Hi Everyone! Thanks for dropping by. If you are here, you must know everyone struggles. There used to be a famous qoute back in school days that was mostly written on school black-board.

No pain, No gain!

I was on maternity break since July 2020. I always heard people say,

  • Comeback is difficult physically, mentally and technically.

  • Update yourself regularly otherwise one could loose touch.

  • Transition might be tough.

It was all TRUE!

Not only comeback could be difficult, it was a test of my self-confidence. I am person that rarely gets nervous. Well i thought so atleast. During my maternity break i was confident that i am cherishing what is infront of me and career can wait. I sometimes took small projects but many of them were non-technical due to my lack of continuity. But when i started my Contribution Phase of Outreachy, it took me

8 days

to understand what was expected and ask my first question. I was very nervous in posting my question to the mentor of certain projects. Well i knew till then it is not easy.

I am a confident mother but not confident technically anymore.

And it is natural. Whatever you are doing day-in and day-out basis, you will be confident in doing that.

How i started ?

  • Made a plan to give dedicated 8 hours per day to Outreachy and have a balanced life.

    • 3 hours in morning to Outreachy.
    • 15 min workout morning.
    • 30 min meal time.
    • 3 hours during day to Outreachy.
    • 1 hour evening walk.
    • 2 hours play time with baby.
    • 30 min meal time.
    • 3 hours during night to Outreachy.
    • 8 hours of sleep.

  • Purposely made plan that had 9 hours to Outreachy so that if anything falls out of plan, i will have an hour or two extra to cover.

  • I so badly wanted to be selected that i left no stone unturned.

  • Sticked to the plan i made from Contribution Phase itself.

  • Selected 3 projects whose problem statement i could atleast decode via research.

  • Reach out to their open chat forum / mentor.

  • Reach out to ex-interns on how to get started and learn their experience.

  • And yes my family supported and supports till date.

It helped!

  • I was able to select one project that i will work on i.e. Systemd

What is systemd ?

To someone who graduated in my era, you can understand systemd as something that replaced init. It is a system and service manager and like init, it also runs as PID 1. It is mainly responsible for starting and stopping the rest of the system.

If you want to understand deep, read standard online documentation. It’s amazing. It helped me get started on basics.

Problem Statement for Contribution Phase: Read here

What i did in those 8 days of struggle ?

  • Started with systemd project. It intrigued my interest the most.

  • If you have opened the link above of problem statement and was terified with the first glance of it, you are not alone. I almost thought this is out of my range and i should select something non-technical

  • But i love challenge, so decided to give it a read. The article is easy to understand if you have a history in Linux. I did. I lost touch though so yeah i was terified to start even, thinking installing something might break my laptop.

  • So i made a bootable via online video in case something happens to my base OS and made data backup.

  • The beauty of these open-source project is they always ask you to start small and then go big.

  • If you bite more than you could chew, you will loose interest or may panic. So take small steps.

  • So i started with Repeatable Tasks of systemd.

  • Cloned the repo like it said and tried reading about it’s tools which are written in C.

  • With some help via online documents that @Luca Boccassi, i was able to brush C concepts.

  • Made a one-liner change just to print hello message.

  • Build the project with my changes [ Installed some dependency like mkosi, qemu-kvm, meson, cmake, and more.. ]

  • How i knew about the dependencies ? Well everytime the build failed, i googled the error or sometimes the error were verbose enough to understand what is missing. So you learn step by step. That also helped me understand where these packages might be needed.

Hurray!, i had my first repeatable task ready. I shared screenshot and that got approved!

Repeatable Task 1

Happy Day!

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