Table of contents
The acceptance mail
"Your Outreachy initial application is approved 🎉", was the message I received informing me that I had been welcomed to the contribution phase of the Outreachy internship. I will not say getting to the contributions phase was a hard task, nor will I describe it as easy, but this is the stage where you just can't explain why exactly you were selected and others were not.
Project selection
Here comes the contribution phase, where prospective interns are expected to work with mentors on projects and make contributions to at least one or two projects before being considered to be selected for the internship.
Each project has listed the skills they expect interested interns to have, but sadly, after looking through each of them, I can't select any that 100% match my skill set.
I searched for the project closest to my skillset if I couldn't get 100%, and I found OpenStack, a project that seems interesting and complicated at the same time.
Finding an interesting project that picks up your interest and matches your skill set is not as easy as it seems; sometimes you have to forget about your interest and focus on what matches the skills you have, which was my case. A Project under OpenStack requires Python, bash, and writing test cases. I knew bash scripting and a bit of Python(very little, though), and I have written test cases in a language other than Python.
Contribution
Now is the time to contribute to whatever project that pique your interest. Since I zeroed in on just OpenStack, I have to find a way to set up my environment for the project. I will say the barrier to entry to OpenStack for a beginner is high and complicated. Also, the channel of communication was strange and unknown (IRC) to me. But I did some research and also reached out to other prospective interns; with this , I was able to get up to speed with my development environment and make a contribution. It was a nice learning experience.