Four years ago, Project Jupyter participated for the first time in the Outreachy program. And at the end of last year, during the December round, three more awesome interns joined the project. Because I was lucky enough to be part of this program both times, first time as an intern and second time as a mentor, in this post I will share the parts that were the most impactful and contributed the most to my growth as both mentor and engineer. I hope this will inspire other interns, to start their journey, but also other community members into becoming mentors.
When I first interacted with the Jupyter community, I remember I was impressed by how welcoming everyone was, how well organized they seemed, how promptly questions got answered and how fast code got reviewed. This was especially impressive during the contribution phase when prospect interns were everywhere at the same time, we were generating crazy amount of work for mentors and the community when asking for guidance and tackling tasks.
When the internship ended I realized how much I appreciated this process compared to other internships. The contribution phase made me feel very motivated because of the opportunity to work on real tasks, with impact for the entire community.
All the work traffic, immense quantity of GitHub notifications, emails, questions, etc., were totally opaque to me as an intern, they seemed to just be magically handled by mentors. I now know this seamless interaction is made of some very special ingredients like team work, time commitment and hard work, nothing magic about it.
Scoping the project, the most challenging part
I believe scoping the project was the part that I found the most challenging as a first time mentor.
The plan I had in mind for how to create the project roadmap, was to define a few tasks that were not very tightly scoped, choose one to start with, allocate time for the intern to research about it, have synchronous meetings to collaboratively refine it, then implement it, review, and then repeat for next task. And although this was a good first plan, I failed to recognize when it stopped working and didn’t realize it’s important to pause and adapt the plan.
It took me some time and guidance from others in the community, to realize that sometimes, constraints are beneficial and allowing complete implementation freedom over a task, can be overwhelming. For finding the appropriate [freedom — constraint] balance I needed to experimented with different task sizes, until tasks had a less overwhelming learning curve. This fosters and grows confidence and improves time management skills.
I found this to be particularly tricky because this balance can be hard to achieve when creating a project roadmap. The hidden complexities of a project, existing skills, or any prior experience managing a project from scratch, are hard to know and plan around in the very first iteration.
Another challenge of being a mentor that is usually hidden is the context switch penalty between mentor time and daily job responsibilities. A mentor needs to fine tune the amount of intern interaction and involvement in the project implementation so that context switches from daily responsibilities are as soft as possible. It’s also critical that a mentor has full support and transparent communication with the daily job management so that work responsibilities don’t spill over into mentoring time, otherwise this can lead to stress and a sub-optimal experience for the intern.
Asking questions publicly, the biggest achievement
The open source comes with a challenge attached to it by default, which is being comfortable communicating in the open and asking questions publicly. The time and work that needs to go into fostering this skill needs to be taken into account from the very beginning and it’s extremely important to consider it from the project proposal and roadmap definition phase. It will help set the correct project expectations, and expose an otherwise hidden complexity of open source project maintainability.
This was a challenge that was more difficult to overcome than expected, because in our case it involved, a first time mentor, a first time intern, and a project that required diving into the codebase of lots of other different projects in the ecosystem, so guidance from the entire community and asking questions was crucial.
My intern, Sheila was very determined and courageous and she received great care and support from the entire community in overcoming this obstacle. She is now a key maintainer of the internship project she worked on, asking and answering questions without issues. Checkout out her many achievements captured in this list (not complete) and her presentation about the Reusable JupyterHub Pytest Plugin at JupyterCon. A recording of her talk should soon be available on JupyterCon’s YouTube channel.
Mentor training, mentor shadowing, co-mentoring, the best allies
I am extremely grateful to have had the support of the other mentors and the community during theses three mentoring months.
In particular, I am very grateful for Sarah Gibson, the Jupyter strategic lead and our Community Coordinator with Outreachy, for organizing for us to get mentor training beforehand through the OLS community. I found that to be very helping and ground setting and it made me feel more empowered.
I also appreciated and found really useful the mentor shadowing sessions that I did with Sarah and the demo session that Min RK hold with all the interns and mentors. They were both great opportunities for me to observe and learn from the other mentors and get feedback from them.
Co-mentoring was something that was considered during this round, but because we wanted to select all these great interns we ended up not mentoring in teams. But this appears as a great approach of introducing first-time mentors.
It was all worth it, the takeway
The JupyterHub project got to improve its documentation, accessibility and testing thanks to this program and to the three amazing interns that worked with us during this round ❤️. In addition, this internship round helped us create a place where people can learn about JupyterHub’s experience with Outreachy and a template repository to be used for quickly generating other JupyterHub Python sub-repositories that follow the standards of the organization.
On the personal side now that the internship is over, I can happily say that it was very enlightening and humbling to be on the mentoring side as well. Even if it’s challenging, you get an amazing feeling when you give back and channel all the effort and kindness that shaped you and that you received as a mentee from other people.
From intern to mentor was originally published in Jupyter Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.