Outreachy report #34: June 2022
June was one of the hardest months since I’ve joined the Outreachy team almost 4 years ago. It was the first time I’ve experienced the loss of a colleague—and Marina wasn’t just a colleague.
I keep feeling that words aren’t enough to express how much I own Marina and Outreachy for the life I now have. Before becoming an Outreachy intern, I struggled to find meaning in life; I had so many dreams, but it was hard to see myself achieving any of them. Being disabled (and, as I’d find out later, trans), I couldn’t see myself being successful in Mechanical Engineering, a degree I’d been pursuing for almost 4 years and a field so conservative and ableist I often felt like I didn’t belong.
Everything just clicked after I made my first contribution to a free and open source project, started my Outreachy internship and effectively started building a career in tech… And I’m sure I’m not the only person whose life Marina radically transformed into something better.
We miss her very much.
✨ Team highlights
- Omotola and I continued to host intern chats: Omotola has become an amazing host for our intern chats. She’s fantastic at figuring out the timing for specific questions and engaging our interns. She’s slowly becoming a point of reference in our community—more and more interns have been contacting her in search of support.
- Omotola and I reviewed Feedback #1: This is Omotola’s first intern feedback cycle. Sage and I trained Omotola on how to review feedback from mentors and interns, and Omotola and I shared the load of reviewing and following up with all feedback we received.
- Sage and Omotola responded to a concerning feedback: A mentor reported they were having problems communicating with an intern. This happened during my week off, so Sage and Omotola shared the load of contacting both mentor and intern to assess the situation. Omotola did amazing in her first incident response!
🔮 Improvements for the future
- We’re improving Outreachy’s resilience: Marina’s death impacted us deeply. It made us think of the many ways we can address Outreachy’s “bus factor”. In addition to that, we’re concerned about how we can make sure our team is notified by the right person if something happens to each of us. I had a talk with my partner on how he should proceed in that case, and I’m looking for a second emergency contact if something happens to both of us.
- I started using Outreachy as a subject for each one of my classes: I’m using our website’s architecture to create my Databases project, and I’ve started to use many of the tools and forms I was introduced to this semester to facilitate our team meetings. For example, I’m planning to use a script for requirements gathering interviews to understand our team’s perspective on the issues we face and the successes we share. They’ve been giving me a very good sense of clarity when investigating a problem and crafting a solution.