Everything that has a beginning sure has an end, which is also true of my Outreachy internship, which I reckon to be the biggest part of my career in tech so far, I hope it launches me into far bigger stages and opportunities as I go on. At the application stage of the internship, I had a lot of worries, one of which was that I was worried I would get to a point in the internship where I would be clueless, stuck, and without help, that turned out to be false as I worked with really amazing mentors and a co-intern who is both hardworking and a good collaborator at the Debian project. Having the help of my mentors, co-intern and an ocean of online resources really helped me during the internship, and I won't fail to mention the ever calming reassuring and promising words of Sage Sharp and Anna e sแฝน (both from the Outreachy organising team).
The period of the internship was filled with mixes of emotions for me, I experienced fear when I didn't know what to do, felt inadequate at some point too, excited when I started having my packages approved for the Debian archive, I was sad when my machine crashed twice (mostly due to my mistakes), it was all really fun and fear for me. I know I should mention one amazing thing that happened during the internship but I actually had so much amazing stuff, so I am going to talk about two; one was when we started building the yarn-apt-plugin, few weeks into the project and I and my co-intern with the help of my mentors were battling how to get it started, we had apparently been working with a wrong version of yarn due to the yarn's not so detailed documentation, so it happened that one day I was reading through source codes and documentations altogether when I realized we might have been making our implementations with wrong versions of yarn and dependencies, so I communicated the discovery with my co-intern, we informed out mentors who gave us the go-ahead to try something new, we tried it and it worked out perfectly as expected; another I would love to talk about was when we started chatting with folks in the community, that was when I realized how massive the Debian project really is, I started realizing how blessed I really am to be a part of the Debian project, I have always been thankful for Outreachy from the first day, really amazing program.
The internship helped me grow a lot, in every way anyone in the tech space needs to grow actually; technically, I obviously can now package software for Debian, a thing I never knew existed before the internship, I find reading source codes easier now, thanks to yarn; interpersonally, I now find communicating with people on a professional ground lot easier than before, communicating with my mentors who have had decades of years of experience, and several other people in the community with much fewer years and my co-intern, plus the need to communicate with people based on their peculiarity ready helped me, I had to communicate with people from different parts of the world, with different experiences, orientations and cultures really helped, at random times I had chitchats with some of these people and I was really beautiful and helpful.
My mentors were a very big part of the whole internship experience, they answered all my questions concerning open-source, Debian, Linux, and even my career after the internship, they showed me all I needed to know about packaging in Debian, and provided help in building the plugin, they provided links to necessary resources and had long extended chats with me when necessary.
For someone who had only heard about open-source before the internship, Outreachy has really made me confident in making open source contributions in that I now have experience doing it, plus I know I now belong to a fellowship I can always reach out to whenever I need help with open source.
So, according to the project description which is to create a plugin that would resolve node modules installed via apt with the Yarn package manager, I and my co-intern have been able to implement about 60% of the functionality of the plugin. The plugin is able to resolve modules (dependencies), it is also able to determine if dependencies already exist in the machine's node installation path or they need to be downloaded from the NPM archive. The next step is to make the plugin copy just the symbolic link to the dependencies without modifying the package.json file and solve the issues identified by our mentors concerning the plugin, after which the plugin will be packaged for Debian. Empathy and hard work as I stated to be my core values in my first blog post helped me out during the period of this internship, as I had to be patient with the people I work with and I had to put in a lot of hard work for me to learn the things I know today concerning Debian packaging and building the plugin with Yarn.