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Emmanuel Taiwo
Emmanuel Taiwo

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Outreachy Blog: Introduce Yourself

Hello there, my name is Emmanuel Taiwo, and I'm from Nigeria. I was begrudgingly studying in a university to get my degree in Mechanical Engineering before I discovered the wonders of the tech industry, realized what I wanted to do and summarily dropped out. My life has kind of really been a rollercoaster ever since, but these days I like to sharpen and grow my tech skills, as well as contribute to open source projects I am passionate about. I am very decisive and like to think of myself as ambitious
—even though I am not always like that. See, I really want to be an ambitious and goal-driven person because I think it's...cool.

Presently, I am an Outreachy intern at the ChRIS project. I'm working as a DevOps Engineering intern, working with containers and configurations for edge computing, and I really am loving every step of the way. I mean, sometimes it is really challenging, but this is my way of my life, I take on challenging things and I hope to be transformed by them.

My Core Values

Here are some of my core values and why they are very dear to me:

Practice! Practice! Practice!

I think the fastest way to get good at anything is to consistently pour many hours of practice into it. It's why I am never really terrified of topics and challenges I have never broached before, because I realize I only need to practice consistently, work hard at it, and eventually the challenge will stop looking so insurmountable.

Know yourself

I think I devote a considerable amount of my time to just trying to have honest conversations with myself. This helps me be confident in my understanding of who I am, where I am in the world and where I want to be. I think you will find that making long form plans about the kind of life you want to live are much easier when you are very sure on what type of person you are.

Keep expanding your horizons

Oh! This one is something that I very deeply cherish. Always keep expanding your horizons. At least every single day, I learn a new thing about the world that I find very salient. One of my favorite pastimes is watching informative YouTube videos. I suppose my most noticeable trait if you know me in real life is that I carry a lot of weird and obscure knowledge about different random things. I'm constantly reading articles, watching informative videos, ruminating on the content I consume and simply constantly expanding my understanding of the world I inhabit. This is something I have always done since I was that kid on my home desktop computer starting up the Encarta Kids app —it was a software that contained lots of fun-sized easy-to-consume information about a variety of things in the world optimized for kids learning, information ranging from short biographies about relevant historic figures to profiles on different creatures in the animal kingdom. It kind of shaped who I am today.

Well, this brings me to the end of my article. Thank you for sticking around to the end. Hope you like it enough to come back around for the next one. Byeee.

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