Outreachy Internship 2024 Updates
Thu, 09-May-2024 by
Makoto Nozaki
edit post
< program which provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation.
We have just finished the intern selection process, which turned out to be harder compared to the previous years. I’ll explain the reasons below.
### It was harder because we got multiple high quality project proposals
Each year, we call for project ideas from the Perl/Raku community. Project proposer is required to commit to mentoring an intern from May to August. Given the significant commitment involved, it’s not uncommon for us to find suitable projects.
Fortunately, this year, we got two promising project proposals. The Foundation’s financial situation did not allow us to sponsor both projects, so we had to make the tough decision to support only one project.
After careful consideration, the Board has elected to sponsor [Open Food Fact](https://world.openfoodfacts.org/)’s Perl project, titled *“Extend Open Food Facts to enable food manufacturers to open data and improve food product quality.”*
### It was harder because more people showed up
Having more projects means we were able to attract more intern candidates. Across the two projects, more than 50 people showed interest and initiated contributions. Among them, 21 individuals actually created pull requests before the selection process.
Needless to say, it's hard work for the mentors to help dozens of candidates. They taught these intern candidates how to code and guided them through creating pull requests. On the applicants’ side, I am amazed that they worked hard to learn Perl and became proficient enough to create pull requests and make real improvements to the systems.
### And the final selection was harder because we had more applicants
After the contribution process, we got an application from 14 people. It was obviously hard for the mentors to select one from so many good applicants. In the next post, Stéphane Gigandet will introduce our new intern to the community.
I wish all the best to the mentors, Stéphane and Alex, and our new intern.
### Voice from the applicants
"In the journey to understand Perl better, I wanted to know what are its most wide applications, one of them being a web scraper. It's because Perl's strong support for regular expressions and built-in text manipulation functions make it well-suited for tasks like web scraping, where parsing and transforming text are essential. I took inspiration from various web scraping projects available on the internet to gain insights into the process and developed a lyrics scraper."
"I'm currently diving into Perl, and I see this as a fantastic chance to enrich my coding skills. I've thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in it and have had the opportunity to explore various technologies like Docker and more."
"I have had the opportunity to experience Perl firsthand and have come to appreciate its significance in web development, on which I have worked. During my second year, I was searching for popular languages in backend development and found out about Perl, whose syntax was somewhat like C and Python. I didn't have any previous experience working with Perl, but now I have gained a deep understanding of its importance and impact on backend development and data processing."
"In this pull request, I made a significant stride in improving the quality and maintainability of our Perl codebase by integrating Perl::Critic, a powerful static code analysis tool."
"I've learned a whole lot about Perl and some of its frameworks such as Dancer2 (a surprisingly simple framework I've come to fall in love with)."
]]>
Comments (0)
