My Outreachy Journey- Everybody Struggles
Everyone struggles, strength comes from struggle. When you learn to see your struggles as opportunities to become stronger, better, wiser, then your thinking shifts from ‘I can’t do this’ to ‘I must do this.’ This is the mentality I have been having for these past weeks of my Internship with CHAOSS. It has been a tussle for me because I had to configure a lot of tools, Install new operating system, learn new technologies before I could move on with my task. Sharing my struggles with my mentors really helped me overcome them.
During the third week of my Internship my task was to host Weblate locally using docker. I had a lot of issues;
- I wasn’t familiar with Weblate because i haven’t worked with any translation tool before.
- I had to install and configure Windows Subsystem for Linux, this really took a lot of my time because I kept on having errors on Windows PowerShell.
- Installing and configuring Docker-Compose to run on WSL2 was challenging because Docker-compose for Windows 10 requires the latest update, so I had to run a series of updates on my system.
- Understanding Weblate config files and documentation was a little challenging.
I was able to handle these Issues by talking with my team, they were really helpful. They helped break these Issues down for me into bits for easy understanding. The mistake I made earlier was trying to solve the puzzle on my own. When faced with a lot of Issues we should always talk to others they might give you steps on how to go about it or give you a headstart on what exactly should be done.
These problems have thought me a lot of lessons. When faced with any issue this is how I handle it;
- Ask my mentors for help, I also ask them to explain the solution using a scenario based example for easy understanding.
- Search for help online.
- Read the documentation of the tool i want to work with.
- Ask for help from the Community.
We all struggle in one way or the other, Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, It’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new.
