# Journey with Airflow as an Outreachy Intern

DevFeed: [Journey with Airflow as an Outreachy Intern](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/journey-with-airflow-as-an-outreachy-intern-32561.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://airflow.apache.org/blog/experience-with-airflow-as-an-outreachy-intern/>)

Author: Apache Airflow

Published: 2020-08-30T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Apache Airflow Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/apache-airflow-blog.md>)

Topics: [airflow](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/airflow.md>), [REST API](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/rest-api.md>), [foss](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/foss.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>), [Pull Request](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pull-request.md>)

Tags: [airflow](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/airflow.md>), [apache-airflow](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/apache-airflow.md>), [community](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/community.md>), [contributions](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/contributions.md>), [foss](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/foss.md>), [intern](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/intern.md>), [outreachy](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outreachy.md>), [rest-api](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rest-api.md>)

## AI overview

The article recounts an Outreachy intern's experience contributing to Apache Airflow, including choosing a REST API project, setting up the development environment, submitting and reviewing pull requests, learning from feedback, and understanding Airflow concepts such as pools, tasks, DAGs, and DAG runs.

## Source excerpt

Outreachy is a program which organises three months paid internships with FOSS projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those projects. Contribution Period The first thing I had to do was choose a project under an organisation. After going through all the projects I chose "Extending the REST API of Apache Airflow", because I had a good idea of what REST API(s) are, so I thought it would be easier to get started with the contributions. The next step was to set up Airflow's dev environment which thanks to Breeze, was a breeze. Since I had never contributed to FOSS before so this part was overwhelming but there were plenty of issues labelled "good first issues" with detailed descriptions and some even had code snippets so luckily that nudged me in the right direction. These things about Airflow and the positive vibes from the community were the reasons why I chose to stick with Airflow as my Outreachy project. Internship Period My first PR was followed by many new experiences one of them being that I introduced a bug in it;). But nonetheless it made me familiar with the feedback loop and the feedback on my subsequent PRs was the focal point of the overall learning experience I went through, which boosted my confidence to contribute more and move out of my comfort zone. I wanted to learn more about the things that happen under the Airflow's hood so I started filtering out recent PRs dealing with different components and I would go through the code changes along with discussion that would help me get a better understanding of the whole workflow. Airflow's mailing list was also a great source of knowledge. The API related PRs that I worked on helped me with some of the important concepts like: Pool CRUD endpoints where pools limit the execution parallelism. Tasks determine the actual work that has to be carried out. DAG which represents the structure for a collection of tasks. It keeps track of tasks, their dependencies and the sequence in which they have