This is my third blog, in the Outreachy series, where I talk about my experience working with the Moja Global community, and what I learnt - dos and don’ts, probably?

It’s too early, to be honest, to comment on what one should not do, but I’m sure I’ve learnt what can be done to be better in the tasks you’ve been assigned to. A few points:

  1. Discuss your questions publicly! Open discussions, issues. It helps others, as it helps me go through existing issues/discussions.

  2. Take a note of what you’ve been doing while you’re doing it. The more you delay, the more you forget!

I have been mostly working on building an AppImage for the FLINT library, and I’m happy that I was able to complete the task this week. I guess I am now more aware about how to build AppImages, how to configure the desktop shortcut settings etc. for the built AppImage. It was fairly easy, but the hardest part was to figure out the errors on my system - and the issue was some missing header files. I went ahead and created a PR to fix it for FLINT: https://github.com/moja-global/FLINT/pull/119

Learning to automate the process was good as well, I guess writing the script was good - here is a funny thing I did: (script link: https://github.com/ankitaS11/AppImageDataForFlint/blob/main/AppImage_FLINT_Build.sh)

./linuxdeploy-x86_64.AppImage --appdir AppDir || true

I expect this to error out, and so - to ensure that the script is not abandoned, I had to ensure this error is ignored. Found this funny tweak, just put || true and that’s it.

I’ve also been going through some analysis of GCBM.Belize, and it’s been good - got some help from Andrew (one of the mentors in Moja Global community) and he was very kind to help me out with my queries. Things have started to make sense to me, why we are doing it, what am I supposed to do etc. So I like it so far! :)

Thank you for reading! See you in the next blog <3