Achievements (accumulated over the past few days):

• got safely and happily to Atlanta
• rested and spent a lot of quality time with family
• started helping my little cousins with their schoolwork
• refactored my Outreachy application
• worked a little bit on coding and writing
• taught my uncle some programming

The last few days have been a blur of great food and quality time with my family. I’ve never had a chance to visit my godmother, uncle and two little cousins in Atlanta, so I’m happy to stay here for the next three weeks. One of my grandmas is also here, so I get the benefit of loads of delicious Polish homemade food while still being in the US.

The schoolwork in the US is different - my cousins have a lot of worksheets and tests, with very detailed instructions. It’s also very cute how a lot of things connect to American traditions - I’ve never seen so many pumpkin and turkey themed tasks.

I haven’t done enough coding and writing, because I’ve been in the family haven. I’ve finally refactored my Outreachy application and project proposals - it took a lot longer than I expected, since I’ve decided to focus on quality time rather than development over the past week. With a lot of help from Tim, Steve and Neeraj, advice from Leah and a ton of inspiring posts and ideas from Sumana, Julia and other Recursers, I’ve added some details and tried to focus more on why I’m a great fit for Zulip rather than a general presentation of my skills.

I got accustomed to slow life in Atlanta suburbs (I mistakenly thought it was much closer to the city itself) and will be able to focus more on my growth again. I’ve had a lot of programming-related quality time today, as I showed Jerry (my uncle) FreeCodeCamp and GitHub - I’m glad that by being here I encouraged him to try it out and see if he enjoys it.

The Outreachy results will be known at 4pm UTC - which means I’ll have only the next 6 hours to stress about it.