The End and a Beginning

Posted on by Anika

Categories: blog and news

Whoops. There it was. Yesterday: The last day of Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015.

It came so silently and just crept up on us that we are just overwhelmed that today it’s actually here. Our heads are still buzzing with organizing conference tickets, answering questions via email, Slack or scheduling out last hangouts, doing Friday-hug pictures, collecting Feedback from everyone involved in the program and sending off keep-on-coding packages to our teams all over the world.

In the midst of our excitement and exhaustion, the three-month program that we started organizing in January this year is coming to a close. This is the end. We still can’t believe it. Good thing that this is actually not true: This is no more an ending as it is a beginning of a brand new span of life and careers for our teams.

Our 40 students - 32 sponsored, 8 volunteering - from 17 different countries have worked for 592 incredible hours on 19 different Open Source Projects. Their amazing supervisors have lead and accompanied them through these three months and deserve a huge round of applause: Alexandra, Benedikt, Markus, Adam, Lieke, Katrin, Sara, Magda, Qian, Alex, Verena, Cathy, Vyki, JZ and Kasia.

We want to especially thank Carsten, Ramon and Katrin for being not only supervisors and coaches or mentors but also organizers of the program.

A round of applause as well to Claudi, who prettyfied our website and designed our stickers this year. We had an amazing team.

All in all we’ve had over 140 people in the program - students, coaches, mentors, supervisors, organizers, designers, helpdesk coaches and trust committee members. We would like to take this chance and say again how very humbled and amazed and eternally grateful we are for each and every person who is donating time and efforts to make this program happen.

We’d also like to thank our wonderful sponsors, who made it possible for us to sponsor 6 more teams this year! It’s so amazing to see how our mission is appreciated and backed by so many companies. A special Dankeschön to Travis CI through Travis Foundation as well as GitHub who are partners of RGSoC. Forever grateful we are for the support of Mandrill, Liip who were our awesome platinum sponsors. Thank you as well to our Gold Sponsors, SoundCloud, Basecamp, Elastic and Google Open Source.

There are not enough emoji hearts in the world to describe how happy, honored and humbled we are to have been able to work together with you to change the future of Open Source! Because we are. We are writing history here and are going one step further to make our communities more diverse, more inclusive and open. We are all part of this amazing time and bringing change to a world that needs it.

Cheers to a truly brilliant Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015! Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.

We are so happy to have shared this summer with you! It was a-ma-zing!

P.S. No need to fall in to a post-RGSoC-blues! After RGSoC is before RGSoC: You can already sponsor the 2016 edition. Or get involved with organizing: drop us an email!