[Outreachy reports] · February 1, 2021 · 5 min read

Outreachy report #17: January 2021

Preparing to work more hours

I’ve been increasing my participation in Outreachy activities in antecipation of my new contract. With great access privileges come great reponsibilities, so Sage and I have been making some preparations.

I’m now an active participant in the website development, taking some smaller tasks to get used to any changes that happened since my first introduction to the web system:

• Task #1: I submitted a pull request addressing a dependency issue I mentioned in a previous report. In short, psycopg2 needs a few PostgreSQL libraries to be installed to be able to compile when running pipenv install. Each Linux distribution has a naming scheme for development packages, which may confuse a lot of people following our documentation. To save them time, I used GNOME Boxes to create a clean installation of three most popular distributions from different families (Arch Linux, Fedora and Ubuntu) to clone our Git repository, try to install every package mentioned and see what kind of errors pipenv would return me. I found every missing package name and edited our README to include more universal instructions and avoid a psycopg2 build failure.
• Task #2: We want to move our blog post prompts from our periodic email communications to our internship guide. That task involves (1) finding every file containing an email related to the blog prompts (2) translating the text in those messages into HTML (3) adding them to our internship guide (4) editing the original messages to add their URLs and test them. I’ll submit a pull request with those changes soon.
• Task #3: Add a section to the internship guide about internet censorship. The Ugandan government blocked social media websites during their elections and that prevented one intern from doing their normal activities. We want interns to be prepared for the possibility of internet censorship, and invited community members to discuss those issues on Zulip and GitHub. I’ve started a draft locally but haven’t figured out yet how to push commits to a draft pull request by another user (or if it’s even possible to do something like that).

Sage and I also started a routine of daily stand-up meetings that mirror those of Conservancy. In preparation for Conservancy’s stand ups, Sage registers on Zulip everything they did the day before, things they’re doing the current day and any blockers they may have. I follow the same format and we discuss anything we may need to discuss immediately.

Adding daily stand-ups to my routine has helped me immensely:

1. I feel more included now that I have someone to talk to daily. As someone that has grown accustomed to working alone with very rare interactions throughout the week, it feels great to share my struggles and successes as they happen and to hear the same thing from someone else. It reminds me I have a work colleague working on the same problems as I am, and that we can always count on each other to solve any stumbling blocks.
2. It helps me keep daily notes on every single task I completed or am working on, which assists me to write this report. I no longer have to remember what I did 30 days ago on my own – I have notes to remind me of that (and keep precious storage in my brain to more important things).
3. It creates an event to build a routine around in one of the most difficult times in my life. I wake up motivated to work and to share that I’m making a lot of progress on a particular task, and I know that if there’s anything I can’t understand or find, I can share it soon instead of waiting for the next face-to-face meeting.

Initial applicantions

Initial applications opened today. This will be my first round with a more active role in reviewing initial applications¹, depending less on Sage to perform small changes that may delay the approval of an application. We both agreed to start a “pair reviewing” moment in our weekly meetings to help each other with applications we’re stuck with.

Livestream with Peixe Babel

Peixe Babel offered their platform to host a chat with me, Clarissa Borges (past Outreachy and Google Summer of Code intern with GNOME) and Juliana Fajardini (current OISF/Suricata intern) about Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. This has been the most watched livestream I participated in with 1,400+ views so far and many people reaching out to ask questions after it went live. Peixe Babel creators are extremely kind and have been really helpful with Outreachy promotion.

Another direct consequence of a livestream I’ve participated in is connecting LKCAMP with Linux Kernel coordinators. They expressed interest in helping their community on Outreachy when I talked to them back in November, and last month I took the initiative to make that connection happen.

Sage suggested, as a future goal, to host our own livestreams with Outreachy coordinators, mentors, interns and alums. That’s something that I really want to pursue, but we still need to verify how feasible that would be.