During the application and contribution phases of the Outreachy Internship, Outreachy held a couple of twitter spaces to offer guidance to potential applicants. The speakers, honorable mention Sage and Omotola, encouraged us to take the leap of faith, and apply to the various Open-Source projects. I remember this continuous encouragement helping me work through my imposter syndrome and pushing me until the last day when I made my final application for an internship at Project JupyterHub.

In the first week of the internship, I felt overwhelmed. This was quickly alleviated by my first email conversation with my mentor offering a congratulatory message, guidance and a list of first steps to help me settle in. The first meeting via video chat that same week further soothed my anxiety as she helped me map out a strategy for handling the project.

The strategy was helpful as it gave me a sense of direction. However, the JupyterHub codebase is massive and I just had to dive in head first. I remember having this need to impress. I had many questions relating to the codebase but found myself mulling over them and researching for hours and hours to exhaustion. And that's where we sometimes go wrong. I had to come to a point of realizing that I needed to focus on learning and not impressing. And the only way I could learn was by finding the confidence to admit to myself that I do not know nor need to know everything. Thus my learning journey began by asking questions, and a lot of them.

In my second and third weeks, I needed to create a skeleton of the repository in which we would build the JupyterHub Pytest Plugin. This included creating initial directories and files that would be essential for the project. It is no surprise then that we started with the project documentation. This brings me to an open-source tool that has lightened the workload within Project JupyterHub concerning the vital work of providing documentation for contributors and users: Sphinx. Sphinx is a powerful documentation generator that has many great features for writing technical documentation. It generates web pages, printable PDFs, documents for e-readers (ePub), and more all from the same sources and with simple steps. To learn more and get started with Sphinx, follow this link.

My mentor made me aware of the Sphinx documenting tool and I doubt any amount of googling would have ever made it known to me. This is to say that you don't know what you don't know and that is where the community comes in clutch. The sense of community within Project JupyterHub is a really beautiful thing and is one of the reasons I am enjoying working with Open-Source.

I hope to keep glowing and growing as a developer within the Open-Source community.

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