EVERYBODY STRUGGLES

                                               


Interning at Outreachy has been interesting as well as frustrating. The experience of working with a mentor in a large community with urge delicate data, code-base and reporting tasks on a daily and weekly basis has been overwhelming.But as we know in every task there is some form of setback or struggle which at times could be frustrating.

My main setback so far has involved working on the cloud. I am a complete newbie to cloud computing and the fact that my entire project hovers around the cloud is quite frustrating. I had to create an aws account, setup and launch an EC2 instance and then do a prototype of my project on it. I did some research on google and then started the work. I faced a lot of issues with the payment details on the aws free trial account creation. I reached out to my mentor after some days and she helped me out. At first I was hesitant to ask for help from my mentor thinking she was going to be very busy to aid me in such a trivial problem but to my greatest dismay she was happy I reached out to her. This made me feel at ease and started the learning process. As the process went on, I came across a more serious problem. I had setup discourse on the cloud but couldn't access it. Checking on the logs, I had some very funny looking errors. I did 3 days of debugging but to no avail. In as much as my mentor was friendly the first time I must admit I was still scared to approach her with this error but I had no choice so I had to be brave enough to ask for help. We spent some time on it and after some days we came out with a solution.

In every great task there is some form of struggle because these struggles are what empower us and make us learn more. Most at times you could be working on some project and you feel frustrated and think of giving up. The fact that we don't give up is what makes us strong and what takes us to higher levels. We also need to note that it is okay to ask for help. There is always going to be frustrating moments and in these moments we have to know that asking for help doesn't make you a looser. It only makes you brave...


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