This week marks the seventh week of my Outreachy internship with Wagtail Content Management System (CMS). This internship has been quite educative, as it exposed me to a lot of new skills. Also, my old skills, such as writing, have become better.
Two of the new skills I learnt while working with Wagtail CMS are asynchronous communication and open collaboration. To better understand these skills, let me give you their overview:
Asynchronous communication
As three different time zones separate me and my five mentors, it is only reasonable for us to communicate asynchronously. Asynchronous communication refers to any form of communication that doesn’t happen in real time. Usually, this takes the form of leaving messages for your teammates via mail or an instant messenger. Your teammates can reply to these messages during their working hours.
If you plan to work with members of a team who live outside of your country of residence, learning how to communicate asynchronously is essential.
Open collaboration
The Wagtail CMS project is an open-source project. Hence, open collaboration is a fundamental part of its operation. Open collaboration is a way of working together where all members have equal rights and responsibilities and any interested person can participate. It is often used in open-source software development and other open projects that allow anybody to provide ideas, code, or other resources.
Yes, I know you think that’s an easy thing to do. Trust me, it’s not. When your team consists of five qualified and skilled mentors, it takes a lot of confidence and practice to share your ideas.
Week seven in review
After taking you through some of the new skills I've gained through my Outreachy experience with Wagtail, it is necessary to also share with you the task I worked on this week and its challenges.
This week, I prepared drafts of the new Concepts section of the Wagtail user guide documentation. Having this section in the user guide is important as it provides explanations to the different terms and official names used in the guide. This section helps users gain a deeper understanding of the user guide. It also helps the users make sense of the other sections of the user guide documentation.
Working on the draft for this section has not been without its challenges. My biggest challenge was attempting to summarize and simplify the concept of StreamField.
The Wagtail StreamField provides a content editing model suitable for pages that don't follow a fixed structure. Examples of such pages include blog posts and news stories. You can use the Wagtail StreamField in situations where you need to intersperse the text of your content with subheadings, images, pull quotes, and videos. It’s also suitable for specialised content types, such as maps, charts, and code snippets.
The week ahead
In the coming week, I have the same task as I had this week. There is still a lot of new content to research and draft. My goal is to complete my research on all the terms and make significant progress on their drafts.
Read more about my Outreachy internship experience with Wagtail in my ongoing series of articles.