Introduction – Preselection.
I opened my gmail account and I had received a mail from the Outreachy Organizers congratulating me on being accepted for the outreachy program.
I am Massabe Kengne Lydiane, a beginner developer from Buea, Cameroon. I am interested in Open source because of the whole idea of sharing and contribution. This is a community where developers, designers, users even medical doctors (in fact people from every field) come together and work towards a common goal depending on the organisation they are involved in. You always learn when you are in a community like this where people openly contribute and find new ways or improve software for the good of the world. For a developer, it is always a good choice to enter an Open source community because there is a lot of skills building, technology learning and also experience working with other people from all over the world (diversity). There are so many benefits of working in an Open source organisation which cannot be all enumerated, so I will advice my fellow developers to take a plunge into Open source.
When I decided to enter an Open source community, I went through many organisations and I must admit that I was mostly impressed with the Mifos Initiative Organisation. The Mifos Initiative Organisation has as mission to speed the elimination of poverty by coordinating a global community that builds, supports, and uses Mifos X, a free and open source platform that enables financial service providers to more effectively and efficiently deliver responsible financial services to the world’s 2 billion poor and unbanked. Am so happy to be in this organisation where contributing code can help reducing poverty in the world and especially in my country. It has been great to contribute to this community and collaborating with amazing people all over the globe and I look forward to enjoy these three upcoming months internship period with the community.
I am in the Buea Womentech Makers Group, this group is a group where ladies are encouraged and empowered by fellow ladies to be involved in STEM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and mathematics). During one session meeting, I was introduced to Outreachy by a fellow girl and I saw it as a genuine opportunity to build more skills and also be more involved in Open source. As I discovered that this was a paid internship, it boosted my motivation and I decided I must apply for this internship. I made some researches online and found that I was eligible,so I decided that I will apply for this round of Outreachy (May – August 2019).
Going through the different projects my organisation presented for Outreachy, I decided to choose the project ” Update the Mifos X user manual and convert it to gitbooks”. I felt capable and ready to complete this project as it requires not too much coding and is mostly documentation. I set up my environment and was ready to start contributing. So, I began updating the user manual, that is, correcting grammatical and typo errors, updating the new pictures and features, etc. Everyday new candidates were going in for this project and I was tensed because everyone was trying to update more pages everyday to be recognized. As you will discover, applying for an easy project is risky because they are a lot of people who apply for the project and so the competition is high. This was my case, and I have learnt the lesson “never go in for an easy project”. In order to have an upper hand in the selection, I had to send three (3) pull requests on issues I have fixed and also started contributing the user manual to gitbooks in addition to the updates I was doing. After doing all these, the only remaining thing was to pray and wait for the results on the 6th of May 2019 at 5 pm local time.
I was so tensed as the time was approaching steadily but surely and all possible thoughts were going through my mind. At 4:30 pm, I tried forcing sleep unto myself but I failed and kept on thinking and holding my breath. By 5:05 pm, I opened my email and behold I could not control my joy when I saw the mail from Outreachy Organizers. I am so happy and grateful for being selected and I look forward to enjoy this rare opportunity and building my portfolio and skills with Outreachy.