It’s already two weeks since I started my Outreachy internship and it’s unbelievable how much I already have learnt. And honestly I feel also very happy on how fast and smooth everything develops until today.
I started contacting the A+F group in Slack, asking them what they thought they were their main problems when it comes to the Dashboard. I already had checked their previous report and Sage had already collected these requirements in Github. I did a summary before asking so their feedback could be more structured. Their proposals didn’t change so much since the previous report and we decided that we’ll work on:
- Better statistics about the recent contributions
- Leaner joining process: Sometimes in bigger editathons it gets more complicated to provide the required passcode to everyone.
- Clearer starting/finishing dates. Some statistics show only the edits done in the editathons when some users continue some days after the same articles. Having a wider scope will help on a better understanding on how each editathon and initiative is providing.
Of course we will also improve the dashboard in general terms: functionality, UX… In these two last weeks I have already worked improving 1 and 2 and it’s very glad to see how you contribute to a real project and real users that will benefit from them.
I am learning a lot. During my first meeting with my mentor (Sage Ross), he asked me what exactly were my expectations of this internship. I told him I want to improve my coding skills as much as possible, so we focus a lot in reviewing my code and we even did some pair programming (we used Teletype).
I don’t only learn how to write better code, I am also learning some concepts I had never worked with (singleton classes, thread safety…) and even worked with Redux, something I hadn’t done before. I still have more to learn about Redux, but as it’s a brand new world for me and still need to clear my mind a bit more about states and props.
My biggest struggle in the past weeks was not the code, the dashboard, the different schedules of the team members or the long days… it was Git! I had some problems with my branches and it took me one week to create a first clean pull request that doesn’t include tones of not related commits. Of course, I also reseted and deleted things I didn’t pretend to, I panicked and I also felt relieved when everything appeared back. It’s funny because when I wrote my application I told Outreachy my favorite FOSS tool is Git, and I have the feeling I didn’t really know it. I still find it wonderful, but with great power comes great responsibility and… I need to work in having cleaner branches. I already have one New Year’s resolution.