It’s been a few weeks since I have started my internship, and there’s a lot to tell.
Community bonding period flew by quickly as I was having my end semester exams. Having finished my exams, and it being the start of my winter break, I had some free time before the official internship period begins.During that period, I was doubting myself if I could finish what I proposed and if I could make portal all set to serve the world. I wanted to get rid of all the anxiety and assert myself that I could do it, so I started the work a few days before the starting date. I was able to finish some tasks with less difficulty, Yay!
After that, I was eagerly waiting for the internship to begin so I can submit my first of many pull requests 😛 Working before official starting date made me less nervous and more confident about myself. Doubts washed away. Whoosh!
I did make a few resolutions on my first day. Some of them were – working sincerely throughout, writing code neater than what I usually code in my personal uni projects, write blogs, involve more with the community and learn more as the internship progresses.
So, as an intern, I’d have to attend meetings. Meetings with May, mentors, fellow outreachy interns were so much fun. They weren’t what I thought they would be like, they’re so coool. There were meetings where we discussed the features on portal, setting up timeline – that was related to work, and there were meetings where it’s not always about work – there was a game we played that was to guess others tastes( to know more about my fellow outreachy interns), like talking about random stuff everyone’s interested in.
Coding is so much fun too, if only there were no errors XD. But, the truth is everyone’s bound to get errors, and get stuck once in a while. No matter how small the error can be and get stuck, it doesn’t mean that we’re stupid to not be able to solve it.
I didn’t know Django before, but, hey, now I do. I knew I am good at python, MVC architectures, and MySQL, so I knew I would eventually be good at Django too. Most of the things I learned (listed under), I did know them(forms/views/migrations), it’s just that I’ve never ever coded them in Django. I’m a little confident in Django now, but not before I solved some of these tasks.
- The first task, Adding a new community form for admin [1] – I learned how to add a form, view, include context in it and a template, writing tests.
- Another task, Creating New community requests [1] – I can say I learned so much from this one task alone, that includes creating a model, understanding migrations, adding permissions and groups after understanding signals, creating a logic for approve feature, reject feature and sending messages using statuses of the task. One satisfying thing was that I was able to add all of them in a week, although I put in a lot of effort into it in that week.
- Creating checkboxes, I was pondering over what model’s field type to add to it. Reddit’s r/Django helped me. I used the widget, was able to use checkboxes but I wasn’t able to store that in my dB, it took me quite some time to figure out what was happening. I created a new char field in the model, and a multiple-choice field with Checkboxselectmuliple widget in the model form for the same field and used a clean_field method to convert checkbox input into a char type.
As I was working, there were times when I was coding super fast, flawless, neat code, there were also times when every line I coded threw me errors and stack overflow seemed like a savior. It wasn’t always a rainbow. I did face a few errors which when googled were present in stack overflow, but none of them worked for me. I then tried to look at the errors for hours and days to analyze and make my own solution for it. One such instance is this [1], I went on to use every answer present on the web (took me a lot of hours to do this), yet nothing solved it. I gave up looking for the answers online and came up with my own fix. But there were some errors that I just couldn’t fix even if I stare at it for days, and try out everything like this [1]
My Systers internship in Outreachy has been going on well, with ups and downs, with a lot to contribute, collaborate and lot to learn. I wish to do well in the remaining of my internship and make portal all set for production. I thank my mentors Tapasweni Pathak, Mansimar, and May for making my journey terrific so far.
