The Growth, The Outreach, and a common language

"As a son of a dead man you can't be guaranteed of an education and as such you can never find a good job. Being a Nigerian already puts you at a disadvantage in life.... Do as I say or you will suffer", words of encouragement from a supposedly "caring" uncle and employer.

My name is Dennis Chukwunta. I am from Nigeria a country from the west of Africa. I lived most of my early years in the ancient city of Benin. The city where Oba of Benin, the traditional ruler and the custodian of the culture of the Edo people, resides. Over the years, as per the pursuit of making a living, I have since traveled to more than ten different cities all within Nigeria. I currently reside in the city of Owerri, Imo state.

I have always loved learning and as such I have always wanted to go to school. This was greatly encourage by my late father. Unfortunately, life doesn't always go according to the dreams of a son's father.

But - who would we be without the pain?

I have since had some formal education but most of my knowledge, especially on the subjects of computers, has greatly been advanced by the internet. With the internet came the opportunity to be a part of a community. The open source community.

Reaching for Outreachy

Outreachy is a diversity initiative of Software Freedom Conservancy.

Outreachy provides internships in open source to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living. The interns work with experienced mentors from open source communities. The projects may include programming, user experience, documentation, graphical design, data science, marketing, user advocacy, or community event planning.

I first heard of Outreachy when I attended a meet-up of developers from the Developer Student Club Imo State University. This was about two years ago. I had just started learning about programming and all the ways it can be used to improve the community.

Outreachy internships are:
💵 Paid - $7,000 USD total internship stipend
🌍 Remote - both interns and mentors work remotely
🕰 3 months - internships run May to August, or December to March

Lack of employment opportunities has been ranked top of the list of challenges faced by Africa's youth. The few opportunities that are available are further out of the reach of people subject to systemic bias and abuse. These includes Women, transgender, genderqueer, or non-binary people, people from a historically disadvantaged caste or tribe. Outreachy's goal is to provide internship opportunities for people like these all over the world.

I applied for the the December cohort of 2021 and I got accepted...yehhhhh

This is still the first week of the internship but I have already come to love everyone I have meet since the contribution stage of the internship. This is especially true of my mentors from the Common Language Lab.

A common language for all workflows

The Common Workflow Language (CWL) is an open standard for describing analysis workflows and tools in a way that makes them portable and scalable across a variety of software and hardware environments. CWL is designed to meet the needs of data-intensive science, such as Bioinformatics, Medical Imaging, Astronomy, High Energy Physics, and Machine Learning.

I love the idea of collaboration, it's one of my core values, and the CWL team embodies that. I am working on the wdl2cwl converter. The existing code is an incredible work by Dinithi Wickramaratne, who is one of my mentors and also an alumni of the Outreachy program.

other core values...

Community, every since I came across the CWL project I have been hooked by their need to build a tool that fosters better communication between academics. Information, data, and experimental results should be shared. The Covid pandemic has reminded us of how important it is for us to be more open to collaboration and a sense of community.

learning. Mentorship is an important part of the Outreachy internship and with the CWLabs comes an incredible mentor in person of Michael R. Crusoe. Since meeting him I have learnt more about the python language, VScode, the Linux operating system, Git, Github, Javascript and so much more. Learning is a big part of my person and this internship has thus far been very educational and fulfilling to my growth(another core value).

With much growth comes the opportunities to help my community and other people to grow. I hope at the end of this internship to be able to further my education and continue to make significant contributions to the CWL project. I also hope to create better awareness to the ignorance of most practices in Africa and expose the youth to better opportunities with technology.

Being an African, a Nigerian, a Woman, a queer or non-binary, or a member of a tribe or village does make you less important to the world. With the inter-connectivity of the modern technology comes the possibility to connect with other people and get opportunities that would have otherwise been out of our reach.

Reach for your dreams, no one has power over you but you.