I have wanted to be a programmer for a long time. It was my original major choice, but due to various issues, I didn’t end up going down that path. But I’ve always tried to do a little development on the side or to help me with my job, so when I was laid off from my engineering job in June, I realized I had a few months to really try to train myself up and become a real-live developer. I took some online courses, worked on my own web apps, and got lots of help and advice from my programmer friends. I even tried my hand at some contributions to open source. This was when I was told about the Outreachy program.
I applied and was accepted to the second round of applications where the applicants get to submit to different projects to figure out which projects they like, and in turn, the project mentors get to figure out which applicants have the needed skills and fit well with their working style. Overall this seems very much like a code interview might be, except that if your work is good it actually gets used in the project. The only downside to this is no time limit was put on this, so people who are going to school, otherwise employed, or have kids may not have the same available time to make a solid contribution. In that respect, I feel very lucky that my husband has a good job and I can take this time off, not only to apply for Outreachy, but also to try this career change!
They closed the second round applictaion about a month before the internship started to give the mentors a few weeks to decide. I was ready to hear back right away, but alas, I had to wait! The week of Thanksgiving I heard back that I was accepted on Firefox’s Multi Account Containers Addon project. I am very excited to be working with a company so full of talent like Mozilla.
This blog post is part of the [Outreachy](https://www.outreachy.com) project.