Yessss. You’ve read that right. Together with other 53 people from several countries, I was accepted for an internship for the Outreachy December-March round, to work with the Open Information Security Foundation, on their Suricata project “Convert protocol from C to Rust”.
If you know me, chances are that you are not familiar with most of those words. If you just arrived here, you may know those, but probably have no idea of who I am. That’s why I’m writing this post – to introduce myself and also to talk a bit about Outreachy awesome initiative, and the project I’ll be working on for the next three months.
First things first: my name is Juliana. I am a Brazilian, currently living in Portugal. Here, I have mostly worked at contact centres, regardless of my previous experiences with software development, startups (customer development) and translation/proof reading. Just… living the immigrant life.
In Brazil, I lived most of my life in Salvador/BA. There, I graduated as an Information Systems Bachelor in 2014, and even before that I was already trying to use my skills and work as a means to somehow give some retribution for the opportunities I have had, and help to shape the world to a better place, in broader terms. With that in mind, I have worked with entrepreneurship and startups; at the Science, Technology and Innovation’s Bahia’s Secretariat (in an ambitious project to bring access to computers and internet to impoverished communities throughout most of that enormous state); with a group of four (including myself) great women who try to contribute to inspire young women into understanding they can also have an active role in technology, not just as consumers, but also as creators, makers, developers (this dear initiative is called OxenTI Menina).
Among the many things or treats important to me, I think that three core values are Community, Contribution, and Sharing.
Community is key, for I believe we are not alone in this world, as seen in the Lion King – or with the Ubuntu philosophy: we are all connected, I am because you are. I grow, when I am part of a welcoming, strong community. I value and respect that, and want to contribute to the communities I’m a part of, be that within my work community, my extended family, the world we live in, with all the diversity that there is within – I want to help the environment I am to be better to everyone, and I try to actively contribute to that, be it with small or bigger actions. And to me, sharing is directly connected to that. When we share – knowledge, stories, a good laugh, food, a hug, the opportunities we have – we strengthen our communities. And we become stronger. Everyone gets the chance of having a better experience or cooler opportunities.
To me, Outreachy seemed like an awesome opportunity to exercise somehow those values, while getting closer to other topics that are key to me: inclusion and diversity. From a more personal perspective, it also meant having the chance to study and get back on track with my developer skills, in order to improve my chances of finding a good, meaningful job, while doing cool stuff, with hopefully cool and interesting people. As I believe in sharing, I also understand the importance of free software, and… if you get the chance to be in an initiave supporting so many important values, well, you have to try, right?
Well… I am not very good at believing in myself and my potential, and it had been a while since I had really worked with software. Therefore, I really want to say how grateful I am to have had some “background” mentors/advisors who helped either in not giving up before trying and understanding that, yes, I could be a part of Outreachy community, or with more technical aspects of the Application process: José Grimaldo; one of myiolab.com founders and some others were a strong point to prevent me from stopping believing that I could do that. As I said – we are not alone. They are my “personal community” that help me go further.
May this Outreachy improve my confidence, so I can help other people reach more. Yay!
