Everybody struggles

In the initial Outreachy tasks, as anticipated, I was struggling to figure out many things. Most of the times, a chat with the mentor helped me to get a way to solve them.

What were you stuck on?

I had a difficulty in understanding the complete ecosystem by itself to work on the task. My initial task was to create a destination configurable for the logs to be written. It sounds very easy now as I understand it better. But when I happened to start it, I also had to understand many things around the Jenkins configurations to visualize it.

Why was it confusing or hard?

It wasn’t hard after the mentor helped me with few examples that implemented the similar things. I was able to understand them.

Where did you search for help?

I searched many stackoverflow questions that implemented similar things but not as a part of Jenkins system.

Were you hesitant to reach out for help, and if so, why were you hesitant?

Yeah! I was afraid of asking very lame questions to the mentor. As this is the first time, I am ever working with people of other organizations and remotely, I was also very concerned if I may take much of their time in asking questions.

What happened when you reached out for help?

All the time, I got an immediate help and also examples to follow from to work on the tasks.

What would you tell someone who is worried about asking for help?

It is good to search online for your answers. But after some time, it is always better to let your mentor know that you’re stuck.