This is the 2nd part of my experience as an Outreachy intern and is one of the best moments I am having to learn about new things. Contributing to open source at the same time is not entirely complicated but the amount of information, that I’ve previously learned in school, is now more compact and besides just understanding, is to put in practice what it stated in paper (obviously virtual papers).

My internship was based on research and I am having a nice time enriching my knowledge and replicating some previous works to adequate them to the project I am contributing on. I should say that my scope My internship was based on research and I am having a nice time enriching my knowledge and replicating some previous works to adequate them to the project I am contributing on. I should say that my scope of understanding of many other topics is getting better. I could comment on a few «struggles» in between my journey, from my point of view not as hard as it sounds, but is just simply mixing the knowledge with code, in my particular case working with rasters (images) both using python or Unix command line was very challenging, and my intend to be perfectionist make this experience equally overwhelming, exciting and gratifying. Hopefully, I received good feedbacks about this, I am trying to improve but the math involved to perform image manipulation, at the computer level was unexpected because this time there should be no GUI software involved.

Hopefully, I am very lucky I have a great mentor and advisors that sometimes even made feedbacks in my mother tongue, and this indirectly involved me into a regional context which helped me to see the vast opportunities to keep contributing to the communities, the open-source and the environmental-climate related organizations.

Step by step, with mistakes and many things to amend, I foresight the response this opportunity will project in my formation and my future as a tech-scientist.

My name is David Guevara (he/him) and I am new intern at Moja Global in the Outreachy 2021 cohort. Also I am 25 and lived in Peru, my main background is in Biology, but I am an enthusiastic programmer interested in Data Science related to Biodiversity, Climate Change an Bionfirmatics.

I like to descovering new things everyday, learning progrees is a long road to travel on and I am enjoying the ride! I am fascinated how tech world could give me the chance to combine my love for natural science and useful tools powered by softwares, open source communities and collaborative projects.

I could describe myself based on this cores: Adventure, Creativity and Influence.

I always love to see how any new topic to review could be a new adventure. Learning is not easy, that is a fact, but its fun and in the progress one get to know many new things one could not imagine before and this excited me due the impact it can generate into my personal and proffesional life.

Creativity too, the world of science is pretty rigid, from my point of view. But tech world offer allways a new way to do it. Being creative just allow me to find multiple ways to solve a task, problem or a random doubt I can get in any cloudy afteernoon and this motivate me to at least try to innovate.

And finally influence, I consider myself a recipient of many people thoughs that offered me help or guidance across my professional journey. I feel that in one moment of my life, I would reverse the flow that has work on me and offer this help to new people and that is a strong motivator to keep improving myself and remain humble.

Being an Outreachy intern is giving the tools to keep celebrating my ideals and with this opportunity I am keep pushing forward on my learning path, working with the Moja Global team in the project «Climate change mitigation: entending models of forest carbon pools to new countries» , which from my point of view, will have a huge impact on my region and is getting challenging, joining data science and research.

More updates soon…