Open Source Internship - Azis Toktobaev

           Today was the last day of the Open Source Summer Institute at Berea College. It feels very bittersweet as I think about the road ahead because I am very excited to put on my undergraduate student hat, even if for this one last year of my bachelor's career, and yet I will miss going to bed every night wondering about the ways our team could improve the material for our open-source project. As I am writing this reflection, I am feeling a large weight of responsibility coming off my shoulders. This project was not just a school project to me; I understood from the beginning that we are developing a major product that will impact thousands of students worldwide in the future. And now, looking back, I think that we were able to achieve that.          On a personal note,  I look back to the days I felt challenged, frustrated, and accomplished, and none of them stand out to me distinctly because all I feel is gratitude for the opportunity to learn and be a part of this process.

        This is almost the end of the internship, and I wanted to take this time to reflect on my overall experience, answering selected blog prompts from the CS Department. Were your expectations for this experience realistic?  Why or why not?          I am extremely proud to say that I am at a stage in my life where I enter new experiences with minimum expectations. I have been burnt before by having my expectations not match the reality, and I learned to have a more realistic approach in life. The expectations I had were minimum: good team cooperation, strong leadership, and a lot of learning. These were reasonable expectations as I have never worked as a Research Assistant and an open-source developer before. So, yes, my expectations were realistic, and they have been mostly met. What have you done that you didn’t ever think you would be able to do?          I always underestimate myself as a coder and a software developer. This internship has shown how much I enjoy the software de

        Today felt like a big victory for so many reasons. This entire project I did not have a chance to work with anyone as a pair programmer because I was focused on my personal research and I provided overall support to the other pair programmers. At the beginning of the Summer Institute, I worked with Sandesh and Imma, however, it did not feel like a pair-programming experience, because we were all learning about the scope of the project. It was a rookie boot camp, and we were all in it together. For the last three days, however, I was working with Roberto and Sama, and though it was 3 of us, it felt like a Pair Programming experience. We were creating the teamwork on Web Scraping, Mapping, and Pivot Tables. Yesterday was Roberto's last day, so Sama and I became a true pair-programming team.          I realized that I feel especially good when working with other people. I  experience a sense of responsibility and accountability that is hard to achieve when self-starting and se