The experience showed me that every fine-looking, perfectly-functional project, probably has hundreds or thousands of hours of effort, debugging, and struggles that go into them, even those built by the best minds ever.

It was a great experience and some sort of fix to self-doubt or impostor syndrome.

I'd like to start by sharing some of my core values: honesty, humility and good deeds toward others. As far as I'm concerned, it's almost always costly, foolish, and unnecessary to tell a lie. I also think we should always remind ourselves that we're never better than the next person, he/she is human just as I am, and so, I should accord them every respect due regardless of their peculiar circumstances. Finally, certain things are pleasurable in life: good food, good music, etc, but I think doing good to others comes at the very top in terms of gratification, although not always as high in terms of cost.

Between 2020 and 2022, our local currency lost about 52% of its value moving from 360 for one USD to 750 for a dollar. It was a frustrating situation for me because all my earnings were in the local currency, and had then lost purchasing power. I realized I needed to build skills with which I could earn in a more stable currency, so I decided to pivot into tech. I knew I loved computers, and I loved Maths, so I figured I could cope. Plus while a lot of people were extremely terrified by FORTRAN which was made compulsory back in college, I did quite well in it.

I joined a very good boot camp that's sponsored by the Mastercard Foundation. It was at this boot camp that I heard about Outreachy Internships for the first time. I was interested in the fact that interns would receive stipends of as much as $7000. That was a great deal for someone earning a terribly-performing currency. At that time it was already too late to apply for the December 2022 cohort, so all I could do was join the mailing list so I could be notified when the next cohort opened for applications. I did that and eventually submitted my applications a couple of months later.

All this while, the $7,000 stipend was all the motivation I had as I didn't even have any ideas what sort of projects were involved in the internship. But as the contribution phase opened, I saw the projects participating, projects like The Linux Kernel, Qemu, Wikimedia, Firefox, Systemd(which I'm Interning at) etc., and I got another motivation: I would get the opportunity to build features that're used by millions of people all over the world. That's huge. I've now begun my internship, and each time I think of the fact that I got the opportunity to implement a feature that determines how most Linux computers all over the world behave in early boot, it gives a great sense of pride, joy and gratitude.

Big thanks to the team at Outreachy and Software Freedom Conservancy for such a great opportunity.