In Which I Find Out I Will Be an Outreachy Intern

At heart, I’m probably what you’d call a pessimist. I’m sure some of that comes from my mom, an immigrant from a country that has a long history of being torn apart by colonialism and civil war. That kind of circumstance often creates a kind of level-headedness about aspirations of success.

While I definitely would put forth that I work hard toward achieving my goals, and I certainly have dreams, I generally don’t allow myself to get caught up in big hopes as I go about my day to day. I also don’t linger on things–as soon as one thing is done, I think about the next, and the next, and the next. I always have 3-5 projects in various states of completion up in the air at all times that I’m actively working on. If something doesn’t pan out in one arena, I do my best to forget it and move on.

And while there are things about this approach that probably need changing–I really have to learn to enjoy my successes more, for one, and give myself more credit–one of the most comical effects is that as I generally don’t assume I’ll be successful in an endeavor, I’m often really surprised when I am–and often not even around to find out I actually managed to do something!

Case in point:

Earlier this year, I found out about the Outreachy internship–a really awesome non-profit project designed to increase diversity in tech by connecting potential interns with mentors from (primarily open source) software communities. In addition to being a paid opportunity, the internship is remote, which is amazing for people like me that live in communities that don’t have a strong tech presence. (We have … uh … *peeks out window*)

As a mostly front-end website creator that has been moving into Python programming and Django, this looked like a really cool opportunity–and I had the benefit of a friend in tech, who not only believe in me strongly, but would start all of our conversations/texts/emails with some variant of So when you apply for this internship that I’m not going to let you talk yourself out of …..

(Hi, Rachell!)

So I did it! I applied for the project, actually learned to use the command line and git (yes, I was previously using VSCode in Windows; I can feel your judgmental stares), and made my very first open-source contribution, to the Tor Project Gitlab Lobby. Along the way, I got to meet some cool people, chat with mentors, and make my very FIRST APPROVED PULL REQUEST.

And I’ll be honest–I needed that.

For me, like it was for many, 2020 was a rough year. I used to work in healthcare, until I got sick with presumptive COVID in March. This was early enough that (at least in my area) testing was almost impossible if you didn’t have contact with a known case or a recent travel history. It took me months to recover–during which time I was unable to work in my field or do pretty much anything. I was laid up and needed something to do (and also to make money), so I went back to making websites (mostly WordPress.) And my super awesome tech friend was like, yeah, those are nice, but you should learn to program–which she had been telling me for, um, four years, now?

And one day, I opened my mail to find a package from her, with a little yellow book called Crash Course Python, and I figured, hey, why not, and cracked it open–

And just like that, I was hooked. I’d had this idea in my head that programming was math–and while sure, there’s math, the key factor I was missing was the second part of the phrase: programming language.

And boy, do I love me some languages. Learning foreign languages was my hobby for most of my late teens and twenties–including languages without a base in Latin. I love that lightbulb moment of breaking down something that feels familiar into a new classification system and figuring out how to navigate or communicate in it.

You know what my other favorite thing is? Solving puzzles.

(Yeah, I should have put this together earlier. I’m dumb like that sometimes.)

I spent the next few months programming obsessively. My partner would come home from work to find me hunched in front of the computer, only to discover that I had not eaten or showered yet. I stayed up really late most nights trying to get just one more thing to work. I finished the book and found Dr. Chuck’s python course on Coursera and did that entire thing, started the Django for everyone course, and then just as I was thinking, man, where do I go from here, Outreachy showed up in my newsfeed and I had a new thing to obssess about.

So you can understand, now, how it felt getting my first pull request approved to the Gitlab Lobby for Tor Project. It felt like redemption. It felt like, wow, maybe I can do this.

Once the contribution period closed and all the applications were in, I promptly assumed I would not be chosen as an intern and forgot ALL about it. (Okay, I didn’t actually forget. I shoved this internship into the quiet place in my head where all my secret dreams are.) But I felt way smarter than I had before, and I spent some time learning some new skills, including playing with class-based views in Django so that I could roll out my website portfolio in Django Bakery (static site generation for the WIN), as well as working on a text-based adventure game I’m putting together that doesn’t rely on maps or cardinal directions, because I’m terrible at that. I also put in for other jobs, and lined up some more contracting work.

When the announcement came in for the Outreachy interns, get this: I didn’t even check it. I was so sure that I had not, in fact, gotten in, that I swiped away the notification and went back to typing … something.

A few hours later, I got a weird feeling in the back of my head, the hey, you forgot something important kind of feeling, so I went back into my email, and there was the Outreachy notification again, and I thought, hey, why not? At least, there will be some cool people to follow in Twitter, and–

Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?!?! Tor Project wants to accept me as an intern???

(My very first thought was, Did they make a mistake sending out these emails?)

So then I hopped on IRC, and yep, one of the project mentors had messaged me almost an entire day earlier, and I had just been going about my business, no idea that I’d already been accepted.

SO YES! I, MARIA VIOLANTE, will be an Outreachy Intern from December to March, working with the Tor Project on an anonymous ticket handling project.

I AM INCREDIBLY (belatedly) EXCITED!