a few gaps we have related to feedback. They’ve opened issue #390 in response to a few concerns I raised after hearing about the experiences of one of our former interns.
As Sage works to solve some technical debt we have, I’ve been focusing a lot of my time to exploring the results of our 2019 longitudinal survey. There’s a lot of interesting data to unveil—data that, I hope, will help us improve a multitude of processes inside Outreachy. It turns out that the timing for improving processes and documentation is perfect—we’ve been getting some very interesting feedback from current and former interns. Even better, we have a lot of data available to guide our decisions and work towards improving Outreachy just in time for the next round. 🎉
Lastly, I’ve been preparing for a presentation I’ll give this Saturday about making your first contribution to open source projects. I’m going to present that at the III Workshop ADAs — Mulheres conectADAs, an online conference organized by a group of women in technology in my faculty, and it will be streamed live on my faculty’s YouTube channel. I’m hoping this will introduce Outreachy to a larger audience and encourage more people from my state (and maybe even from Brazil as a whole) to apply.