In this article, I'm going to talk about my struggles as an intern, and I hope at the end, you'll get to understand that everybody struggles 🤗.
So I've been an intern with Debian for about four weeks now through the outreachy internship program. It's been fascinating and challenging. My project for the internship is based on packaging OpenPGP for Debian. In other to do that, we first have to package dependencies required by OpenPGP.
Let's break down my struggles a little bit. When I first read the project description during the contribution phase, I had no idea what Debian packaging was about. I never thought I'll be able to understand it. But I had to learn, I was determined to learn. Through the help of my mentors and the resources available, I was able to make it through the contribution phase despite my limited experience.
The first few weeks of the internship proper came with so many frustrations which pushed me to further learning. I had started packaging a dependency hoping to finish it in no time, but it wasn't so easy. I ended up completing my first package towards the end of the month and I can never forget the relief I felt when I did. It didn't matter to me that it took so much time. All that mattered was, I finished.
This experience made me realize one thing. It might take longer than we plan to achieve our goal. However, what's important is that we learn in the process. And never forget that there's always light at the end of the tunnel ✌️.