My journey at Mozilla begins

This would be a part of a series of posts through my journey as an Outreachy intern at Mozilla. This would not have been possible without Emma and Kate. Thank you so much.

What is Outreachy?

Outreachy is an amazing initiative for women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people in free and open source software to get involved. If you are new to open source and searching for an internship that can boost up your confidence, Outreachy would be a great start for you.

The seleced interns work on a given project for three months under the supervision of a Mentor. Various organisations (e.g. Mozilla, GNOME, Wikimedia, to name a few) take interns to work full-time on the project. The outreachy program happens twice an year and the interns are paid for their time.

I’m so excited to be accepted for this year Outreachy round 16 as an intern with Mozilla community.

I am currently working with Open Innovation team under the guidance of Emma Irwin and Katherine Mancuso at Mozilla. I am currently exploring the Debugger tool and its use to our current project.

How did I get involved with Outreachy?

I started engaging with Mozilla community in the beginning of February. I thought I was ready for Outreachy and pinged one of the former outreachy interns and my good friend, Princi Vershwal to get a general idea about some do's and dont's. This really helped me a lot throughout the process.

I began contributing in Taskcluster and Diversity repositories. This gave me an opportunity to get the know-hows of the working of an organisation in open source society. At first, it was really intimidating speaking in an open source community, like every message of mine was a broadcast to a crowd of people, but with time I started getting more comfortable to speak out and asking questions. The people in both these organisations were really helpful in clearing my doubts and guided me through my submissions.

I really like how the community takes the code of conduct very seriously and promotes a welcoming environment for everyone. I already learned a lot from the application phase. One of the things that I learned is that we can help open source communities with more than code.

Path to Outreachy...

Choose projects you are confident with ..

Outreachy announces the organisations on the first date and every organisation takes 1-2 interns depending upon the projects they have opened. Explore all the projects and choose one which interests you the most and you feel motivated to work on that project for the next 3–4 months. Try to stay calm with the competition and start contributing with good first issues.

Stay consistent and ask questions ..

Don't hesitate to ask questions. This does not means that if you are stuck somewhere, you immediately ping the other person. If a problem can be solved by a simple Google search, do that before. Being an intern with outreachy teaches us patience and consistency needed for a project. Even if you are stuck with a problem for a day don't lose hope just coordinate with the fellow team-members and reach out to them on IRC or Slack channel.

Don’t get disheartened if your patches are not accepted in early stages. Eventually, they would be. They just need a little more polishing. Keep going and one day you will get your PR merged!! :)

Know your project before submitting an application ...

You do not have to hurry about submitting a proposal. Get to know about your project, set up the platform, solve bugs and once you get comfortable with the code and platform then submit the application. This way you will have a better idea about the project and this will reflect from your application.

What do you get out of Outreachy?

Knowledge and Guidance

The primary reason why I suggest people to take part in Outreachy is that you will get the opportunity to work with some of the most knowledgable people and learn valuable skills which you would require for working in the real world as well as in your day to day job.

You learn how to work with remote teams which are spread geographically over the world having different time zones.

Stipend and Perks

Outreachy values the time interns give to there projects by working full time for 40 hours/week. Each intern gets

• $5,500 USD, and an extra $500 stipend for travel related to Outreachy, which is fantastic. Yay!!!

• LDAP credentials. This means you get a @mozilla.com e-mail address like all regular employees. You get to take part in team meetings and have access to pretty much everything.

• A laptop to keep. What you get varies from year to year. This year they gave a 15" Macbook Pro latest model to all the interns.(Mine arrives tomorrow :) )

• Invitation to All-Hands event to meet all the mentors and spend an exciting week brainstorming and exploring !!!!!!

Some general guidelines

1. Always be respectful to your mentors and co participants while communicating.
2. Make sure you follow the Code of Conduct of the organisation.
3. If you see that any fellow participant is stuck on a similar doubt and you feel that you can help, just share your knowledge even if he/she is your competitor.

Getting selected is a goal but spreading knowledge and involving more people in open source is a bigger aim of Outreachy.

Got any more questions?

Are you curious about Outreachy? Thinking of applying? Confused about the application process? Feel free to drop me an email at akshitadvlp@gmail.com. :)