Everyone Struggles

Wow! It has been a very wonderful week and it was pretty fast. In fact, I felt the week was rushing to just end without much tasks accomplished simply because it does not want me to. I had loads of tasks on the Trello project tracker that initially I did not understand a fig about them. But in this situation, what could I do? As a result of my being curious, I struggled through all the tasks but I kept going. I remain resolute especially adding the fact that my mentors, Maysa and Luis kept explaining the same concept over and over again. So, I throw it open to my mentors even on the slightest confusion. Thankfully, they are very quick to respond.

The beautiful thing is the more they run me through the interactions of the project, the more I find it easier to comprehend. I give you an example. I was confusing Kubernetes commands with that of OpenStack. Ohh! What is even Kubernetes? That is another concept that I was totally at a lost with prior to the Outreachy internship. I struggled to find the relationship between Kuryr-Kubernetes, Kubernetes and OpenStack.

I never kept quiet. I knew if I persist and kept asking the same question over and over again, that it will definitely begin to make sense. Luckily, my mentors were ever willing to help. I remember, when they joined me on a tmux session (Don’t bother about tmux, it’s a simple concept and I would explain down this post) and actually talked me through, helped to run a VM(again, don’t be scared, VM simply stands for a virtual machine), and even assisted me to debug real-time.

What else could I not talk about my struggles with finding the right resources on the documentation to enable me complete a task. I found out that some information might be staring me in the face but I could not recognize it until I open up and ask question. What helps me a lot is I do not waste time once I can not understand a concept I was working on. I immediately through it on the IRC(Hmm!!! another big word again, don’t be scared) and someone especially my mentors would jump in and provide multiple links to a resource I can use to easily find my way out. Funny! Once I step through the links, it begins to make a lot of sense.

Another important aspect of my project is preparing a Devref. Initially, I was scared. Where do I even start from? Again I threw it to my mentors to clarify how I would prepare a devref and it goes with my exact words ” What task is exactly required? A diagram or explanatory notes or algorithm?” Immediately again they responded and provided me with multiple links to several devrefs prepared by the community when working on a new project. In fact! I was elated at how this gave me a base to start from.

Yeah! everyone struggles but the bottom line is do not bottle it up. Throw all your confusions to your mentors, to the community. You will be surprised how once they explain the concepts again, it would begin to make sense.

OpenSource Vocabulary Terms

Sure! there are numerous concepts everyone in the community uses easily even generally on OpenSource that initially does not make sense to me.

First! PR. When I started out to contribute to OpenSource projects, I totally do not understand the meaning of PR. Everyone kept using this without minding explaining the meaning at first. Anytime I fix a bug on the codebase, I refer to it as simply fixing a bug. Unfortunately, one of the reviewers would point out that I rasied a PR. I made my research and realised that PR simply means pull request. That is you are make a request pull on the codebase and asking someone to approve it so it can be included on the project code. That is how I simply interpreted it on my own and moved on.

I promised to explain important concepts above. Sure! I myself struggled to understand them initially too. A term like tmux , until my mentor requested me to join a tmux session, it never made any sense to me. I had to quickly search it out and with their help, I connect to tmux session everytime I work on the project and collaborate with my mentors.

Another concept is VM on the cloud. Sure! this was confusing but my mentors managed to get me a virtual machine on the cloud. This means, I do not have to only rely on my local machine before I can test out the codes. I can login to the virtual machine and connect on tmux and I would in real-time work with my mentors on the cloud remotely.