How to remain an active community member after Outreachy? This is the question I find myself asking in my head more and more often these days. Open Source contributions can be as flexible or as time-consuming as you let them be, but once you’ve established initial rapport and set a pace, how best to keep that up or modify it when your availability changes?
Although contributing as a volunteer is at the core of what Open Source represents, I’ve come to the idea that more formal relationships tend to give that extra bit of solidity a newcomer might need; more advanced contributors seem to find their way and their pace a lot more easily -and with less formal guidance required- than those first trying to join and/or with less experience.
So searching for a follow-up part-time internship (or junior dev position), parallel to some well-invested volunteering, seems to me the best way to go! Ideally a place where my experience in advocacy, webinars and panels, article writing, and SDO (Standards Development Organizations) involvement (ICANN, IETF, W3C), can be of use to the team.
My main motivation – a drive to work on my skills as I contribute to the maintenance and development of Open Sourced software, keeps me daydreaming with the idea of being able to remain in the communities that will one day see me as a main contributor.
Being privacy-oriented, certified in CCNA and Linux+, interested in DNS (previously involved in BIND as remote Jr. Dev, project written in C), OS and Browsers, and after having the great experience of working with Wireshark (written mostly in C) and Git (what do you know, also mostly written in C!) remotely through Outreachy, I’d love to remain part of a community that keeps me close to these areas with their projects:
Projects written in C -I can now implement pointers and references without panic and know about vtables (tnx jrnieder!)! Projects in C++ -I’m so looking forward to practicing with variadic expressions! Projects in Java -already miss playing with DOM after my graduation thesis project (fullstack web interface for data analysis); or also projects that use languages/tools I’m not too familiar with yet, such as Python and ML!
For this purpose, I think that having studied in China for 6 years, as well as lived in different countries in 3 continents, and speaking 3 languages rather fluently (ES-EN-CN), has provided me with a good perspective for clear communication with team members from different regions and time zones, which, given how these communities are usually very distributed across the globe, makes me hopeful (and capable!) of smooth transitions.
As I continue writing this post, I realize it’s a massive Cover Letter, but hey, I’m nothing if not compliant! And gotta do what needs to be done, which in this case, is to follow the lead of a very experienced and awesome program such as Outreachy. So if you’re still reading up to here, thank the organizers for encouraging us to give all these details; as a reserved female dev from Costa Rica, I don’t usually talk this much about myself! But if you’ve got something for me to listen, in English, Spanish, Chinese, or basic French (ehem), send me a line and I’ll (remotely) be there!
Also, feel free to visit my about.me page ^^
Thank you for reading!
Joey's Blog 