Woke up in the morning with a sense of guilt.
In this way Candy Tsai - Debian Outreachy intern of current round - began her story about difficulties of working remotely. As soon as I saw this, I thought - exactly my feelings.
Despite the fact that when my studies at university, I spend much time at home programming/reading/solving something, working in the internship turned out to be a big challenge for me.
At university, I often feel that people (teachers, classmates) do not care about what happens, and I have no motivation to do well (or even at least do something). The main difference is that here I feel a lot of responsibility for the project I’m doing, and I don’t want to bring down the people who care about me and my success during the internship.
In a sense, this played a cruel joke on me, because I wanted to do everything at once and well, and not to disturb the mentors too much. In fact, I spent my days trying to figure out a task that I sometimes didn’t even know how to approach. And a lot of time passed, I had nothing working, and I felt terrible discomfort when I wrote to the mentors about my difficulties.
Then it happens: woke up in the morning with a sense of guilt. And go to bed too. And work.
But this week we had a voice chat with the mentors, in which we discussed what is happening. We agreed that I would not be hesitant and would ask questions if it was impossible to advance the task for longer than half a day, and also I would write a work log in which I would note what I did every day or two.
I also started using Toggl to more accurately estimate the amount of time I spend working on my internship. Perhaps this will help me increase my productivity and more efficiently manage my time. I will write about the impressions in the next post. It also can generate pretty reports, so in the next blog post, I'm going to publish a report.
Working on tasks, I often got stuck, and even searching through community resources did not help. For example, recently I worked with Makefiles, and I had to look for various ways of organizing entities in them, which were not always considered in the official documentation.
In some cases, experiments helped, sometimes reading makefiles from other parts of the project. But sometimes only a mentor could help.
In general, practice shows that asking for help is more effective than getting stuck and losing the motivation to continue learning. So I will try not to withdraw into myself and interact with people. I advise you to do the same.