Hey everyone👋 I'm here again, this time to talk about my struggles as an Outreachy Intern, starting from the contribution stage, to this week.

We all start out not knowing things. Well, at least me😂 and I have learned a whole lot these four weeks as an intern, I keep reminding myself that it's just been four weeks.

During the Outreachy Contribution stage, I struggled with building the CWL User Guide locally on my machine. Usually, I'm someone who struggles with asking for help, and I like to believe that if I try hard enough, I can accomplish anything on my own, but omo, this thing showed me shege! I tried everything I could and made sure I followed every step accordingly, but to no avail. It still was not working, so I decided to ask for help. Mind you, the actual reason I did not ask for help initially was because I thought; this is like the first step, how would it look on you that you're not even able to build the project you intend to work on? But anyway, at some point I realized I was not heading anywhere, and I just decided to ask for help in one of the community channels.

Then again, none of the suggestions I got seemed to be working, I tried everything, and I started from the beginning so many times, but still no progress. I then decided that since I could make my contributions straight from GitHub without building the project locally, I would do just that and figure out how to build it later, so I made my first contribution like that. Then I thought, what if you get selected as an intern, and you have a task that you can't accomplish directly from GitHub, moreover, aren't you supposed to be learning? So I asked one of the applicants; who co-incidentally, got selected as an intern too, to guide me on how to build the project locally. We started from the beginning and followed each step, I got a few errors, but most were errors I got before and noted down, so I also remembered how I got past them, and voila! it worked, the User Guide was up and running on my machine! You can't imagine how excited I was!

As much as I believed initially that I could've done it on my own, it was easier to just ask for help.

After I got selected as an intern, I realized I did not know a lot about the project I was working on, and honestly, I was overwhelmed, there was so just much to learn, and I started having doubts about if I was going to be able to successfully carry out the project. I read and practiced with a whole lot of resources, but that just seemed to overwhelm me even more, so I reached out to my co-intern, we talked about it, then scheduled a meeting with our mentor to discuss it, and we were able to come up with a solution.

I was trying to understand Sphinx at that time, so I started from the beginning this time, practiced with the CWL User Guide, and also used Sphinx to build the documentation for a project I worked on some months ago. I'm still trying to figure out what theme to use anyway, and I think I'll just build mine; but yes! progress! Everything I'd read on Sphinx documentation started making a lot of sense, and it turned out to not be as difficult as I thought initially.

So, as much as it helps your learning process to find solutions to problems encountered, there's no shame in asking for help. You make more progress when you do, your problem is resolved quicker, and you can move on to another one😂. That is also part of why we have communities; to help you. Moreover, someone else might have that problem as well, so you just solved it for them, and also encouraged them to ask for help too.