Everyone Struggles, But Everyone Believes They Are The Only One Struggling¶
While I have had a very curious interest in FOSS since almost the beginning of my time at university, and tried to follow it up by looking at projects that intrigued me, I was never able to contribute to anything largely due to my inability to ask (read: fear of asking) questions like what a beginner like me could do. I often did not know how to structure my thoughts and questions in a way that the maintainers understood - beyond the initial “hey! I am a beginner in xyz and would love to work on this project” - because what I probably wished for is someone to assign me a task and list out all the prerequisites I’d need to fulfill it.
Since anyone reading this will know that that is not how open source exactly works - not that maintainers don’t help you out, quite the opposite, but delegating unresolved issues to newcomers like a teacher would do to their students is not how it goes. Any contributor needs to be more proactive in claiming issues, recognizing bugs, and approaching the project as a whole. Now what should people who really do want to be proactive in such a manner but actually feel lost and clueless do? I was one of them, and I can say that I continue to be like that. When I began my journey with Outreachy through the contribution period, after making sure that I had some interest in the PyMC project, I claimed issues without thinking much at all. I was encouraged by my mentor to scan through the many many open issues and chose the ones that seemed the simplest, and haven’t stopped learning and working since.
But that was just one part of the challenge. Since the beginning of the internship I have had a difficult time with communication, as there were a lot of technical terms used when discussing doubts. I struggled to understand why certain things were highlighted, or deliberated upon, or deemed unnecessary since I do not have more than a beginner’s knowledge of statistics and bayesian modelling. I was able to convey these to my mentor well enough, but had trouble assimilating myself in the community and feeling confident enough to ask queries since I am not theoretically thorough with the subject matter. This persisted for a while, and still does but I am trying to overcome it actively.
Another challenge that I continue to face is really just an annoying trait of mine - wherein I don’t push commits until I think the issue is properly and completely resolved. It would be very ideal if I could do that! Solve every issue at once or with only one round of discussion and update all the tutorial notebooks in the pymc-examples repository through sheer will! But of course I cannot do that and I am learning how to contribute to a project incrementally and embracing all the error messages that I do not have the skills to comprehend or debug without assistance. This is also helping me ask questions more actively to members of the community other than my mentor, which in turn has gone a long way in making me feel slightly more well-adjusted in the community.
I hope this continues and I hope I ask more intelligent questions in the future, because the internship so far has taught me a lot about how to think and approach problems.
This blogpost and the next 2 have long been in the pipeline whilst also being long overdue, and the reason for my tardiness has been the very debilitating covid-19 virus. An old relative of mine passed away, and then my family (except me) got infected. It was a tough time and became disturbingly tougher with every passing day. Outreachy organizers and my mentor were extremely kind and understanding enough to give me time off, so I ended up taking a break from the internship. Constant, incessant worry kept me awake for most of the time off, especially when my mom would have breathing troubles or dad would have persistent fever, even though they were both fully vaccinated. Thankfully, it is all over now and my parents and my brother have recovered, but that time just put into perspective how much struggle there really is in the world - from which I have managed to come out quite unscathed. It made me feel both grateful and guilty of my privilege and a whole host of emotions too messy to commit to words, but I hope the feeling of gratitude continues and I am able to continue the internship with more energy than I did before.