The results of Outreachy are out! Outreachy is a paid, remote internship program that helps traditionally underrepresented people in tech make their first contributions to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. Fedora is participating in this round of Outreachy as a mentoring organization. We have two interns for this round which started on December 5 and goes until March 5, 2018. We found some time to interview both of Fedora’s Outreachy interns!

Shaily, India

  • Fedora mentor: Aurélien Bompard
  • Project: Fedora Hubs: adding a full-text search feature

Tell us a little about yourself?

I’m a political science graduate from Delhi University, India. I started learning programming as part of high school coursework and then continued exploring on and off out of interest through the internet.

How did you hear about Outreachy?

I spend a lot of time on Quora, that’s where I read about Outreachy while browsing through a summer internships topic thread.

What caught your attention about Fedora? How does it align with your personal interests?

Prior to Outreachy, I had only made small apps for the sake of learning specific frameworks, so I thought it would be difficult for me to grasp a relatively large code base well enough. However, I felt quite comfortable with Hubs after completing the required task, which was structured in the form of an interactive tutorial and explained how the stack was set up. I think what caught my attention here is how everything was so well documented – not just the code, but I could also find blog posts and videos which helped me see the inspiration behind the project and put forth the points of view of many people involved in it.

I feel motivated to contribute to Hubs because it’s going to enable more people to get involved in Fedora. It’ll help make things more accessible to both new and experienced contributors – which will improve the general experience of working with projects associated with Hubs.

What are you looking forward to most during this Outreachy cycle?

I want to use this time in learning the most that I can since I’m working with people who are much more experienced in various fields.

Where do you see yourself after you complete this Outreachy cycle?

I see Outreachy as a great opportunity to acquire real-world experience. I hope to find an exciting full-time position after the internship!

Alisha Aneja

Tell us a little about yourself?

I am a Masters student at the University of Melbourne. Having pursued my undergraduate degree in Computer Science as well, I always knew I have a love for computers and want to be a programmer. I am a FOSS enthusiast and contribute to Mozilla and Rust projects as well.

How did you hear about Outreachy?

Through a friend who was an Outreachy intern for OpenStack in 2015 and is now employed full-time at Red Hat.

What caught your attention about Fedora? How does it align with your personal interests?

My project is to develop and improve both new and existing administrative tools for 389 Directory Server using Python. The directory server uses LDAP and that is one of the reasons I applied for this project. LDAP is used in many medium and large organizations; however, there are not many resources for learning about it online and it has a steep learning curve. Doing this project is the best way to get more experience in Python to play with and get to know about LDAP, which is surely going to be exciting!

What are you looking forward to most during this Outreachy cycle?

Getting more experience in Python, learning about LDAP, learning the concepts of the Directory Server and how administrators use it and getting involved with the amazing Fedora community!

Where do you see yourself after you complete this Outreachy cycle?

I see myself…

  • Contributing to 389 Directory Server more confidently, in various areas like re-writing the plugins, integration of new technologies like fuzzing, performance analysis and enhancement.
  • As a more experienced Python programmer and administrator with knowledge of LDAP.
  • Giving talks about the internals of the Directory Server.
  • As a better community member.

Best wishes for Outreachy 2017!

We wish them both a successful journey as Outreachy interns and look forward to hearing about their experiences soon!