I finished my Outreachy internship working with Mozilla. I look back and I amazed that I’m here writing this. I feel really proud about this. This has been my best experience in my dev life so far.   Since the application this have been an achievement. I’m a introvert person, that used to have a really big Impostor Syndrome. Part of me used to feel that I was just pretending that I knew and when I was selected I felt that I just had very good luck during the process.

I started the application because the program looked perfect for me, and I didn’t have nothing to lose and I could learn to try again later. But I didn’t tell almost anybody that I was doing the application because I was almost sure that I weren’t achieve it. But I wanted to do my best and I read many posts of past outreachy interns.

The contribution period were my first time contributing to Open Source. I failed in my first attempt to contribute, but I give myself another chance and tried with another project: the BMO. This wasn’t my first attempt because it was a Mozilla Project and I thought although I had the skills needed, any Mozilla Project must have many applicants so it must be the most difficult if I wanted to be selected. Now I can say that if you have the skills required for the project you can achieve it.

This project is developed with Perl and I hadn’t used it before, but I searched about it, read some project documentation, and most important I asked in the channel and there they guided and helped me. I felt really comfortable and did my first contribution.

After that I felt more confident and I started to think that maybe I could achieve that. I started exploring the project, making more contributions, I was pending of the channel and also I offer myself to solve a problem a user asked in the channel and I filed the bug.   And finally I was selected, I had really achieved that! But when the internship started the Impostor Syndrome came again, and during my first weeks I felt that I couldn’t achieve it, I thought that my internship would end after the first week ( I wrote about that in my Everybody Struggles! post). But there was where I started to learn more, in summarize: I learned to solve my problems with rubber duck debugging, that ask for help is ok, left a lot of thoughts that I had from school that was bad for real work, to organize my time, to work remotely and most important I learned to be more confident.

Also I faced the English language for first time in my life, this was my first experience communicating in English outside an English class. During my first meeting with my mentors I barely talked, and at the beginning I was afraid in all the meetings and also in the chats that what I said didn’t make sense. This experience help me a lot to lose the fear to it and also to improve my level.

The mozilla workshops, the outreachy chats and write these posts help me to learn a lot too, in these I realize about my Impostor Syndrome, learned about the importance of connections and network, because almost all the internship I was focus on achieve the project goals that I forgot that I had a big opportunity to make a network. Also I learned that everybody struggles and not always goes all perfect for everybody and that it’s ok if project plans change.   And about technical skills I learned to use Perl and increased my skills doing backend, learned to use documentation, why is important the Product Specifications at the beginning of the project, improved my skills using git and learned much about webhooks and Bugtrackers.

At the end I completed all the parts of the project that my mentors and me planed at the begging. In summary the first version of Webhooks Feauture is implemented. There are already planned new enhancements to make it better for users and it have been filed in Bugzilla and the best part is that I can continue contributing to it after my internship ends.