Welcome to our 3 new Outreachy interns!

In June 2022, we welcomed 3 Outreachy interns: Melke Berhan, Shivani Sangwan and Soumya Jha.

What is Outreachy and why we care about it?

This is only the 2nd time the Galaxy Community is participating in the Outreachy internship program, so you may not be very familiar with it yet.

The Outreachy internship program offers 3-month-long paid internships to members of underrepresented communities in free and open source projects.

And this is why we care: we believe we need to increase the diversity of contributors to Galaxy and be proactive to make it happen.

3 interns and 3 projects

This round we offered 3 different projects:

• Develop a notification system for different events in Galaxy;
• Galaxy climate to support local/regional initiatives and concrete actions to fight climate change;
• Develop a culture of wellbeing for open source projects, the Galaxy community as a use case.

Below, the interns are introducing themselves and the projects they are working on.

Shivani Sangwan

Who I am

I am Shivani Sangwan from Delhi (India), a computer science enthusiast interested to explore new skills and technologies every day, slowly building my way into open source. This is the first time I am contributing to a real-world open-source project and interacting with other developers on a public platform. The experience so far has been awesome. I really like the energy of everyone in the team, it is very motivational. Apart from academic interest, I like to play badminton, fitness activities and exploring new places. Would love to interact and connect with everyone in the community during the internship journey.

What I am working on

I’ve been selected as an intern to the Galaxy Community under the Outreachy 22 cohort to work on the development of a notification system for different events in Galaxy. I have been working on mockuping a user interface for the notification system with an ability to create “manual” notifications. Then proceeding to designing a set of APIs for creating and subscribing to different types of events for a user, for example, History shared with you, Workflow shared with you, Workflow run completed. Continuing my work after the previous tasks to implement a persistence mechanism for events to mark an event as seen or “not new”, with the assignment of different event types (Message, System, Jobs, etc.) in a SQL Database. We further proceed the tasks by developing a user interface for displaying events and a user interface for manually creating events.

Soumya Jha

Who I am

Hello, I am a third year undergrad, enthusiastic for Data Science and Machine Learning. My major is Civil and Environmental Engineering. I am from Jharkhand, India. Being a polyglot, I can speak and write five different languages. People recognise me as a hodophile, who loves to explore nature and its beauty. I envision the admiring glances of green and healthy Earth. My major area of study is air pollution and its control. I have also explored "Compound Climate Events" and their causes for some time. I have prior experience in Python, its libraries, data structures/algorithms in C++ and full (MERN) stack web development.

I believe technology is a boon to humankind. It’s a way to get out of the problems that we’ve created. I have worked in several campaigns for protection of stray animals and for environment conservation. I am looking towards bringing a distinguishable change and awareness towards the changing climate, which can be of some help in lowering the potential threat to our existence.

What I am working on

I’ve been selected as an intern to the Galaxy Community under the Outreachy 22 cohort. I will be working on the contribution of tools to the Galaxy toolshed and certain documentations for Climate protection on a regional level. Climate in itself is a huge and sensitive topic, a serious discussion of which is the need of the hour.

“Who does not want to enjoy the cool air of the Air Conditioner, when it’s scorching heat outside?” Yes, we humans can definitely do it. But what about the stray animals living in the very same locality? And what about the drying giant tree in your neighbourhood? There is no resort. We are selfish. And Climate Change is the proof. It indeed is very important to spread awareness about how important climate change is impacting us and how it will be in the coming times.

"Climate Change" should not just be the jargon of the ‘Science People’. Local awareness in this case can be a game changer. Thus, with the help of Galaxy Community, I have got the chance to bring a change in my local areas by showing them the probable future pictures of the current climatic scenario.

I will be focusing towards the climate analysis for the city of Mumbai (lat: 18.75,19.25; lon:72.50, 73.00). Mumbai is the financial capital of India and is of great significance. The IPCC 2021 report declares that the city will be completely under the water by 2030. My main work includes detailed analysis of the land and ocean interactions of the city. The major focus will be ‘analysis of URBAN HEAT ISLAND‘ effects and ‘effect on MARINE lives near the coast’ in the region.

The main motive is ’making science reproducible’. The entire analysis will be converted into workflow and would be available to anyone who wishes to use it in future, so that their analysis/research can be more centred and less time consuming. During the process, wherever we feel the technology limitations, I will be contributing to the development of those tools for analysis. This will open more possibilities in the future.

To fight the ‘Climate Change, a resilient attitude is the need of the hour. The concept of “NET ZERO” sounds overwhelming but unattainable on true grounds. Technology and our meaningful actions towards curbing the pollution can help improve the situation. Wish you a Greener Planet!

If you want to know more about me and my work within Galaxy Climate, check out my Blog_website. Read my blog on Climate Change here.

Melke Berhan

Who I am

Hi, I'm Melke. I'm a researcher with a B.A. in psychology from Addis Ababa University. I am interested in research and working in artificial intelligence to create solutions to different societal problems. In my free time, I like to binge-watch crime documentaries, watch videos on artificial intelligence, and listen to some good playlists.

What I am working on

I'm an Outreachy intern for the May-August round of 2022, working on the project "Develop a culture of well-being for open source projects, the Galaxy community as a use case." The project aims to improve the well-being of open source communities taking into account essential factors such as mental health, diversity, equity, and inclusion.