Career Opportunities
Before my internship at Outreachy, I had always known that to excel at something, one has to put in the work. Time, consistency, and continuous learning are non-negotiables. And so I began by taking courses, exams, and practicing what I have learnt by building projects. I started small. A button that could perform a function, a filtering system, or even trying to clone a cool website, just to practice my skills on real-world projects. All these helped me and are still helping me. Luckily for me, I had the skills needed for my projects. And I was excited to put all that I have learnt into use, and even learn more.
Learning on my own and building projects opened the door to Outreachy, an open-source promoter. I love this job so much because it always aims to assist others and make life easier by solving their problems. I have also learnt so much. Integrating about 4 APIs in my project, learning how to reduce load times because fetching data from these 4 APIs takes time. Also, thinking of very creative ways to build stuff, I’m grateful. This career has also opened me up to meeting new people. Fellow interns, mentors from different countries, the Wikimedia community members, the Wikimedia organizers, and creators of very fantastic Wikimedia tools. I have learnt a ton from their feedback. I know much about user experience now. And this was from the app testing of various community members. They shared with me their pain points, and I was happy to build a solution that could ease their problems. Integrating libraries was another area I learnt. I remember building a table from scratch and implementing a sorting system for one of the columns through buttons. But my mentors gave me an easier, cleaner idea to improve the representation of tables. The idea? DataTables.
Getting an internship like this offers one the experience to take on more challenging roles. Like an entry-level role or a Junior developer role. It could even be a freelance role, volunteer opportunities, or the knowledge and ability to solve users’ problems. These are what are just starting to open one to. So, continue putting in the work, share what you do, learn, and understand what you are learning. Build something if you love to, like me. And the opportunities will come through this work.
Thank you :)
