Outreachy report #15: November 2020
Mentor interviews
I emailed our mentors mailing list looking for volunteers in October. In the following days, I received 15 requests of interviews but ended up interviewing only 8 mentors on calls over Google Meet and Jitsi, synchronous chats on Zulip and assynchronous email exchanges.
The duration of calls varied from 8 minutes to over an hour depending on how busy that mentor was that day. Synchronous chats on Zulip would usually take an hour to complete, and email exchanges could take over a week. I had the opportunity to ask them about their past professional experiences, whether they’ve been mentored themselves or not, what kind of involvement they have with their communities, what led them to start mentoring and to Outreachy especifically, and so on.
Since I had no prior experience in interviewing people, this task required some trial and error in the first few interviews to calibrate my expectations, my questions, my pace and my interviewing technique. On the bright side though, such practice would come in handy in one of the live events I participated later this month.
Overall, it was a really positive experience and it definitely made me feel closer to the community Outreachy has built over the years. One really important lesson I’ve learned from my interviews is that it’s fundamental to contextualize your interviews to your interviewees. In this case, I would take some time in the beginning of the interview to tell mentors about Outreachy’s long-term goals, what kind of data I was expecting to collect during my interviews and why. I would tell them who would have access to their answers and in what terms. Mentors told me they really appreciated this kind of transparency.
Dependency exploration
In my first attempts to build our website locally I was using a beta version of Fedora 33. Unfortunately, since Fedora updated several packages, I would get some errors related to dependencies of dependencies I didn’t have the time to solve. I temporarily switched to an Ubuntu machine to successfully build the website for the first time in October, leaving a possible dependency investigation to some time in the future.
After taking a good look at the errors pipenv was throwing at me, I discovered that Pillow wasn’t Python 3.9 ready yet. A quick search led me to Fedora’s documentation on how to install multiple Python interpreters, and installing python38 solved all the issues I was facing. I’m planning to submit a version of our README.md with instructions on how to install dependencies on other Linux distributions soon.
Promotion
I participated in two livestreams this month:
- Afinal, o que é esse tal de software livre? @ Casa Hacker. Caio Volpato and I aimed to create a beginner-friendly discussion about the many aspects of free software and open source (philosophical differences, financing models, contribution paths).
- Outreachy, com Anna e só, Clarissa e Gabriela @ LKConf. LKCAMP invited me both as a host and interviewee to talk about Outreachy (past, present and future) with two other former Outreachy interns: Clarissa Borges (GNOME) and Gabriela Bittencourt (Linux Kernel).
Intern selection
I assisted Sage in the final steps of the intern selection process: checking their eligibility once more, making sure we were keeping track of every community, and so on.