My internship with Wikimedia is gradually coming to an end and I must say it’s been a life changing experience for me. I’m really amazed at what I’ve been able to achieve within this short period of time with the help of the community and guidance from my mentor.

Looking for a job, internship, a grant, a volunteer position, or some type of other opportunity ?

I’m currently looking for full/part time job opportunities that will help me build a career in software development and also be able to improve developer experience. These opportunities could be remote and non-remote. Working remotely with Wikimedia has given some experience working remotely with a team and I must say, I enjoyed the flexibility that came with it. I am also open to relocating, if the need arises.

Types of work I would love to contribute to / skills that would help me wiith such work ?

I would love to contribute to projects that involve software development, improving developer experience, technical writing and documentation.

During my internship with Wikimedia, I worked on documentation improvements to most viewed MediaWiki Action API pages on-wiki, this project had me testing mediawiki action APIs with different scenerios and writing sample codes in different programming languages to come up with concise API documentations for these APIs. My drive for this project was majorly knowing the fact that while working on the API documentation, I was helping in my own little way, to improve the experience of developers making use of those APIs. My technical writing skills have improved from writing technical documentations, to blog posts and reports, I have more experience in building developer friendly APIs and writing Clean Code. Having to work remotely with a community using a collaboration tool called phabricator has also improved my communication skills.

Before my internship with Wikimedia, I went through a Developer Academy Program hosted by Interswitch Nigeria LTD (a digital payments and commerce company in Nigeria). This program lasted for 8 months where I went through series of training in Software Development, particularly building Enterprise Applications. The first four months comprised of indepth classroom training on courses such as algorithms and data structures, design patterns, springboot and .net frameworks, quality assurance and software testing, and legacy systems etc. Followed by one month practical project where I built a Voucher microservice application using Java (Spring boot), C#(.NET Core), Mongodb and other tools and finally 3 months internship working with a team.

During my three months internship, I worked with the developer relations team where I worked on series of tasks which include software development, technical writing, documentation, research, carrying out surveys and onboarding programs for new engineers.

These internships have helped me build technical skills in software development, technical writing, developer relations, and soft skills in communication, being a team player, using collaboration tools and working remotely.

Tools or skills would you like to learn?

I would love to learn and explore software testing and devOps.

Interpersonal skills that make me a collaborative team member ?

I respect every member of my team(junior and senior), their opinions and their views. I am open to new ideas and believe in creativity. Having to work within a community and with a mentor during my internship also improved my communication skills. The project also helped improved my ability to connect with people through writing articles and blogposts.

To summarize it all up, I have learnt alot while working with the mediawiki team and I intend to keep improving myself even after the internship. I’m really excited about moving on to the next phase of my career and seeking opportunities that will expand my knowledge and skills. Considering the knowledge gained and skills acquired from this internship and previous experiences, I am convinced that I’ll be a valuable employee to any company that’s lucky to have me. Cheers.