Vanessa Christopher is working with the NeuroFedora team as an outreachy Intern. This blog post is her experience and project update so far.

The Journey

I started my code journey six months ago when I wrote my first “Hello world”. My excitement was over the roof. I heard about the Outreachy Program from an alumni in the tech group WTM (women tech makers). I decided to give it a try because why not? I get to gain experience working with skilled people and also get paid to learn and increase my skill set.😄

Project Update

Kicking off my internship: My first weeks task was about

  • Setting up a timer (time warrior) to help me keep track of how much time I spend on each task
  • Setting up an internship journal (red notebook) where I can document my progress and steps for future reference, and
  • Writing my first blog post.

The following week, I started with the packaging tasks. So far I’ve packaged a couple of applications and I can say that I’m conversant with python packages, of course thanks to the help of my mentor (Ankur Sinha)!

From week fifth, I started updating packages to their most recent version. I was stuck on some packages for a few days and especially packages whose dependencies were not yet packaged for the Fedora Linux . One example would be python-mne which required python-pooch. Ankur assigned python-pooch to me, and we were able to solve the blocker for python-mne.

Last week Ankur taught me a new trick to take my commits from my pagure repo and add them to src.fp.o repo. With this, git commits that I had made during the initial build and review are not lost, and the autochangelog and autorelease will continue to work correctly.

Recently, I learned the flag to --deselect-- a test with pytest by adding -k "not <name of test>” to the pytest command. e.g -k "not ftp_downloader and not downloader_progressbar_ftp".

I also learned how to build packages on koji, and access my build logs. I have also started writing blogs for a non-technical audience.

I have so many things (technical and non-technical) that I have been learning but to sum up my experience, “Fedora is the best!”. Everyone has been super helpful and my mentor is absolutely amazing!

Thank you for taking out time to read my update ❤️