Week 2in Women in Machine Learning and Data Science Mentorship Program.

After the zeal and enthusiasm of the first week, I decided to proceed with all that was discussed in the 1:1 session with my mentor. I decided to begin with the challenges on various coding platforms. Though I found it a bit difficult, I still decided to proceed with it slowly. I decided to take it all slow and begin with some coding problems from various websites. I decided to follow the coding milestones that I had been thinking to work on. But only this time I tried to be more consistent with it. As I was a bit busy with traveling this week I have decided to proceed with the milestone with consistency. All thanks to my mentor who motivated me to proceed with things.

Week 2

Talking about our 1:1 session in week 2. We had a quick catch-up on how my week went and how I proceeded with the discussions and suggestions from our last session.I discussed my doubts and queries with my mentor and she listened to them very keenly. She also suggested various things like what kind of tutorials should I proceed with and whether I should opt for theory learning or practicing side by side. She also suggested that rather than taking any kind of online courses and paying for them I should directly proceed with learning and practicing side by side from coding platforms.

Open- Source

The main thing we discussed was open-source . Arushi di told me in detail about what is open source and how can one proceed with contributing to open source. She gave me insights into how various software is open-source and anyone can contribute to them . We discussed Github and version control. She also gave me examples from her work experience about how even in the industry Github plays an important role in saving code and rectifying bugs. It is an important part of life for any software developer.

I learned about how one can open issues in any project and communicate with the project admins or maintainers to work on any kind of issue. Also, the open-source community is very welcoming and I can directly converse with any kind of project admin regarding the background of the project or how I can work over it. The mentor gave me examples of various open-source programs.

We discussed the following open-source programs

> Google Summer of Code.

>Outreachy.

>Rails Girls Summer of Code.

>Girl Script Summer of Code.

I learned about how I can include open-source experience in my resume and how it can increase the value and quality of my resume. She even gave me examples from her college where one of her class-mate was offered a job directly from Mozilla. All of these experiences and insights really motivated me. I talked to her about the girl script summer of code where I am currently a contributor and how I had made few contributions to various projects. She encouraged me to keep moving on with it and contribute more. As one can really get the industry environment while working on various open-source projects.

I really enjoyed our discussion and the mentor encouraged me to proceed with my milestones and try to be consistent. It is always great to discuss your goals and plans with someone and get advice from someone experienced. Now, I really hope to work according to my plans and I am looking forward to another week of awesome and valuable discussions.

As I always believe that learning never stops and it is never too late to start.

Thanks for Reading!