Outreachy report: January 2026

Our cohort of 21 interns continues to run smoothly. We’re currently gathering evaluations from mentors and interns in order to authorize their second stipend payment. We received one extension request, but we believe it was by mistake. Omotola Omotayo hosted a social session with our cohort, with one more to go.

After submitting our budget for 2026, we planned our May 2026 cohort. I was responsible for calculating cohort dates and aligning them with Google Summer of Code’s 2026 schedule. Here’s the relevant timeline for Google Summer of Code:

And here’s our planned timeline for our May 2026 cohort:

I decided to start our May 2026 cohort earlier than usual to allow interns and mentors to work together for two weeks before requesting the first round of evaluations. Mentors often comment that it doesn’t feel right to evaluate an intern one week in and submit brief or vague feedback; giving them two weeks to acclimate should result in more detailed evaluations.

After hearing about Rackspace’s price increase, Paul Visscher attended one of our meetings to discuss migrating all services under outreachy.org to a new server. We determined that our Zulip server was the easiest service to migrate and the most expensive to keep on Rackspace; therefore, it was the first target in our migration plan. That service migration ran smoothly on January 30. Then, we have our email server — a medium complexity endeavor, according to Paul — and outreachy.org itself. We can handle an email server migration as long as it doesn’t take more than two days of downtime, but we can’t touch the outreachy.org until early May: we’ll open our new cohort on February 6 and we’ll have hundreds of active visitors and users until May 1. Additionally, Paul confessed that migrating outreachy.org concerned him the most as it’s custom software, so I agreed to write a step-by-step guide to help him.

As for our Open Mentorship Handbook, Omotola Omotayo and I gathered mentorship references in literature and we hosted a listening session where I interviewed Peculiar about the ins-and-outs of mentorship from the perspective of a mentee turned mentor. The latter wasn’t planned; Peculiar became the only external attendee for about 30 minutes and I took that as a chance to put into practice some techniques for conducting interviews I learned from a graphic novel about the behind the scenes of Ira Glass’ This American Life. I continued to read On Writing Well and interviewed a long-time mentor about the impact of LLMs on beginners in open source.

Interestingly, he was receptive to LLM usage, arguing that LLMs could enable beginners to tackle more complex projects. His answers about LLM integration to his work, however, concerned me. There were reports of conflicts between those who use LLMs and those who don’t, with emphasis on the speed of deliveries. He admitted that sometimes he felt held back by others who aren’t using LLMs, wondering if he would garner faster results working alone. But wouldn’t that eliminate the work and the friction needed for beginners to learn? Are we witnessing the creation of a generation of senior professionals unknowingly kicking the ladder behind them? (And what does that mean for programs like Outreachy?)