It's the third week of my internship with the Debian Project and it has been an exciting experience for me, actually filled more with mixed feelings than just excitement. I am tasked with the responsibility of writing about a new open-source vocabulary I just learned in my past few weeks at the Debian Project; the vocabulary is "packaging", to a very large extent the term describes a bulk of what is done here. In a layman way of explaining, the packaging is taking software (usually small software tools used in building other bigger software) written in any language and making it compatible with Debian, such that they can be installed directly into Debian, a good example is taking the babel package written in JavaScript and making it installable directly into a Debian machine so that it can be easily called when needed in the development process of another more sophisticated software on a Debian machine.

Everyone struggles

This section would be very useful for you if you're trying to apply to outreach and you stumbled on my blog, I am a self-taught programmer, meaning as of now I do not have any computer science degree or any formal training whatsoever in what I do today, learning by myself was the jungle, and I am used to ups and downs in what I do. Over the period of time, I have been working on the Debian project with the community, I have realized that the accepted possible margin of error in software packaging and maintaining is very low, it is in fact expected to be perfect. Being a self-taught programmer, I sometimes pat myself on the back when I make mistakes and go "it isn't that bad", or even make unexplainable implementations to my code when things don't go as originally planned, as long as the implementation gets the job done. Working on Debian has been different, I realized that I needed to be sure, in fact, super sure of every step I take, everything I do. When I first started here, I saw how knowledgeable my mentors are, they are super smart about what they do, but over time I realized that no single one of them has a 100% understanding of everything that has to do with packaging, sometimes when troubleshooting they go "hey x, what do you think about this?", this singular act gave me hope, made me understand that it's okay not to be sure, it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to ask questions, and it's okay to not know how to ask the questions, what is most important is that one is learning the job, one is paying attention, and one is improving steadily on the job. Though everyone struggles but with patience and dedication everyone can be a master Yoda at what they do.