The Start of my Outreachy Internship Experience
25 May 2020
Kia ora and kamusta! I'm Andria (she/her). Starting this week until August, I will be joining the fab team at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap to work on a Slackbot Router project utilising serverless architecture.
I'm from the Philippines but you can find me loitering in New Zealand nowadays. I love going out in nature, traveling to find new food and look at ruins, making miniatures, reading, playing video games, and walking aimlessly in my free time.
Three core values that have stuck with me throughout the years are curiosity, competency, and fun.
I'm an incredibly curious person. It's at the core of who I am and drive most of what I do. I love learning and figuring things out. If there's something I don't know, I endeavour to fix that; if there's something that I want to try, I jump in and do it. It's what has driven me to study international relations, to work as a political advocate and as a marketer, to pursue becoming a software developer. It's what drives me to travel, to read, to continue learning, and to continue moving forward.
Being curious and scratching that itch is not enough for me however, I also value competency. In whatever I do, I strive to be competent. Simply being able to do something is not enough, if there's something that I decided I want to do then I make sure I do it well. I'm not competitive with other people, but I try to always be better than who I was before. I try to do things well because I know it will make me proud of myself and above all else, I want to live life so that the younger version of myself will look up to the current me.
With everything in my life, I make sure I do it because it adds to my happiness. I value fun and I find that the things I get curious about and want to do are the things that will bring me joy. I read somewhere that if you had a choice to do something, choose what will make for a better story afterwards. With an additional dash of responsibility and pragmatism, this has definitely been how I've lived my life so far.
I decided to apply to Outreachy because I knew it will be challenging and I appreciated the opportunity. I've always been drawn to working with non-profit organisations and being able to do that while also learning and honing my skills is amazing. Being accepted to work with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is great as not only am I excited for the project I will be involved in, but I also love the work that the organisation does. To put it simply, I decided to apply because I've always been curious about contributing to free and open-source software, I know it's an opportunity to learn and increase my competency, and I'm sure I'm going to have a lot of fun.
