I'm going on an adventure
Table of Contents
1 whoami
My name is Magali, I'm a second-year Computer Science student, living in São Paulo. Before that, I was a Materials Engineering major but then realised that wasn't really my thing. The decision to switch majors was hugely influenced by an 'Intro to Computer Science' class that I took in my first semester.
In my free time, I am generally watching series or listening to music while surfing the web. On vacation, though, I like to discover new places and be a tourist.
For the next three months, I'm going to be a GNU Guix intern in Outreachy, and every two weeks, I'll describe here how the development of this project is going.
2 Core Values
There are two core values I believe are fundamental to accomplish goals in life: responsibility and willingness to keep learning.
2.1 Responsibility
If you want to get things done, you've got to be organized and take things seriously, setting goals and being transparent to yourself about how your progress is going. This is one of the many things that being responsible stands for and thus I believe this is an extremely important core value to have.
2.2 Learning
How can one make any progress in life if there's no willingness to learn? A very important value to me is learning. Outside of the computer world, I love learning about different cultural traditions and languages. For instance, did you know that in Korea it's a sign of respect to hand things over to other people using two hands?
3 My Application to Outreachy
3.1 Outreachy
Outreachy is a program that organizes 3-month-long internships in Free/Libre Open Software(FLOSS) projects for underrepresented groups in the tech industry. There are opportunities not only for programming but also design, improving documentation, and whatnot.
I remember the first time I heard about Outreachy was when I entered college. There was this sort of one-week-long event meant to introduce undergraduate freshmen to opportunities in and out of college. The Outreachy Program was mentioned along with it, and since then I've been wanting to be part of it.
This year, I got to know better about FLOSS through the undergraduate
research I'm part of. I learned about the basics, like licensing, how these
communities communicate, and how this kind of software is built. For
instance, I had no clue that the development of software could be done
using mailing lists. And before Outreachy, I had never used IRC before, nor
ever used email to send patches -I had never even made a patch.
Anyway, what motivated me to apply to Outreachy was that I wanted to see with my own eyes how a free software community works and what it's like to be part of one. Besides that, I was also very motivated by my undergraduate research group.
3.2 GNU Guix
During the initial application process, Guix projects caught my eyes because the language used was Scheme. Coincidence or not, it was the language used in one of my college subjects - Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages. I had liked it, so I thought it could be a good opportunity to see Scheme in practice and also learn more about it.
Guix is described as an "advanced distribution of the GNU operating system", but you can also use it as a package manager on top of a foreign distro. I use it along with Ubuntu. For my internship, I'll add a subcommand to see the history of all packages, making it easier to browse through different package versions.