Outreachy'20 - Everybody Struggles! (Part 2 of Outreachy Series)

Hi! I’m Sneha and this is Blog 2 of my Outreachy series titled “Everybody Struggles”. As humans we have always made to feel bad about our failures/setbacks. Never have we ever looked at it from the perspective of celebrating our roadblocks since that is what leads to and shapes us to be successful ahead!

Now I know what you all are thinking isn’t this supposed to be like a technical blog enough about the philosophy xD But in reality everything that we go through be it something technical like this internship or even the new year’s resolution that we almost always can never keep up. The one truth behind all of it is everybody struggles and it is okay to accept it and embrace it. If life wasn’t challenging enough we won’t be seeing the growth we wanted would we(?) and everything would be pretty monotonous.

My struggles so far

Now coming to my struggles so far in this programme, some of the tasks that I have outlined seem really difficult to start with. Since my proposal deals with performance optimization, it is an open-ended question really and many a times I am faced with Open-ended questions that can have more than one correct answer.

For example- One of the problems I am dealing with right now is figuring out how to add alternate text for Images uploaded by the user. The trade-off lies in choosing AWS/Microsoft or other such services to recognize the images and accordingly add the alternate text for it or to add an alternate text input field for the user to add it accordingly. The question comes if our data should be made available to these services or if we stick to the alternate text input field will it mess up with the User experience or will it be accurate?

Another perfect example of my struggles lies with figuring out how my performance related optimizations fare out in the production environment. While I want to defer certain scripts to improve page load time, there is always the fear of dependencies relying on those scripts and thus breaking things down. Another issue lies in the fact that for many of these optimizations require me to add more gems and also ensure that future contribuors follow certain guidelines as to not break the code. So is this the correct way to do this?

So with all these questions in my mind, how to deal with these Struggles

How I am dealing with my struggles?

One of the most amazing things I am blessed with so far has been the extremely supportive Publiclab Commmunity. And they are pretty much the reason why my struggles feel more like challenges that just need a little bit of a push and I am always almost already there!

The energy of this community is extremely positive and that is why everytime I find myslef in an endless loop of questions I create an issue with the discussion label, tag all my fellow community members and look forward to their advice! And they never disappoint :p

And this will be my advice to all my readers here too! Never be afraid to ask or speak what’s on your mind! We always hold this fear of sounding stupid enough and break our heads thinking over solutions over and over again. And while that really shows how determined you are but if you have tried for more than a couple of hours and are working in a team, collaborate ask and it will aways yield better and faster results :v Most of the people you reach out to would be happy to answer your questions and could have experienced the same issues when they were starting out.

Final Words/Meme

One of my favorite quotes from the man himself!!

Thanks!!