My Outreachy 2017 @ Wikimedia Foundation

Its surprising how time flies, so sad half of the journey has pass already.😞😞 I can still remember how at the beginning of this internship I could not even understand what putting an extension in a PHP namespace means. Now I realize how obvious the statement implies its meaning😃. Being at the middle of my internship, to be sincere I feel like having to work with my mentors, and some other developers on IRC that usually help me is an awesome experience. I just feel like " am not gonna leave open source, never-never ". Its really exiting. My project as well has gone half way and currently finishing the 3rd task out of 6. This task has given me some serious challenges in the sense of: Limited time. Some confusion on what exactly I am suppose to do. Limited resources as I experienced a lot of electricity shortdown, that could last for up to 12 hrs. In the task in question I have to change all the $target  variables passed as arrays to objects. It sounds simple when...

The next move requires no past mistakes to be done. I am getting to the 5th week of the journey and the more time goes the more the work becomes more and more serious. From the few weeks that have gone already, I have improve on my organisational skills and have learnt how to push  work fast enough to meet with datelines. For the next move I am also taking the next task. My work is divided into six tasks as per my timeline and am on the second now 😟. I have to press the acceleration button if I want to meet with datelines but that's not a big deal when you have mentors like mine. Since coding started I keep on learning. I become more comfortable with the code base and I think accelerating things a bit will not harm and instead help. Let see in one week time what the output will be :).

This time around there are all sort of things I see, learn and notice from Outreachy To begin, The project is progressing and I have submitted some few patches under it😎. Till now the most difficult is not coding but understanding and knowing what I am required to do. It took me some good time to come up with a conclusion on what exactly I had to do. Also, I can say my PHP skills are greatly improving as I keep working. My first task was to put the MassMessage extension in a namespace MediaWiki\MassMessage. I bet you when I sat on my pc the day I started the task, I didn't know one bit what it means😂😂. I had all sort of ideas in my mind from the few research I made. I was so confused that I had to contact my mentors. Funny enough I really did not still have it clear but while doing, I had it clearer till the first patch I submitted. What actually are those things that shocked me in the journey? The speed at Which I learn. It is very high. I heard of a new program GCI...

Hmmm!! long waited for this time, where i will get my hands dirty 😎😎 Coding has finally started and the first thing is to setup a MediaWiki instance on Cloud VPS, which I shall use with my mentors to test changes before deployment. Believe me, it was a sweet experience but difficult. Just at the beginning, I had multiple challenges😓😓 but luckily, I have very responding mentors (@Legoktm, @D3r1ck) always available for help. This is a narration of what happened. I had never worked with cloud services before so I was relying greatly on documentations and following of steps. I created a new instance massmessage-test-wiki on the massmessage project on WikiMedia Cloud VPS. That was pretty simple. The next thing was to connect to the instance and setup MediaWiki on it. I had struggle for hours without succeeding, made research with no good output. In fact, I could not even connect to the instance😢😢. After some long struggle I thought the problem might be my operating system as I h...

Now, Outreachy has started and it's time to get to work.  Trying to know my mentors well and setting up for development. Even though I have some personal problems and instability in now in my life I am trying to push up with the work😥😥. I am anxious for the coding period to come and for me to start work fully😛. Hopefully by then, I will be more stable. I created a phabricator task requesting for a new project " MassMessage-testing"   on cloud VPS for testing that was granted and resolved by Brian Davis. The project will be used by my mentors and I for testing of changes during the Outreachy period. All I need is to set up MediaWiki on it now😌😌.

It was like a dream but in real, so unbelievable but true. I give all thanks and glory to GOD 😇. Here we Go!    Actually, I didn't study IT at the university but have always being passionate of it. I think I didn't do it because I was a little bit intimidated by codes and was seeing those who could code like ' gurus', so I felt it was for others and I went in for Geology which I actually enjoyed. This year in school was different. I had to drop out from university and stop reading Geology as there was a lot of political crises in my country and mostly in my schooling town. Not going to school and having nothing to do, I gave a try to programming and coding. I started by joining programming clubs and attending IT based events. with that, I made new friends in the field who guided me through algorithms, first code in C then in PHP and finally a small project in PHP. Wow! learnt so much😎😎. One of the events I attended was "Hacking on MediaWiki". It...