Because I’m in the Western US, while my mentors and the other interns are in the Eastern US or India, everyone’s usually disappeared by the time I’m getting ready for lunch. All of our meetings are first thing in the morning for me. By the time I’m running into issues, everyone’s long gone for the day. Obviously, I do my best to prepare any questions for the meetings in the morning, but it makes meaningful collaboration a lot trickier. And it gets a little lonely.

Our communication is mostly through Slack. Slack is a terrible way to get questions answered. It’s so easy for things to get lost in the chatter. Especially when questions begin to pile up because of that pesky time zone issue.

I always have an minor panic attack when I have to post something in Slack. I have a question, so do I put it in the #questions channel? But it’s about a particular project, should it go in that channel instead? But really, is it a question that anyone cares about or should I just DM someone? Or maybe I should just guess at the answer instead of putting myself through the public humiliation of posting on Slack and getting no response from the void.

Our meetings are through either Google Video or Zoom. Both are great communication tools, when they’re working. Sometimes we end up in a meeting where one poor soul can’t use their mic and has to awkwardly comment in the chat. Which no one’s ever actually looking at, so by the time someone seems the comment, the context is completely forgotten.

The most ridiculous situation is when someone tries to show everyone an example during a video call. At that point everyone’s swiping through every possible tool to find a link. Is it in Slack? The video chat? The google doc where we’re collaborating on the meeting notes? Is the person screen sharing? Did they start screen sharing after you left the page to check all of the other webpages?

Despite its issues, working remotely is amazing.

In the morning, I roll out of bed, get the kids ready and out the door and sit down to start working. This week I took a long lunch so I could attend my preschooler’s Valentine’s Day party. At 5:00, I close my laptop and walk 15 feet to my kitchen so I can start dinner. No dress code and no commute, my ideal.

Working globally is something everyone should experience.

Working with people from around the globe reminds me to always consider how content will be read by people from various cultures, who speak various language. It means that we work even harder to ensure that all of our processes are concisely written without confusing idioms.

Collaborating Remotely and Globally was originally published in Janice at Outreachy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve worn a lot of hats, but none of them have been even vaguely related to coding. The last few weeks has been a lot of brand new stuff, coming at me fast. And software does not have a low barrier for entry.

The Systers webpage needed some updating. It was missing a lot of information and was written using a markdown to html generator and all of the source files were gone. This meant that when I went to move things around and start adding information, it got messy real quick. I know basic HTML and CSS, so I figured it wouldn’t be a huge deal if I just started over from scratch. It’s just a static page, it’s supposed to look simple, and I was told not to focus too much on the design.

As with most projects, what started out as a quick and easy project, soon became a whole lot of work.

It turns out, learning HTML and CSS in a tutorial setting, with an in browser environment is really different from making a real page. Up to this point, the only things I’ve made have been on Glitch. I’d never had to set up an actual working development environment.

Setting up a dev environment isn’t really an intuitive process. Every time I got stuck and asked someone for help, they’d open up the command line, throw some magic in there and everything would be working again in a way I didn’t understand and definitely couldn’t replicate. Okay, so I know it’s not magic, but I find the command line frustrating. I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the whole text-only system. It’s on my list of things to work on.

Once I got VS Code set up with everything I needed, I wrote up all of the HTML for the one page website. Totally easy, no big deal. The styling for everything was really simple and my CSS page was tiny, I thought everything was basically taken care of. Then I realized that my one page was too long and you really needed the ability to jump to the different sections. Then I realized that I actually needed to create several more pages, which also needed to be accessible somehow.

So, nav bars. Turns out you can’t just make a super simple nav bar. It has to be responsive. I started googling. I ended up trying to work my way through a few different people’s tutorials/write ups, but they were all so complicated I couldn’t really get them to work with my stuff. Finally I found Marc Caron’s Medium post using pure CSS to create a mobile hamburger menu.

I worked through it, mostly not understanding what I was doing. It worked? I now had a menu across the top that turned into a hamburger menu that popped out from the side in mobile. But I also needed a submenu, which isn’t included in the tutorial. Since I’ve never done any of this before, I had to go googling around to figure out how to do that. It took me half of forever and a million people’s CodePen’s to get the submenu to drop down if hovered over in full screen and also drop down if clicked on in the mobile view.

I get that these are easy things for most developers. I am not a developer. It took a lot of googling, a lot of friend bothering, and a lot of giving up and working on other things for a while.

But it works. The page is simple, it mostly looks like a wiki page. White background, no images, a lot of text. It has a responsive nav that is pure CSS/HTML, no JavaScript.

And it’s done.

I think.

Comfort Zone: Obliterated was originally published in Janice at Outreachy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That is a lot of traffic from a very diverse group of people from EVERY level of experience (GCI is ages 13–17, only) from around the globe. Some of these contributors are Open Source pros and some need a hand creating a Github account.

I spent some time at the beginning just working my way through the 14 active repos and ensuring that they all had the basics, things like licenses, a Code of Conduct, and Issue Templates. Then I did things that made my order loving heart skip a beat, like making sure every repo had the same issue labels and that they were color coded using the Anita B.org color palette.

The next big task was putting together contributing guidelines. I spent a little time wandering around Github looking through a few organizations’ guidelines and put something together. It was approved by my mentor and I started the process of adding it to each repo. Another mentor saw the guidelines and brought up some issues.

I had too much information in the guidelines. Even though I’d broken it up into digestible chunks and added links at the top to jump to each section, it was still too much. No one was going to read to the bottom.

I was trying to create a single document that would cover the full range of experience levels that Systers’ contributors possess and it didn’t work.

She pointed out that in my attempts to be inclusive and consistent across the repos, I’d left out any information on how to contribute to each specific repo! I started again. This time I specifically looked at organizations that have huge numbers of repos. Many of them had very simplistic guidelines on Github, then they included links to their websites with further information.

I sat down and wrote out all of the sections I was trying to include in the Contributing Guidelines, the repo wiki, and the ReadMe files. The only parts I want included on Github are generalized information that won’t change often. Changing information to each repo is a test in tedium. You have to add the same information to every repo individually. It’s terrible.

Instead, I’m taking any information that will eventually change, like a newcomer’s starter guide, our Slack channel invite (controversial take: Slack will not last forever), and available internships, and moving them over to the Systers website. I’m going to add links to the website to the appropriate pages in Github.

Now, if someone creates an awesome new tutorial that we want to share with the world, it can be added to the website and not to each, individual repo.

Really I’m just doing all of this because I’m lazy and don’t want to work that hard. Shh…

Streamlining Repos and Creating Organizational Processes was originally published in Janice at Outreachy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After getting a bachelor’s degree in theatre, I fell into teaching. I taught 8th grade pre-algebra and 8th grade special education English. I quit after that second year, completely burnt out. I claimed there was no way I was ever going back into the classroom. The next year I started teaching high school theatre and stayed there for three years. I loved my students. I love theatre. I hated the bureaucracy of the education system in the U.S. I hated that while I taught theatre, I worked 80 hours a week. There’s no way I can do that now that I have kids. I know a lot of people do, but I just can’t.

My husband’s a software developer and as I began talking about what to do with my life, he started waxing poetic about coding. I figured I’d give it a shot. Over the next few years, when I found some time, I’d start a new tutorial. I’ve done CodeAcademy, edX courses, started Eloquent JavaScript a few times, and dipped into some of his other random books and suggested tutorials. I’ve got a decent grasp of HTML and CSS, some basic knowledge of UX/UI and writing documentation, and signed up for a GitHub account. I never got too far past the beginner’s section of anything before I’d get pulled back into parenting and life, then by the time I went back, I’d have forgotten almost everything I’d worked on.

After staying home with my small people for four years, I realized that I was bored. While I love my tiny monsters, I don’t love being sequestered with them for days on end without any adult interactions other than the occasional barista or grocery store cashier. My four year old loves preschool and my two year old will start this fall and that means that it’s my turn to decide what I want to do with my life. You know, figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

Again.

In February I saw Alice Goldfuss’ tweets about her amazing Teespring Campaign of ‘Ladies is Gender Neutral’ t-shirts (seriously, go read that post and laugh at the complete meltdowns men had when they realized the shirts were only available in women’s sizes). All proceeds went to Outreachy. I had no idea what Outreachy was, but if someone was going to create a campaign this hilarious to make money for them, I needed to find out.

As I scrolled through, I realized that I was eligible! Being eligible for an internship is not something that usually happens when you’ve been out of college for almost ten years. Unfortunately, all of the projects were outside the range of my abilities. So, I spent the next few months working on more tutorials (yet again), working on some documentation and blog posts for Gulp, and checked the website again when the projects came out for the Winter round.

This time there were several non-coding projects, including this one for Systers, an Anita Borg Institute Community. The more I read about the organization, the more I wanted this project! Systers’ is committed to supporting women in tech. Delving into open source for the first time feels pretty overwhelming, so the idea of doing so within an accepting community of women seemed much less intimidating.

I checked out their github, found a small documentation related contribution to make, and contacted May to see what else I could do, as I worked on my application.

I was accepted! Now I’m combing through all of Systers’ repos and creating documentation and processes, to lower the barrier for entry for new contributors. I really enjoy finding order in the chaos and ensuring that everyone feels safe enough to make a pull request.

Finding ways to ensure that people of all ages and abilities, around the world, can participate in open source communities should be a priority for all projects and I love that Systers is so passionate about it.

I’m excited to help create an environment where absolutely anyone can make contributions and hopefully find the confidence they need to continue being involved in both the Systers’ community and the Open Source community as a whole.

Outreachy & Systers was originally published in Janice at Outreachy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.