Meet the latest Outreachy and Ushahidi intern

Cover image from NicePNG.

Original post on hashnode written May 30, 2021.

Blogging is part of the Outreachy intern's experience. This is the first blog post about me, my core values, what motivated me to apply for Outreachy and my first week working at Ushahidi.

Introducing myself

Hi, my name is Obiagba Mary. I am from and reside in Nigeria. I studied accounting and graduated from the University of Benin, Edo State, Nigeria in 2014. I also took a postgraduate diploma in music degree at the University of Lagos in 2018, thinking I would switch to music. But here I am, almost always in front of my computer, coding 😌 How I got into tech is a story for another day, but here's a summary.

I was a home music theory and guitar tutor at the time I wrote my first line of HTML (December 2018). My knees/legs were giving me issues, movement was limited, stopped activities that required me to move around too often in the end. I picked up coding through my siblings who are techies, who got me resources to start learning with. I wasn't consistent at first and was just learning for fun. Also so that I'm not idle, while I figured out what's next. I got serious with it in 2020, and since then have found and benefited from remote learning and scholarship opportunities in tech.

I love two things: God and the acoustic guitar (I haven't played it in a while though; I should resume playing now that I'm starting to achieve my tech goals).

Core values important to me

Three (3) core values important to me are growth, contribution and faith. There are more but will talk about these 3 in this post.

Growth: Building habits that lead to continuous development and improvement, in whatever I do.

Contribution: How do I, through and in the process of growing, help others grow? - this I'm always conscious about.

Faith: Faith in God, incorporated in every aspect of my life. Respecting that others may not believe in who or what I believe in. And trusting God to make himself known to them by himself in his own time, instead of making them feel uncomfortable around me.

What motivated me to apply for Outreachy?

GADS2020 mentors and learners who tagged me on Twitter or sent the application link to me, I can't thank you all enough. The first time I applied for Outreachy, it was because I wanted to try out something new. The goal was to find a real-world application, to use the things I learnt at the Google Africa Developer Scholarship 2020 (GADS2020) program. This was in October 2020. Before this time, I have never contributed to open source before.

The second time (February 2021), I applied because of how the previous contribution period helped me grow. Not just the code writing or its impact on my portfolio/personal projects, but also in relating with other people. For the first time in my life, I wasn't seeing other applicants as rivals or competitors. We were encouraged to help each other out. I loved the atmosphere created by the Ushahidi mentors (Anna and Rowasc), and this also encouraged me to apply and contribute to Ushahidi again, whether I get selected or not (only Anna is a mentor this time).

First week at Ushahidi

I'm working on the project - "Improve performance on the Ushahidi Platform Client". Met with my mentor, Anna Losif, on Monday 24th via google meet (I've been looking forward to the day I would meet her since last year). It was a very friendly meeting. She put me through all I needed to get started and shared resources with me to set up for pair programming when the need comes. We created the project board together on Github, and I got all my questions answered.

There's not much about the first week. I spent most of it trying to sort out the things I needed to submit to Outreachy. The task for the first week was quite easy (at least it looks so because I submitted a pull request for it on time, lol) - I worked on removing unused dependencies in the codebase. My mentor and one other team member, Wisdom Ebong, were really helpful during this period. I've also interacted with David Losada too. I get to meet the rest of the Ushahidi team this week - really excited about this.

Conclusion

So that's it about me, my journey to Outreachy and Ushahidi, and the summary of what the first week was like. I hope to share with you, my struggles and accomplishments in the next couple of weeks. You can also contribute to Ushahidi on Github.

Find me on Github, Twitter and/or LinkedIn.

Next Outreachy article: Everybody struggles.