This is the second part of a series of blogs I will be writing as part of my outreach internship with Bioconductor.
In open source, most of the thing we do are learnt from others, the community or through research. When you start contributing to open source you are likely to meet new concepts, words, ways of doing thing and so on. Open mindedness will take you far in Open source. Being able to be open to asking questions, answering questions and seeking help whenever you need it, goes a long way in making your open-source journey easier.
When I started at Bioconductor, I struggled with several things. One of them was learning the language and context of sweave documents. R programming back then and now have different syntax and that was somehow confusing and made me struggle a bit.
Another thing was the different package names. In Bioconductor, there are so many packages available. Knowing which name was for a package, function or class was something I struggled with. I had to go back to confirm on the documentation many times just to start getting them.
I also struggled with asking for help. Sometimes I would get stuck and the spend a lot of time doing research and trying to solve everything on my own. This resulted to me spending more time actually struggling to get a solution when a solution was just a text away. I would have simply asked my mentor or community members.
How what did I do about my struggles?
- Ask my mentor to help when I am stuck. I always ask questions or links to resources whenever I feel I need something. My mentor has really been supportive no matter how simple or hard my question is. I always get answer or recommendations on time.
- Ask my community for help. Other members of the community may understand something very well and might be very resourceful with what you are struggling with.
- Research. In open source, research is very important. Trying to figure out if there is documentation about something or how other people solved or overcame some of the things that you are struggling with. Using resources like Google search engine, stack overflow or cheat sheets can help.
- Giving myself a timeline. If I struggle with something for more than a set period of time then next would to ask my mentor. This actually helped reduce time trying to get a solution by myself and enabled me do more work.
If you are struggling with a vocabulary or concept, it is good to first learn that all of us struggle with something. Next is to take action, you can use some of the methods I have shared and try figuring out what works for you. More importantly, you should try and understand why you are struggling with something. It might be because you are new to the concept or you need to learn a few things to help you understand things better.
Remember, everyone struggles!
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