[Outreachy reports] · May 2, 2022 · 3 min read

Outreachy report #32: April 2022

April was a much better month than March: I had my first planned vacation in years. I taught a lot and learned a lot too.

🏆 First-time achievements

I was in charge of many of the closing actions for the May 2022 application period: I emailed applicants about the final application deadline; I reminded mentors and coordinators of details of the intern selection period; I coordinated the manual submission of final applications with Omotola, our new community manager!

We announced our new community manager: We published a beautiful blog post welcoming Omotola Omotayo. I believe I speak for all of us when I say it’s very satisfying to see the results of almost 4 really intense months working on our hiring process!
Sage hosted training sessions on the Django Shell: Sage trained me on how to use our production server’s Django Shell. They showed me how to use our test server to reproduce a perfect copy of our production database, how to manually send hundreds of emails to applicants and how to make useful database queries. (It felt like watching a magician reveal their cool tricks! 🪄)
I hosted multi-subject training sessions: Omotola and I had multiple meetings for a couple of weeks to help her ramp up. We had training sessions on answering emails, invoicing community sponsors, submitting final applications manually, and many more. (She’s a fast and dedicated learner!)

We’re improving Outreachy’s work/life balance culture: Sage and I have been making arrangements to encourage and help everyone to take some time off work regularly. We experimented a little with Sage’s vacation on the week of April 17 and my vacation on the week of April 25.

Omotola, Sage and I chose a permanent meeting time: We struggled a little bit to find a good time for meetings in the first couple of weeks. After some adjustments, we found a time that wouldn’t require Sage to wake up too early in the morning and wouldn’t take any minute from our lunch hours.

I created a Documentation topic on our Organizers stream: It notifies everyone of any changes in our external or internal documentation and streamlines any discussions related to our docs. A specialized topic on Zulip reduces noise on other topics and helps us find any relevant information in the future.
I published new documentation entries: We now have documentation on how to write letters of participation, how to use Thunderbird and how to use Windows Subsystem for Linux!