Struggling has become so normal that we get surprised when we don't.
Newton's third law accurately describes how we deal with everyday activities, even as normal as breathing. We work to eat, eat to get energy, have energy to work, and the cycle just keeps going. Growing up, we learn through a lot of experiences that mostly start off as a challenge, and progressively evolve into simple accomplishments. The reason for such success is that we struggle to achieve that very goal we have been looking at.
Through Outreachy and contributing to open source on OpenRefine, I cannot count the number of sleepless nights I have had trying to understand what I have to do. I remember just reading through contributions of other experienced community members, trying to learn how to communicate and contribute like them, reading through lines of code trying to master the flow, travelling through countless queries on Google and Bing looking for a fix to what I was working on at any time, working on an issue for a straight week and many other amazing experiences with this amazing project. One standard in all this is that I have never given up on what I was doing. Another is that OpenRefine is supported and actively maintained by amazing developers.
We love your fix and we will do anything to help you integrate it. Have a great time, have fun, feel free and let us know where and how we can help.
These welcome words by my mentor is exactly how OpenRefine treats contributions. I must admit that I was initially intimidated by its huge code base and interestingly effective logic, but that all got away when I finally understood this. There is no point at which I feel like I have a comfortable zone while working on this project, and this constructively helps me to keep improving the project and working on issues that I can.
I am always grateful for my mentor, who is very quick to respond whenever a build fails. Along with other maintainers of OpenRefine, there was never a time I had an exchange and was the same afterwards. StackOverflow links, issue descriptions and just a conversation between maintainers while I watched were sometimes more than enough, especially given the precision to which their responses hit the mark for the solution. So far, my experience with OpenRefine has taught me that the only possible problem with a question or query is if it is not stated clearly. That itself is not a concern to me, as I have observed questions rephrased by maintainers together with a newcomer to better understand them.
Whatever difficulty it is we get to place our hands on, is able to be solved if we decide to get it solved. I have followed through with this in mind, and my stubbornness towards challenges have made me improve daily from who I was as a developer and contributor before Outreachy.
I have gone through a month of this internship and I can do this all over just for the experience I got from it.
Is it too much for you to handle? Do you feel you are not good enough? Are you about to give up? Everyone struggles, hit me up and let's get up some juice, charging your brain back into it. Just make sure you feel good about yourself and are having a great time!