Outreachy Introduction

So a week ago today I started my outreachy internship at Mozilla for the project: “Improve the User Experience of HTTPS-Only Mode” \o/

As a first task I am supposed to introduce myself … which is quite hard but I do have a cheatsheet for that. Whenever I have to write a bio I go back to one email a dear friend once wrote in 2018 to introduce me to someone and copy paste it. Nothing in this introduction is wrong, but the over all picture that is drawn is much cooler, than I really am but hey there is no lie so here we go:

“Leli is involved with Heart of Code (http://heartofcode.org – a women’s hackerspace in Berlin), CryptoParty Berlin, and Frauen und Computer Kram (FUCK- Women and Computer Stuff). Her areas of specific knowledge include physics, increasing women and girls’ participation in STEM, LEDs (especially with wearables), knitting, keeping hackerspaces awesome, and just generally being a badass, among many other things.”

So yeah I’m totally that cool!

I am absolutely obsessed with LEDs and love to make stuff blink and shine. I haven’t really touched LEDs since the pandemic started but if you are interested in my old stuff you could check out my LED Twitter (everyone should have one)

But perhaps a bit more on topic (in relation to this internship) is my involvement in the cryptoparty community in Berlin (and as a guest in New York <3)

For those who never heard of CryptoParties: It’s much less party than the name might lead you to believe 😉

CryptoParties are free and open workshops about protecting one self in the digital space, specifically aimed at people without prior knowledge. Usual topics are: e-mail encryption, save browsing, device encryption, password managers, etc.

So now after years of teaching about open source tools for security to get the opportunity to work on one is still mind-blowing to me!

This is my first real coding project and I’m so looking forward to learning about the coding side of things. And having the luxury of having a mentor helping me to navigate through a huge project with a gigantic code base is such great starting point.

I’m really looking forward to the next 12 weeks!