Outreachy, December 2021-March 2022

Mentoring

Every time I finish a mentorship, I read my blog posts about previous mentorships. Almost every time I finish a mentorship I write that I’ll probably take a break from mentoring for a while, but then I don’t. 😅

Introduction

For the last few months I have been mentoring Osama Ahmed Tahir. He was an Outreachy Round 23 intern. He was working on refactoring WebdriverIO tests from sync to async mode. That was a very challenging task. Both of us didn’t know much about async/await when the internship started.

As I was preparing for this blog post, I checked when was the first time I’ve met Osama. Looks like the first interaction we had was on Zulip in October 2021. He introduced himself and asked a question. We’ve had many conversations since and got to know each other pretty well.

Tasks

He created 23 tasks in Phabricator (our task tracking tool) and resolved 13 of them. Besides his main task, he also worked on several small side projects. An interesting one was deleting invisible Unicode characters. He also worked on updating documentation for our local development environment.

Commits

Osama created 45 commits in Gerrit, our code review tool. 16 of those commits are merged so far. A notable commit is 730546 for the MediaWiki Core repository that needed 69 updates before it was merged. We needed 3 more follow up commits to finish the task in that repository. 😬

Besides his main project, notable commits include releasing a new version of an npm package and fixing a dependency in one of our projects.

Communication

Osama has documented the internship both on his personal blog and on my team blog. We have used Zulip for chat and Google Meet for video meetings.

Conclusion

I really like mentoring. I learn something new with each intern I mentor. I hope they also learn something from me.