Hello everyone, I am here again with the last Blog of my journey as an Outreachy intern. For those who don’t know me , I am Neelima Mohanty , selected as an Outreachy intern at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) for the May to August Cohort. If you are new to my blog then make sure you read my previous Outreachy Blogs before going through this blog post.

Just 3 months ago I received an email at my inbox from the Outreachy organizers according to which I got selected as an intern at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team for the May to August 2023 cohort . And look today my internship is going to end in just two days . So I planned to take you all into a rollercoaster ride of my internship journey .

In the first month I was welcomed by my mentors Rob Savoye and Petya Kangalova where Petya introduced me about the HOT Community . Next I was assigned with many github issues from the projects FMTM and osm-fieldwork by my mentor Rob . I still remember Rob saying me “ Don’t get overwhelmed by seeing the number of issues assigned . Just pick one and start working now and you don’t have to complete all . Take your time and complete only as much as you can comfortably” . These words were so relaxing for me .

Throughout the months of June and July , I and my mentors worked together . I created PRs and they reviewed it , left comments . I worked on them and finally they merged them . One great thing that I always liked and appreciate is that Petya and Rob always respond quickly to my messages and Rob reviews my PRs in seconds in the most perfect way . I also worked with other members of HOT like Kshitij and Omran for another HOT project called fAIr.

In the last month of my internship Petya and Rob offered me an opportunity to be a co-speaker at the Lightning Talk for the FMTM project at Code for All Summit which I accepted and completed . It will be released on 20th September 2023 on Code for All You tube channel and social media handles. Do watch it .

Yesterday Outreachy organizers had organized a Wrap up chat with all the May to August 2023 cohort interns and mentors where we gave appreciations to our mentors and the organizers gave us a happy farewell.

As now the internship has come to an end , I am invited to attend the Wrap-up Social Event Virtual Meet by Outreachy on 24th August 2023. And my internship ends on 25th August 2023.

My mentors have also scheduled a Wrap-up meet for me on 29th August 2023 in which personally I and mentors will talk about my Outreachy journey and also future opportunities. I am very excited for both the upcoming events.

I thank Outreachy and HOT tech team for giving me such a wonderful opportunity. Finally a huge shoutout to my mentors Rob Savoye and Petya Kangalova for being with me and assisting me at every step of my journey as an intern . That’s it friends , my Outreachy internship journey ends here. Bye 😊

Hello everyone, I am here again with the 5th Blog of my journey as an Outreachy intern. For those who don’t know me , I am Neelima Mohanty , selected as an Outreachy intern at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) for the May to August Cohort. If you are new to my blog then make sure you read my previous Outreachy Blogs before going through this blog post.

This is the second last week of my Outreachy internship and I almost feel like I am a part of the HOT Community or in other words I feel like I know many members of HOT already. Apart from my mentors Rob Savoye and Petya Kangalova , the list of members whom I know are Kshitij Raj Sharma , Omran Najjar , Susmina Manandhar and Sam Woodcock . Informal chats with all these people made me more familiar with this community. Let me introduce all of them with you and what I have learnt from the informal chats with them.

Kshitij and Omran are part of the dev team for fAIr project of HOT . I learnt a lot from each one of them about backend and frontend of that project and understood their work to implement AI in the process of mapping .

I already have written about my interaction with Sam Woodcock in my 2nd Blog . But that was how we came to know each other for the first time . Whereas when I got selected as an Intern , he sent me a message introducing himself and told me that he would like to help me in my technical documentation work in FMTM if I face any issues . Then I came to know that he had been volunteering for FMTM since a long time.

And finally and very recently I met with Susmina Manandhar from Nepal who work as an Associate Project Manager at NAXA one of the partners of HOT . We together worked for two weeks and prepared the Lightning Talk Video of the FMTM project for Code for All summit. While in these two weeks , we met almost everyday and not just talked about work but she also shared about herself and her University days .

How can I miss the part that every week when I meet with my mentors we always talk about a lot stuff which is informal like Open source conferences , work opportunities and even about coffee 😊. In fact Petya and Rob are the ones who gave me the opportunity to speak in the Lightning Talk at Code for All Summit which is a evidence our Informal chats.

Hello everyone, I am here again with the 4th Blog of my journey as an Outreachy intern. For those who don’t know me , I am Neelima Mohanty , selected as an Outreachy intern at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) for the May to August Cohort. If you are new to my blog then make sure you read my previous Outreachy Blogs before going through this blog post.

This blog post will help you to know me better and offer me job or internship opportunity according to my skills after I complete my Outreachy internship.

My skills and experience

Being a Computer Science and Engineering Student , I have learned a list of technical skills and am still learning more. As I believe that learning without implementation is worthless thus I have had experience of each skill that I have learned in the form of internships in various organisations. I welcome everyone here to have a look into my Resume to know about my experiences and skills in detail.

Opportunities I am looking for

I am looking for developer roles as well as technical writer roles . I will be interested to work and assist on job or internship related to any of the following domains : web development , app development , AI/ML , Cloud Computing or technical writing. I am eager to contribute my skills and assist in any capacity within these areas.

What makes me Unique for your organisation?

Below are some of my interpersonal skills which I consider as my strengths for an job/internship opportunity:

• Team leadership and Team spirit I already have the experience of being a team leader to a team during few internships and projects . So I respect the concept of teamwork and collaboration.

• Communication I consider communication is a cornerstone of a successful job environment. It enhances teamwork, information sharing, relationship-building, performance management, and leadership effectiveness. Strong communication skills contribute to a positive work culture, increased productivity, and successful outcomes in the workplace.

• Problem solving skills I also have problem-solving skills that are highly valuable in a job environment as they enable individuals to identify, analyze, and find effective solutions to various challenges and obstacles.

Other important points

Below are my preferences regarding a job/internship opportunity:

• Availability to Start : I am available to work just after the Outreachy May to August - 2023 internship .
• Work location : I would prefer remote job/internship more over on-location job/internship as of now.
• Employment Type : Although both full time and part-time work are fine for me but as currently I am a student so I will prefer part-time job/internship.
• Languages I speak : From childhood till now my top prioritised language has been English as I have studied in English medium school and University . I am fluent in both speaking ang writing in English . Other than that I also know my National language Hindi.

So if you think my skills match the requirements of the job/internship at your community or organisation please let me know and offer it to me if I am eligible . I would also like to thank my mentors Rob Savoye and Petya Kangalova again for being with me and assisting me at every step of my journey as an intern . That’s it friends , meet you next time with Blog 5. Till then bye 😊

Hello everyone, I am here again with the 3rd Blog of my journey as an Outreachy intern. For those who don’t know me , I am Neelima Mohanty , selected as an Outreachy intern at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) for the May to August Cohort. If you are new to my blog then make sure you read my Blog 1 and Blog 2 before going through this blog post.

Recently a person named Berra Karaman messaged me on LinkedIn that she is interested in applying as an Outreachy intern and wished to know more about my application and journey .

On reading her message , I thought that not only she , many other applicants also must be wondering about applying to Outreachy and some may also be thinking to apply to work at the organisation I am working at as an Outreachy intern. So , I decided to introduce my community to a newcomer who decides to apply in HOT(Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team) as an intern in the upcoming Outreachy cohorts.

Here are some important perks of being an Outreachy intern at HOT

• Skill Enhancement

This is a place where your skills are not only appreciated but also allowed to implement them at a fixed paced , not too slow and not too fast. My mentors never compel me to hurriedly complete a task . Of course deadlines are set and we together try our best to complete the tasks in an efficient manner before the deadline but if it gets completed partially then we again conduct a meeting , discuss the agenda and make changes accordingly to the schedule in order to complete the work .

• All about Open Source

Other than working on the project , I get to learn a lot new things related to open source and the community . For instance , my mentor Rob Savoye shared his experience of attending the SOTM-US-2023 and Petya Kangalova shared every single details of the open source conference FOSS4G which she recently attended . They give me tips regarding these conferences and the open source community.

• No Gender Discrimination

Once my mentor Petya said that HOT gives equal importance to both male and female workers and that the number of women working here is no less than the number of male employees. I myself have met and heard three such great people who play a pivotal role in the organisation’s development . They are Synne Marion Olsen , Ramya Ragupathy and my mentor Petya Kangalova. As a female intern myself I can give you a thumbs up for the way women are treated here.

So if you are a newcomer and your skills match the requirements of the next project that HOT comes up in the upcoming Outreachy cohorts , then I suggest you to surely give it a try . I would also like to thank my mentors Rob Savoye and Petya Kangalova again for being with me and assisting me at every step of my journey as an intern . That’s it friends , meet you next time with Blog 3. Till then bye 😊

While everyone struggles , I chose to embrace the struggle.

Hello everyone, I am here again with the 2nd Blog of my journey as an Outreachy intern. For those who don’t know me , I am Neelima Mohanty , selected as an Outreachy intern at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) for the May to August Cohort. If you are new to my blog then make sure you read my Blog 1 before going through this blog post.

How many of you have come across new terms while contributing to open source communities? I guess everyone has . And do you remember how did you cope with it? As you think of all this , I will narrate you one such experience of mine during the contribution phase of Outreachy during March 2023 .

While raising a PR to add comments to the code of the osm-fieldwork repo as part of technical documentation , my mentor Rob Savoye reviewed it and said me that he liked the thought of adding comments to the code but it was not the right way. I would like to quote his words “Thanks for adding comments. We usually don’t need to comment write() and open(), as it’s obvious. If you want to get really deep into commenting source code, we want to add support for sphinx.This adds a comment block for each class and method. This would require you read and gain some understanding of the code itself, which is not a bad thing. We use sphinx for other python projects.”

On researching according to his words , I came across a new term “Auto-Documentation” which is also known as “auto-docs” in short. Then I raised an issue on adding auto-docs to the source code using sphinx so that Rob and other members of the HOTOSM community could respond . Reading this one of the important members of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team , Sam Woodcock said “My recommendation would be mkdocs instead of Sphinx. I have always found it much easier to implement and manage.Plus it’s nice to have readable markdown at the end, rather than reStructuredText.The docstrings can be in any style: Google (my choice), numpy, reStructuredText.This would only be a change to the auto documentation tooling.It would be great to update the function parameters at the same time to include type hinting (as this helps auto doc generation).”.

Having the suggestions of both Rob and Sam , I researched and learnt a lot of subtopics coming under the topic “Auto-docs” such as “docstrings” and “type hinting”. I researched on how to implement auto-docs using mkdocs and sphinx. While the research on using which of the above two will be best for our code is still on and I will be updating you on it in one of the upcoming blogs but one thing is clear that “Auto-Documentation” was the first new vocabulary term I have learnt after I applied to Outreachy.

For those who are also new to this term , I am sharing below links to a few resources which have helped me and will help you too .

1.https://towardsdatascience.com/auto-docs-for-python-b545ce372e2d

2.https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/

3.https://www.mkdocs.org/

At the end of this blog , I want to thank my mentor Rob Savoye and also Sam Woodcock for playing major roles in making me learn such a wonderful part of technical documentation . I would also like to thank my mentors Rob Savoye and Petya Kangalova again for being with me and assisting me at every step of my journey as an intern since the last two weeks. That’s it friends , meet you next time with Blog 3. Till then bye 😊

Hello everyone, myself Neelima Mohanty , currently pursuing my BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from Odisha University of Technology and Research , Bhubaneswar , Odisha , India. I am a Sophomore (2nd year) . I have been selected as an Outreachy intern at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) for the May to August Cohort.

My Core Values which motivated me to apply to Outreachy

* Learning and Implementation

Once Benjamin Franklin had said “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” Almost all the tech skills that I have learnt till date have implementations tied along with them. My internships , trainings and small projects are all evidences of the fact that I believe in a continuous and comprehensive process of learning and implementation. I applied to Outreachy on the same ray of hope that each time I make a contribution I will learn something new and implement it.

* Transparency

Quoting the line of Dalai Lama “A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.” I always like the workplaces which are transparent and where the process of judgement is crystal clear . Such a place is Outreachy and also the organisation I had applied for (HOTOSM) along with my mentors Petya Kangalova and Rob Savoye. The three steps of Outreachy Open Source program – initial application , contribution period with final application and the internship period shows how Outreachy follows transparency and this really impressed me.

* Teamwork

“Teamwork makes the dream work” said by Bang Gae. During the contribution period of Outreachy , I came across my amazing mentors Petya Kangalova and Rob Savoye who guided me along every step and are still guiding me. Talking to them I felt like if I get selected , we will form a great team together. And here I am with me dream fulfilled.

Another great reason for which I applied to Outreachy is to represent the girls in my country and the world, in this tech industry as well as open source platform.

At the end of this blog , I want to thank Outreachy for giving me this opportunity to be a part of this wonderful program and also to share my thoughts . I would also like to thank my mentors Petya Kangalova and Rob Savoye. Ofcourse my hardwork and my parents’ blessings have a great role in my achievement. That’s it friends , meet you next time with Blog 2. Till then bye 😊