Summary

• Supported four interns who needed delayed internship start dates
• Fixed performance issue on Outreachy website server
• Updated intern feedback forms for COVID-19 policies

Admin

On May 19, Outreachy interns started their internship. There is always some rough patches in the beginning for some interns.

Three interns needed a delayed internship start date because their school terms had shifted due to COVID-19. One intern needed a delayed internship start date of five weeks because an internship they were to do in late August had been moved earlier due to COVID-19.

Sage Sharp also ran internship chats with the other Outreachy organizer, Anna e so. Sage has been transferring knowledge about how to run the chats to Anna.

Finances / Sponsorship

We worked to provide the 2020 budget estimate to the Outreachy Project Leadership Committee (PLC). The PLC is discussing contractor staff hours and the potential of hiring staff.

Development

During the Outreachy intern announcement, the website was experiencing high load times. The website would time out with a Dokku error.

It turned out that the Django web server (Green Unicorn) was set up to run in single threaded mode. We switched gunicorn over to run two threads per CPU, and upgraded the server to have eight CPUS. We posted a post-incident report on Twitter explaining the issue.

There was some development work done to support our temporary COVID-19 time commitment policies. We modified the internship feedback forms to include an optional field where interns could specify whether they had been impacted by COVID-19. That way organizers could apply a more lenient time policy to the internship.