The year 2020 has been a year of massive change in the entire world, there are mixed feelings of loss, confusion among others, but all in all, there is always hope that keeps us moving forward. I must say that being accepted as an Outreachy intern has been that ray of light at the end of the tunnel that I needed to end the year and begin the new year. Outreachy is a paid, remote internship program with the goal to support people from groups underrepresented in tech. Starting my career in the field of software engineering has been a journey of hard work, persistence, and seizing every opportunity since where I come from such opportunities are rare and the support for women's engagement in technology is quite low.

My journey into being accepted as an outreachy intern started when I submitted my application about 3 months ago, the whole
Outreachy application takes approximately 3 months. During the application process, I got the opportunity to contribute to open-source projects, which is one of the requirements of the initial application process. Contributing to open-source projects is something new to me, I had never contributed to any open-source project before even though I have been coding for a while now. This is a completely new path for me in my career as a Software Engineer and it's one I'm truly excited to embark on, though a bit scary but I know that great things will come out of it!.

As part of the outreachy program, I got accepted as an intern at Wikimedia as a Software developer intern, which will last for 3 months, and December 1st marks my day as an official Wikimedia intern. Excited!!. Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. One of the reasons why I'm passionate about technology is the impact it makes in the lives of people and in the world at large, the kind of impact I see Wikimedia making by providing free educational content. I'm thrilled to be working with such a community of great and smart minded people and continue to make an impact by building and contributing to open source. I have the privilege to be mentored by Vidhi Mody, Željko Filipin, and Soham Parekh whom I look forward to learning from and collaborating with.

Keep an eye on this corner for more blog posts and adventure! I will be blogging about my experience with the new technology I will be using, Outreachy, internship experience at Wikimedia, Open source projects, to mention but a few.

This post was originally published on dev.to