Today marks a start of an exciting adventure — I’m starting my Outreachy internship with Linux kernel community. I think it’s a very good occasion to say a couple of words about myself.

Me

My name is Karolina, and I’m a Polish software engineer based in forever-sunny Scotland. I’m curious about all computer things and enjoy programming in many paradigms — C/C++, Haskell, Ruby, assembly, you name it! In my spare time, I enjoy playing video games, tabletop RPGs and, occasionally, board games. Otherwise, you can see me baking cakes that are secretly healthy, doing yoga or wandering around the town. I’m also into callisthenics, but I can’t do any impressive tricks yet!

My core values are kindness, curiosity, and autonomy. I believe that we should always consider how our actions and words can impact others (and ourselves!) and use them to elevate and empower. Curiosity has been always by my side. I love figuring out why (and how) something works and, ideally, writing it up. I value autonomy — I’m a self-starter and I work my best when I can organize the work that suits me best.

Outreachy

How did I get into Outreachy? It’s quite a long story. In the last two years, I have had been working with Ruby on Rails, but I realized I prefer to dabble with low-level programming and security, especially binary code analysis. I would spend my spare time doing crackmes, learning about operating system internals and reading different blog posts. One day, I ended up reading a blog post about one of the Linux kernel subsystems, and it mentioned an enigmatic word — “Outreachy”.

I looked it up, got excited, forgot to bookmark the blog post and…nothing.

Due to various reasons, I thought this internship programme is out of reach for me (no pun intended). Life took a couple more turns before I was able to give it a chance. I was unemployed. I put all my eggs in one basket, I applied… and I got it!

You might ask what actually draw me to do it? I’ve always wanted to contribute to open source, but I felt intimidated and not confident enough with my skills. With Outreachy, I can work on one of the projects I care about, and I’m not alone on the journey. Each project has a mentor that supports you on the way, answers your questions and encourages you when things are not going exactly like expected. And working on open source full-time is just great!

I’m really looking forward to it, wish me the best of luck!