Meeting with my mentors
From the previous week, my mentors and I had agreed to a particular day and time for our meetings, and the one for this week was to be the first one we’d be having with that schedule. It went really well and we further discussed project expectations, and my mentors both gave me some bits of advice to help make my internship journey smoother.
My lead mentor decided that although the team was aware of when the GSoC projects were being selected, it would be good to prepare an RFC (request for comments) for the features I intended to work on. My project itself was based on a previous RFC from years ago, but things had changed since then and I would be using a different approach, so we collectively decided that a new RFC would be the most ideal way to go about it. My lead mentor, being a core team member, also mentioned that to try and make things even easier for me in the community, he would ask to invite me to a core team meeting. I was both excited and nervous because I would get to meet the people at the helm of affairs for Wagtail, but I would also be very much the most inexperienced person in the meeting.
My second mentor mentioned that writing blog posts to document my journey and learning would help for personal development, and I agreed. That was the push that brought me to writing my experience here. He mentioned that I be active in the community and cover as much content related to my project as I could, whether or not we could immediately see whether it would be useful to it. He also mentioned for me to familiarize with the RFC workflow specific to the Wagtail community, and he shared useful material.
Finally, we concluded that I would make two RFCs: one for the primary project goal, and the other for the secondary/stretch goal (contextual alt text generation with AI). We also decided I would write the RFCs first as Google Docs so we could have different rounds of reviews and feedback, as I had never done something of that nature before.
Meeting with the Core team
I got the calendar event as promised and marked it for attendance. It was a Zoom meeting, although the invite was via Google Calendar. My lead mentor checked in with me to make sure I had no issues connecting with Zoom. I joined the meeting a few minutes before it started and met him there. I was tensed and so self-conscious, but I told myself that everybody I had interacted with at Wagtail up until that point was patient and kind, so the rest of the core team would also likely reflect those attributes.
Luckily for me, my lead mentor was the one who chaired the meeting. This made me feel much more comfortable, and he gave me the softest possible landing for me to introduce myself. I talked about myself, the project I would be working on, and the fact that an RFC with the proposed changes was in the works, along with a prototype. It was brief, and they were very nice people. It also crossed my mind that I might like to be a core team member sometime in the future (I hope).
Something I noticed with their meetings was the incredible level of detail. They recorded everything about the Wagtail repository. From the number of recent pull requests, issues raised, new contributors, and so on. They had metrics for everything. Actually, for every process in Wagtail, there is a good amount of recording done. They discussed briefly some other Wagtail-specific discussions and the meeting was over.
Challenges
I had a bit of friction getting started with the RFC but decided that I had to get at least one sentence in. I did, and then came another sentence, and another, up until my draft was ready.
I also had some issues with the prototype I was working on, and had to ask some of the more experienced members for help. It was on a part of Wagtail that there was limited outside knowledge about, so I ended up reaching out to Wagtail’s lead developer. I was scared of sending him a message at first because I imagined he’d be the busiest man on the planet, and that my inexperience would put him off. He eventually did get back to me after his brief holiday, and I can now tell you for a fact that I had no reason to be scared. I got some help with something that was breaking changes, as well as with a better approach to another part of Wagtail I would have normally had to modify.
Week 2 was very productive, and as far as community bonding goes, I knew for sure I was a part of Wagtail.
