Hi! I am Harshita, a 20-year student from New Delhi, India. I am currently pursuing B.Tech in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. In my free time, I love to read books, listen to my not so happy playlist and go out for an occasional jog.
For those of you that are new here, here’s a little peek-a-boo: I got selected as an Outreachy Intern for CNCF Tracing in the May’21 cohort. This blog will serve as a tool to document my learning and experience throughout my internship.
Now, to tell you a little bit about myself, there are few values that I would like to term as my core values. These for me are determination and growth.
I value determination. I have come to understand that success arrives at your doorstep only if you give it all to pave the way to come to you. Half-hearted effort won’t necessarily leave you with much learning. Determination prepares you for failure, on your road to success, and that is why, I value it so much.
Secondly, growth is something I value a lot. Whenever I associate myself with a task or project, I am of the mindset that when I am done with the task, I will be an individual with a better understanding and knowledge of the task. I like to challenge myself in ways that will help me grow and become a better person with more to give back to the society.
My core values resonated with what Outreachy tries to achieve through its internships, and hence played a huge part in my Outreachy journey.
So what is Outreachy?
Now, that I have mentioned this initiative a number of times, let me formally tell you what it is. Outreachy is one of the most wonderful open source programs out there. I strongly suggest you check out the website here. To summarize the content on the website, Outreachy provides remote paid internships to individuals that are subject to systematic bias in the society. Internships run in two cohorts: 1) May to August and 2) December to March and the selected interns receive a total stipend of $6,000 USD.
There are plenty of organizations to choose from, and the projects span a number of topics like graphic design, web development, user advocacy, performance testing, documentation and data science. Since the projects are open-source, there is plenty of support from the community and mentors.
What was my motivation behind applying to Outreachy?
For me, the motivation was simple, I wanted to learn and grow as a person and I absolutely love open source. I first saw the Outreachy website in December 2020. Hailing from the northern hemisphere, I was required to apply to the May cohort. So I waited for the applications to open up in February and till then worked on improving my skill set. Outreachy has projects in different areas from a very diverse set of organizations. Motivation to work on them was not hard to find, as I believed that they would push me to new boundaries and prepare me practically for a job in tech.
Some of the past interns further reasoned me to join the program and told me how amazing their experience had been. Now being an intern myself, I can say that I totally agree with their words, it is indeed a beautiful experience!
Fast forward to the present day: I am starting my journey with the CNCF Tracing community in a project to compare performance between the OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing instrumentation libraries. Performance testing is something I have only briefly done before, so, there is tons of learning involved.
In my next blog post, I will talk about the basics of performance testing. Stay tuned to learn more about my Outreachy journey!
Harshita Srinivas 