I am Mahnoor Asghar, a software engineer who graduated from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan. I have been accepted into the Outreachy program for the December 2021 - March 2022 round, and I will be using this blog to share my journey :) Welcome aboard! My hobbies tend to change with time but I always enjoy reading books, be it classic or dystopian. It helps me unwind after a long day, and learn more in general. Other than that, an occasional movie or TV show, and a tea with friends is my idea of an evening well spent. I value integrity and reliability in people, and try to apply these principles practically myself as well. Dependability and trustworthiness are very important to me, be it in a personal context or professional.
I came to know about the Outreachy program a few months after my first encounter with open source. I was working on metal3’s baremetal-operator, which utilized Ironic as a provisioning backend. The requirement was to add some parameters for RAID configuration in the BMO. While we were deciding what those parameters should be, and how they would map onto the Ironic API call, we needed input from people who had experience with Ironic. This was how I was led to the Ironic community meetings for the first time. After a few discussions with the community, an approach was agreed upon that was already accommodated by the current Ironic API.
When I heard about Outreachy, and found that Ironic had 2 projects that were open this round, I saw it as an opportunity to understand the vast API surface Ironic had to offer. I was also interested in learning about the development workflow used, the architecture of Ironic, and how they interacted with the rest of the OpenStack projects. I had a very vague idea about these things, and wanted to learn more about them. Thus, I applied for the Auto-documenting REST APIs for Ironic project. The Outreachy application required submitting at least one code contribution to whichever project we apply for. Having this goal in mind, I looked up where the I could find some bugs for newcomers, and found that there were some tagged Outreachy on the Storyboard. Some were already taken by other applicants, but there were plenty to go round. I picked one that required changing the baremetal sub-command help text. It took me a few days to set up a development environment and understand the structure of the python-ironicclient, and after some tries, achieve the required result. I uploaded my contribution on opendev (as required), and completed the application. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of making one contribution, and was hoping I would get accepted as well!
The primary motivation I had was the idea that anyone, from anywhere could contribute towards a software that is being used globally. To me, the idea that free software and open source is practically possible was impressive and exciting. It opened up so many possibilities to what we can achieve. Outreachy provided me with a great learning opportunity, and a way for me to express further interest and work on something I picked myself. Grateful to be a part of this program!