Heya reader! Welcome to the second blog post for the Outreachy series! This blog’s topic is “Everyone Struggles”. Why, you ask? ‘Cause we all do! I have more than 10 trucks full of relatable stories or things to say regarding this topic. (Yes, I struggle a lot in my tasks.) I have struggled in my academics, while programming, while learning any language (programming and non-programming) and, the list goes on.
But, instead of going through all my struggles and making this blog a novel, I will prefer to say one incident to show that not everyone’s perfect. 😉
Let’s take the example of the contribution period for the Outreachy internship and let’s begin from the very beginning. I got the email for qualifying the first stage and was elated. But what next? The participants were expected to go through the list of projects and select the ones they were the most interested in, and I was the girl who had just stepped foot into the open sourcing world. It was difficult. I seriously maintained a list where I noted down and rated all the projects out of 5 stars basing on their tech stacks and difficulty level (by reading a brief overview of them). And then, there came Wikimedia’s projects! It was just like how Harry Potter got his magic wand: unexpected but was strangely attracted to it. (One of the secret reasons why I included Harry Potter in one of the topics in my project)
I was intrigued by the project of “Synchronising Wikidata and Wikipedias using pywikibot” (Yes, I work for it now!) and the weirdest thing is, I knew about nothing other than “synchronising” and “Wikipedias”. But well, I was curious! I tried to reach out to the mentor listed for that project, Mike Peel, and he was amazingly helpful!
The project was like ice skating: I fell down (stuck with doubts or errors), wondered if I could even make it out of the many other amazing participants, but then got up and the end result was always delightful! I started out working with Wikidata and moved on to find out how pywikibot worked. I seriously pestered by mentor with doubts every now and then (once or twice a week, I guess :P) and went through numerous docs, resources in the internet, the large programs in all the files in the pywikibot repository, stayed awake till 4 A.M. in the morning just to find out that I misspelled a variable, and the list never ends.
No matter how tedious or difficult the task to understand and work with pywikibot in the initial days was, it always turned out to be good, either because my mentor has always been patient while answering my queries or because I found the right solutions or resources to help me find the solution. In fact, even “rubber duck debugging” works! I recently came across this term in one of the emails by the Outreachy Organizers which means debugging the code by explaining it to someone else (especially a rubber duck). Often times, I have found solutions to my problems while explaining the statement either to my mentor or my friends.
So, in the end, for anyone who is reading this right now and hesitates to ask questions, don’t hesitate anymore! I have been there too. In fact, I still overthink (a lot) and prefer to stay quiet many a times wondering if my doubt is too stupid. But well, no one was born a genius – everyone had their tough times of doubts or errors that they had to overcome. And, as I often repeat it to my friends (and to myself), positive thinking can help you achieve a lot more than what negative thinking will! So with this, au revoir! 🙂
Nizzblogs 