Hellen Chemtai: Career Growth Through Open Source: A Personal Journey

Hello world ! I am an intern at Outreachy working with the Debian OpenQA team on images testing. We get to know what career opportunities awaits us when we work on open source projects. In open source, we are constantly learning. The community has different sets of skills and a large network of people.

So, how did I start off in this internship

I entered the community with the these skills:

• MERN (Mongo DB, Express JS , React JS and Node JS) – for web development
• Linux and Shell Scripting – for some administrative purposes
• Containerization using Google Cloud
• Operating Systems
• A learning passion for Open Source – I contributed to some open source work in the past but it was in terms of documentation and bug hunting

I was a newbie at OpenQA but, I had a month to learn and contribute. Time is a critical resource but so is understanding what you are doing. I followed the installations instructions given but whenever I got errors, I had to research why I got the errors. I took time to understand errors I was solving then continued on with the tasks I wanted to do. I communicated my logic and understanding while working on the task and awaited reviews and feedback. Within a span of two months I had learned a lot by practicing and testing.

The skills I gained

As of today, I gained these technical skills from my work with Debian OpenQA team.

• Perl – the tests that we run are written in this language
• Ansible configuration – ansible configurations and settings for the machines the team runs
• Git – this is needed for code versioning and diving tasks into different branches
• Linux – shell scripting and working with the Debian Operating system
• Virtual Machines and Operating Systems – I constantly view how different operating systems are booted and run on virtual machines during testing
• Testing – I keep watch of needles and ensure the tests work as required
• Debian – I use a Debian system to run my Virtual Machines
• OpenQA – the tool that is used to automate testing of Images

With open source comes the need of constant communication. The community is diverse and the team is usually on different time zones. These are some of the soft / social skills I gained when working with the team

• Communication – this is essential especially in taking tasks with confidence, talking about issues encountered and stating the progress of the tasks
• Interpersonal skills – this is for general communication within the community
• Flexibility – we have to adapt to changes because we are a community of different people with different skills

With these skills and the willingness to learn , open source is a great area to focus on . Aside from your career you will extend your network. My interests are set on open source and Linux in general. Working with a wider network has really skilled me up and I will continue learning. Working with the Debian OpenQA team has been very great. The team is great at communication and I learn every day. The knowledge I gain from the team is helping me build a great career in open source.