Experience in applying to Outreachy

This summer I will be participating in an Outreachy internship with the OCaml language community. I am very happy about this and would like to share my experience in applying to Outreachy with people who are interested in participating too. I learned about Outreachy last spring from a past participant in this program from my university. For a long time I wanted to take part in the development of open-source software, because I am an active user of it myself and, in general, its philosophy is close to me. It seemed to me that in order to participate in such a thing, one must have great programming experience, and I only took the first steps along the way. But I read the conditions for participating in Outreachy and decided that I could try because in any case, the application process will not be useless: I will get something useful for my career. Viewed the list of projects, I chose one, technologies of which I was familiar with, and began to try to make a contribution. But by that time there were only a couple of weeks before the application deadline, and the community already had few assignments for beginners and many strong applicants. In the end, I did not succeed, and I decided to try another time. From this, I learned the first lesson: you should start working on the application as soon as possible. This season I began to choose the project immediately after the publication of the list, introduced myself to the community and started working on the contribution the same week.  This year I chose the OCaml community project because I like functional programming, and the project related to the improvement of the OCaml language compiler seemed interesting to me since I’m interested in the internal structure of the compilers. I was afraid that it would be very difficult to make a contribution, but the mentors picked up good tasks for beginners which helped to understand how the development is going.  When I encountered difficulties, I searched on the forum and on StackOverflow (there were quite a lot of answers from mentors of OCaml projects :) ). If this did not help, I wrote to the forum and the community members helped me figure it out. Thus, I learned the second thing: you need to ask questions if you can not understand something. People who understand the topic can help a lot. Mentors helped me in the process of preparing a contribution and reviewing a pull-request to the project repository. Working in this way, with their help, I made good contributions that were accepted into the repository. I would like to tell the doubters whether to apply or not: if you have the time and desire to help open-source software and get experience with technology and interaction with communities, – definitely yes!