Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. — Albert Einstien

Overview
Programs like Outreachy help an individual a lot when you are starting to work on open source. Over time, I have learned a lot throughout this program and have gotten the confidence to work in any system. Getting confidence, learning new technologies, and working with collaboration were a few aspects of this internship.

What were the most amazing and fearful aspects of this program?
When contributing to it for the first time, I was having a fear that I wouldn’t be having the required expertise but as I started to learn more about it, it became easier to resolve assigned tasks. During the internship journey, there were several challenges that I came across. One of the challenges was about “Falsy” and “Truthy” values were highly interesting. After a few experiments, I learned that these terms are not exactly the same “True” and “False”.

What technical skills did I acquire?
Getting to know more about Gerrit, how the system handles CI/CD, and upskilling my sync/async knowledge. This will be going to help me write code in an efficient manner in the future and develop resilient architecture. Moreover, working in an open-source environment would help me to contribute further to different technologies. My mentor used to help me whenever I used to get stuck on a bug. We used to have regular meetings, where we used to discuss issues and the latest methods. From time to time, he has provided me with valuable lessons and suggestions.

Did this program increase my confidence?
As mentioned earlier, the Outreachy program has provided me with all the right skills to contribute to more open-source areas, and hence, I feel more confident to contribute more to open-source in the future. Moreover, having conversations with individuals from different areas has improved my communication and presentation skills. Now I can deliver my message more clearly.

What are my future perspectives?
I was able to async and deploy one of the core repositories while continuing working on other sub repositories. Even though the Outreachy program has finished, I would still continue working on the remaining repositories and would try to fix the remaining issues.