The following post originally appeared on Medium. The author, Ruchi Pakhle, participated in our LFX Mentorship program this past spring.

echo “amazing experience”

Hey everyone!
I am Ruchi Pakhle currently pursuing my Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from MGM’s College of Engineering & Technology. I am a passionate developer and an open-source enthusiast. I recently graduated from LFX Mentorship Program. In this blog post, I will share my experience of contributing to Open Horizon, a platform for deploying container-based workloads and related machine learning models to compute nodes/clusters on edge.

Background

I have been an active contributor to open-source projects via different programs like GirlScript Summer of Code, Script Winter of Code & so on.. through these programs I contributed to different beginner-level open-source projects. After almost doing this for a year, I contributed to different organizations for different projects including documentation and code. On a very random morning applications for LFX were opened up and I saw various posts on LinkedIn among that posts one post was of my very dear friend Unnati Chhabra, she had just graduated from the program and hence I went ahead and checked the organization that was a fit as per my skill set and decided to give it a shot.

Why did I apply to Open Horizon?

I was very interested in DevOps and Cloud Native technologies and I wanted to get started with them but have been procrastinating a lot and did not know how to pave my path ahead. I was constantly looking for opportunities that I can get my hands on. And as Open Horizon works exactly on DevOps and Cloud Native technologies, I straight away applied to their project and they had two slots open for the spring cohort. I joined their element channel and started becoming active by contributing to the project, engaging with the community, and also started to read more about the architecture and tried to understand it well by referring to their youtube videos. You can contribute to Open Horizon here.

Application process

Linux Foundation opens LFX mentorship applications thrice a year: one in spring, one in summer, and the winter cohort, each cohort being for a span of 3 months. I applied to the winter cohort for which the applications opened up around February 2022 and I submitted my application on 4th February 2022 for the Open Horizon Project. I remember there were three documents mandatory for submitting the application:

1. Updated Resume/CV

2. Cover Letter

(this is very very important in terms of your selection so cover everything in your cover letter and maybe add links to your projects, achievements, or wherever you think they can add great value)

The cover letter should cover these points primarily

How did you find out about our mentorship program?
Why are you interested in this program?
What experience and knowledge/skills do you have that are applicable to this program?
What do you hope to get out of this mentorship experience?

3. A permission document from your university stating they have no obligation over the entire span of the mentorship was also required (this depends on org to org and may not be asked as well)

Selection Mail

The LFX acceptance mail was a major achievement for me as at that period of time I was constantly getting rejections and I had absolutely no idea about how things were gonna work out for me. I was constantly doubting myself and hence this mail not only boosted my confidence but also gave me a ray of hope of achieving things by working hard towards it consistently. A major thanks to my mentor, Joe Pearson, and Troy Fine for believing in me and giving me this opportunity.

My Mentorship Journey

Starting off from the day I applied to the LFX until getting selected as an LFX Mentee and working successfully for over 3 months and a half, it felt surreal. I have been contributing to open-source projects and organizations before. But being a part of LFX gave me such a huge learning curve and a sense of credibility and ownership that I got here wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

I have been contributing to open-source projects and organizations before. But being a part of LFX gave me such a huge learning curve and a sense of credibility and ownership that I got here wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.

I still remember setting up the mgmt-hub all-in-one script locally and I thought it was just a cakewalk, well it was not. I literally used to try every single day to run the script but somehow it would end up giving some errors, I used to google them and apply the results but still, it would fail. But one thing which I consistently did was share my progress regularly with my mentor, Troy no matter if the script used to fail but still I used to communicate that with Troy, I would send him logs and he used to give me some probable solutions for the same but still the script used to fail. I then messaged in the open-horizon-examples group and Joe used to help with my doubts, a huge thanks to him and Troy for helping me figure out things patiently. After over a month on April 1st, the script got successfully executed and then I started to work on the issues assigned by Troy.

These three months taught me to be consistent no matter what the circumstances are and work patiently which I wouldn’t have learned in my college. This experience would no doubt make me a better developer and engineer along with the best practices followed. A timeline of my journey has been shared here.

Checkout my contributions here
Checkout open-horizon-services repo

Concluding the program

The LFX Mentorship Program was a great great experience and I did get a great learning curve which I wouldn’t have gotten any other way. The program not only encourages developers to kick-start their open-source journey but also provides some great perks like networking, and learning from the best minds. I would like to thank my mentors Joe Pearson, Troy Fine, and Glen Darling because without their support and patience this wouldn’t have been possible. I would be forever grateful for this opportunity.

Special thanks to my mentor Troy for always being patient with me. These kind words would remain with me always although the program would have ended.

The LF Edge Mentorship program is always a great learning experience, and this year was no exception. Because of Ruchi’s work we now have more services following our best practice policies in the open-horizon-services github repository. Despite the time difference she was always flexible when it came to our sync-ups and was never afraid to ask questions or for clarification if something wasn’t clear. I hope Ruchi will continue to provide the meaningful contributions to the Open Horizon project I have seen her demonstrate throughout this mentorship program.

And yes how can I forget to plug in the awesome swags, special thanks, and gratitude to my mentor Joe Pearson for sending me such cool swags and this super cool note