26.04.2017, Berlin

With two more days left for the announcement of Outreachy results, I have decided to go with Plan B. I think I am being too paranoid about the results this time, I am not able to concentrate on anything else. While I am being 90% optimistic, I want to have a Plan B to console the 10% pessimistic me. Even though I was a tad late to apply this year, I feel I have done a decent job with my application.

Here is my application - https://docs.google.com/document/d/15rb9HB8yYu52WIyjtLJ0HGrKyum2L36Ujh-pS_H39MA/edit?usp=sharing

And here is my contribution - https://github.com/princiya/log-network-requests

Best case, I will get the internship and the money. Worst case, I have the following Plan B.

I am an optimistic individual and it is very difficult to have me demotivated. While not securing the internship won't be the end of the world to me, there will be a few obvious regrets; not getting the money to be one of them ;)

First let me make it clear to myself what this internship means to me:

I want to make the best use of my leave for this year. I have always wanted to be an active opensource contributor and this year I have the time to make this impact.

With this firm resolution in mind for this year, I was pretty happy when I found this project in January and was able to make a PR - https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html/pull/1976.

I was keen on picking up a project from Mozilla because Mozilla has always been participating with Outreachy and it would fit with my forte of work. When the Outreachy's participating organisations list was announced this year, Mozilla wasn't listed and I was disappointed. I reached out to one of the programme's coordinator via Twitter and she confirmed that Mozilla was participating and their project list would be up within a week's time. The hope came back :) When the project list was up, Lightbeam caught my immediate attention and I worked towards my contribution. I must say, web privacy is an interesting topic. There is so much scope to learn here.

I like to encourage women into technology. With this internship, I would be setting a real life example between managing work and home.

Plan B:

• I can still contribute to Lightbeam because it is an opensource project and try to learn and understand about web privacy to the maximum. There is a lot of scope in this area!

• I will get back to debugger.html and try to get some more PRs merged.

• I want to do three courses from Coursera:

  • Algorithms (I HAVE to be very good at this)

  • Machine Learning

  • Data Scientist's toolbox

  I have been aiming to take up these courses from a very very long time (from past 3-4 years). This year I have no excuse.

• Ideas for fun projects:

  • Build a StackOverflow like platform for all the discussions happening at ExpatBabies Facebook group and Jutta's idea of online midwife.
  • Build visualisations for some day to day life problems.
  • Cook, bake and blog
    • The foodie in me is very excited about this one :)

• I need to get better at the following and blog my learnings:

  • ES6
  • Web performance
  • D3.js, SVG, WebGL
  • WebVR
  • CSS layouts

As I conclude this post, let's hope for the best :)