Rails Girls Summer of Code Blog2020-07-09T14:15:45+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/Rails Girls Summer of Code Teamhttps://github.com/railsgirlsberlin/summer-of-code/contributorsTravis Foundation StatementTravis Foundation Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:002020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/foundation-update<p>The past few months have been a testing time for us all. As the global pandemic led to the cancellation of so many events and created new challenges for nonprofits, we remained steadfast that Rails Girls Summer of Code should go ahead as planned.</p>
<p>Despite this determination and the extra measures put in place to safeguard the program, we have been unable to gather the resources necessary to keep <a href="https://foundation.travis-ci.org/" target="_blank">Travis Foundation</a> running. Sadly, it will soon close its doors for good.</p>
<p>Without the team to manage the program, we regret that <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/" target="_blank">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> has also been cancelled.</p>
<p>Many of you will share our disappointment at this turn of events. Thanks to the incredible efforts of this awesome community, fully committed to increasing inclusion and diversity in open source, we have witnessed huge improvements over the past 7 years. While we see this as a genuine success, we know there is still much to do.</p>
<p>It is comforting to know that you - thousands of inspirational coders of all genders and backgrounds - will continue to advocate for diversity, challenge discrimination, and bring about societal change.</p>
<p>While Travis Foundation will no longer be an influential force in this movement, we step aside gracefully in the knowledge that new - and even more groundbreaking - initiatives and opportunities will certainly develop in its place.</p>
<p><b>Thank you for making the past 7 years so awesome!</b> ❤️💛💚💙</p>
<h3>Thank you to our supporters</h3>
<p>Our appreciation goes out to all the individuals who have helped make RGSoC such a successful program. This includes all our sponsors and donors over the years who invested in the people who can create a better, more representative tech environment. We thank everyone who dedicated countless hours to assist in organising and planning RGSoC; each one an incredible role model for aspirational programmers, who deserve our genuine recognition and respect. 🙏</p>
<p>The applications received this year were of exceptional quality. We are grateful for the support that mentors have provided student teams over the past few months. With your help, coders new to FOSS have already made many valuable contributions. We hope that your project has genuinely benefitted from this process and that you have gained some life-long contributors along the way.</p>
<h3>A special message to applicants</h3>
<p>We were overwhelmed by the almost 600 people, from all around the world, who applied to RGSoC this season. That’s incredible! We have been moved by the passion shown by each of you.</p>
<p>It is important to reflect on everything you have achieved by applying to RGSoC. In the process, you’ve honed some super-valuable skills:</p>
<ul>
<li>communication skills utilised in finding a teammate who compliments your technical ability and goals for the program</li>
<li>negotiation and decision-making in determining your choices as a team</li>
<li>time management, collaboration and learning new tools to write an application to the best of your ability</li>
<li>researching and having the guts to reach out to coaches, proposing your ideas to successfully encourage them to participate on your team</li>
<li>and of course, everything you have learned while delving into the codebases while contributing to open source projects</li>
</ul>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code may end here, but your journey in tech shouldn’t have to. Please continue making contributions to open source projects. In this way, you will have a profound impact on some of the most pressing real-world problems faced by our generation. We genuinely look forward to seeing the difference you make.</p>
How to keep coding during lockdownRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:002020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/lockdown<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/RGSoC-in-Lockdown.png" alt="!" /></p>
<p>Regional responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have varied, but one common measure has been an enforced state of quarantine. In recent weeks, some of you have contacted us concerned about the difficulties this causes, particularly for mothers suddenly having to balance coding with childcare.</p>
<p>Here we compile a number of resources we have been sharing on social channels, found with thanks to members of the open source community and our contacts at Travis CI who know a lot about working remotely.</p>
<h3>Useful guides</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/working-from-home-kids-single-parent-a4389401.html" target="_blank">Evening Standard, 17 March 2020</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Rebecca Cox from <a href="https://www.singlemotheredit.com/" target="_blank">The Mother Edit</a> offers tips for single parents (also good for those sharing responsibilities) including how to create structure, boundaries, and downtime.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.unicef.org/coronavirus/7-ways-employers-can-support-working-parents-during-coronavirus-disease-covid-19" target="_blank">Unicef, 23 March 2020</a></li>
</ul>
<p>RGSoC aims to be family friendly with approaches similar to the policies outlined by Unicef, such as taking measures to avoid burnout and allowing flexibility with time commitments (more on this below).</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/how-to-work-from-home-with-kids-around/" target="_blank">Poynter, 13 March 2020</a></li>
</ul>
<p>As Kristen Hare notes, it isn’t always about compartmentalising home and work life or studies. Some kids can actually <b>help</b> by taking care of some household chores. Maybe including them in what you’re doing will keep them quiet or draw understanding and support from team- or workmates.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.timecamp.com/blog/2020/03/the-ultimate-guide-to-remote-work-for-parents/
" target="_blank">Timecamp, 17 March 2020</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Take control of the situation with these tips on useful apps, preparing for meetings (or pair-programming), and finding a space where you can feel productive.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://workingfamilies.org.uk/workflex-blog/the-covid-19-balancing-act/" target="_blank">Working Families, 24 April 2020</a></li>
</ul>
<p>When all else fails, being creative may help you focus. From allocating uninterrupted time in the day to spend with the little ones to enlisting family members to act as ‘virtual babysitters’.</p>
<h3>Support for RGSoC students</h3>
<p>Remote working is essential to Rails Girls Summer of Code. For example, it is common for project maintainers to mentor teams from a different city or even continent.</p>
<p>In the past, RGSoC teammates have always been required to share a working space to aid their pair-programming experience. This year, we decided to relax this rule to make the program more inclusive to applicants who live in isolated communities, where finding a teammate can be difficult. Many students outlined a plan for remote pairing in their applications, and most teams we chat to during quarantine call us from separate locations - even if they are neighbours!</p>
<p>While the participating teams have yet to be finalised, it is likely some RGSoC students this year will themselves be mothers. So, what can we - and the teams - do to ensure this experience is fulfilling and manageable?</p>
<h4>Childcare</h4>
<p>The scholarship enables students to focus on their projects for 3 months. Where possible, RGSoC will support childcare costs. However, we realise this is not an option for locations required to maintain social distancing.</p>
<h4>Part-time teams</h4>
<p>This year, 52% of applications opted to participate full-time. We will offer shortlisted applicants the chance to choose part-time before the program commences for students who need more time for their families.</p>
<h4>Build connections</h4>
<p>Networking is a fundamental element of the program. It’s all about building a future in tech, whether a basis for support, finding out about new meetups and conferences, or potential job opportunities.</p>
<p>Who knows what parents are going through better than other parents? This is why we will ensure the teams have opportunities to connect, such as with a dedicated Slack channel for mothers.</p>
<h4>Find a schedule that works</h4>
<p>With even part-time teams expected to put in 20 hours a week, RGSoC is a big commitment. Cooperation and communication are essential to success.
While applying, many teams have already discussed their availability and schedules with their teams. Parents or not, successful applicants should reach out to their coaches and mentors again in June to reassess their work times. Split days, and early morning, evening and weekend participation may be possible, especially where teams span different timezones.</p>
<h4>Talk to your supervisor</h4>
<p>Okay, it’s a terrible name. But supervisors aren’t there to make sure you’re clocking in on time and pulling your weight. Far from it: as a self-led program, students are responsible for what they put in (and get out) of RGSoC.</p>
<p>Each team is assigned a supervisor to support non-tech issues. This includes asking after team members’ wellbeing, how they’re coping with the workload, etc. At any time, students can connect with their supervisor, who will endeavor to help with ad hoc issues.</p>
<h4>Fexibility</h4>
<p>We cannot foresee every eventuality. Even the best-laid plans can be derailed. One year ago, no one would have thought the news in 2020 would be filled with reports of a global pandemic.</p>
<p>There is rarely a one-size-fits-all answer. As such, we have consciously refrained from implementing too many measures specifically in response to lockdown. Instead, we will monitor the situation, talk to teams frequently, and determine what support we can possibly tailor to individuals’ needs.</p>
<h3>Share your thoughts</h3>
<p>Have you found other resources you think would be helpful to the RGSoC and wider open source communities? Maybe advice for parents, useful tools, code teaching materials/courses, or alternative funds to help with childcare costs.</p>
<p>Please post your links on social media and include the <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC" target="_blank">@RailsGirlsSoC handle on Twitter</a> or mention us in your <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RailsGirlsSummerofCode/" target="_blank">Facebook posts</a> and we’ll share them.</p>
<p>If you have any suggestions for how we can support participants on RGSoC 2020, please <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">email us</a>.</p>
Alumni Interview with Taneea AgrawaalRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:002020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/alumni-interview-taneea<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/Alumni-Interview-Taneea.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>We are proud to share our interview with RGSoC 2016 alumni Taneea, an Electronics and Communication graduate from IIIT-Delhi who now works as a Technical Analyst at Goldman Sachs in Bengaluru, India.</p>
<p>As a self-confessed geek, hacker, coder, and hardcore Artidote fan, Taneea likes nothing more than whiling away the day solving interesting problems, equipped with just a laptop, snacks and a cup of coffee. Leading local meetups for women in tech, and as a valued member of the 2020 Orga team, Taneea hopes to touch lives and make a difference to the world through her work and expression.</p>
<h4>What first inspired you to get involved with programming? </h4>
<p>A lot of my college curriculum was programming-heavy, so I had to write code for class assignments. However, I really started to love programming as a freshman; as the coordinator of LitSoc, the literary society at IIIT-Delhi, I wrote a python Facebook post scraper to declare the winners of an online competition. I had lots of fun writing the program and this script was the first one on my GitHub account. Soon, people were forking my script and we were using it for every online competition organized by LitSoc. After that, I started actively taking part in other developer communities and competitions to be a better programmer.</p>
<h4>Did you always plan a career in tech? </h4>
<p>I'm an electronics and communication engineer, so I always planned to have a career as a hardware engineer. However, during my time at IIIT Delhi, I realized I had a penchant for software programming and I was good at it. Throughout my undergrad, I took part in summer internships (RGSoC being the first) and took courses which helped me hone those skills and eventually land a technical role at a global firm.</p>
<h4>What was your RGSoC project all about?</h4>
<p><a href="https://openfarm.cc/">OpenFarm</a> is a free and open database for farming and gardening knowledge. They provide a platform for expert and beginner farmers and gardeners to share their knowledge in the form of growing guides - structured, community-generated, single-author documents that describe how to grow a crop based on specific environmental conditions and growing practices.</p>
<h4>Which skills did you find most useful during RGSoC?</h4>
<p>The most important thing that RGSoC teaches you is the sense of community.</p>
<p>It is wonderful to be a part of something bigger than yourself and to interact with people with backgrounds different than your own. I had the opportunity to meet and work with mentors, coaches, supervisors, fellow scholars from across the globe; an experience that is unparalleled.</p>
<p>Because it is common to work with people in different timezones, you also learn the importance of teamwork, which is an extremely useful skill when working in an organization. Taking part in RGSoC, you grow not only as a programmer but as a person.</p>
<h4>What challenges did you encounter during the program? </h4>
<p>During our summer of code, one of our coaches told us that he couldn't coach us anymore because of his job. Since he was one of the two of our local coaches, we had to find a replacement for him to keep our place in the program. We immediately told our supervisor, Ramon, about the problem; he was very supportive, and even offered to help in finding a new coach for us. We reached out to our local network at the same time and found two new coaches, so all was hunky-dory!</p>
<h4>What do you do in your current job role? </h4>
<p>I am an analyst in the engineering division at Goldman Sachs in Bengaluru. Our team is responsible for maintaining, supporting and uplifting the firm's proprietary global Securities Database (SecDb).</p>
<p>My typical day involves designing and implementing features that are required to enhance the database, in addition to helping in the day-to-day operations. I am also involved with the firm's affinity networks - India Women in Engineering and Women's India Network - to drive further awareness through engagement and events.</p>
<h4>How did your participation in RGSoC help you get to where you are today? </h4>
<p>I knew I wanted to be a programmer before I took part in RGSoC but I wasn't confident about my programming skills. RGSoC helped transform me into the programmer I am today because of the different opportunities that were offered to me during and after the program - interaction with a global tech community, open source contribution, doing my bit to help improve diversity in tech. I not only became a better programmer but also gained a plethora of interpersonal skills that even benefit me in my current role at GS.</p>
<h4>Do you still do any programming? </h4>
<p>My current role is programming-heavy so I code in C++/Java almost every day.</p>
<h4>Do you have any advice for new RGSoC students and for women and non-binary people who wish to work in tech? </h4>
<p>A quote I've always lived by:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are.” - Max DePree</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I would want to tell anyone wanting to work in tech to believe in themselves and to just do it. Tech is a mixed bag with a lot of niche fields, which has something for everyone, so it's really not hard to get in at all. Be confident, and take the leap!
<h3>Supporting RGSoC students</h3>
<p>More than 200 students have participated in Rails Girls Summer of Code so far. Please <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donate to the crowdfunding campaign</a> and create more chances for coders like Taneea to get started in tech.</p>
</p>
Breaking Down Barriers to Open Source ContributionsTaneea Agrawaalhttp://twitter.com/TanSA052020-03-24T00:00:00+00:002020-03-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/breaking-barriers<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/2020-03-24-Guest-Blog-Breaking-Barriers.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>Hands up anyone reading this who has ever felt a pang of apprehension over contributing to an open source project. Quite a few of us. Despite the community being so welcoming and supportive, it can be daunting to get started with your first few pull requests.</p>
<p>Today, guest blogger and RGSoC Alumni Taneea shares the benefit of first-hand experience. Here, she provides encouraging nuggets of inspiration for anyone needing to put the doubts aside and explains how RGSoC can help you get started in FOSS.</p>
<h4>If coding wasn’t your first choice, it’s okay to change</h4>
<p>I first heard of RGSoC when a few of my college seniors participated in the program. I was a second-year Electronics and Communications engineering undergrad at the time, who was not very keen on designing circuit boards or wireless channels. However, some experimental dabbling in code for college assignments had sparked my interest in programming. So, when I heard about this program for open-source software, it piqued my interest.</p>
<p>I, along with my friend, applied for the program the next year (2016) and got selected! Needless to say, it has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life.</p>
<p>However, even today, when I interact with people about the program, I realize that there is a lot of inertia when people are asked to contribute to open source. The following are some tips to help you get started!</p>
<h4>Where to start?</h4>
<p>Possibly, the hardest problem to overcome is finding a project to contribute to. A lot of people I’ve spoken to have told me that they’ve never really been able to find projects that interest them, and when they do it’s hard to pick an issue to work on.</p>
<p>This is where RGSoC makes it super easy for you. They have a plethora of projects in a variety of programming languages and frameworks; the project pool has something for everyone - from front-end heavy projects to data analytic projects to full stack projects.</p>
<p>As RGSoC aspirants, me and my teammate opted for projects in programming languages and frameworks that we were familiar with or wanted to learn - Ruby on Rails, Javascript - and we were lucky to find a combination of both!</p>
<p>This diverse mix of open source projects is a deliberate attempt by the organizers so that the program can have maximum participation, and this year is no different! You can check out the various projects on <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/" target="_blank">RGSoC’s website</a>.</p>
<h4>Identify what’s holding you back...</h4>
<p>Just finding a project you like might not be enough. Many people reach this stage but still never contribute. But why?</p>
<p>Possible reasons include but are not limited to code complexity in the project; a lot of my friends gave up because they couldn’t understand the code and couldn’t figure out which issues to start with. Other reasons might be lack of support and mentorship - who to reach out to in case you had doubts.</p>
<h4>... and start coding anyway!</h4>
<p>The easiest way to pick an issue is to familiarize yourself with the software you’re interested in contributing to, if you aren’t already familiar with it. Use the app, play around with it, know your software. This will give you functional knowledge about the application, and provide you with a region of interest - a starting point to dive into.</p>
<p>You can even start looking for low-hanging fruit in terms of open issues in the repository. Even if you think a button should be repositioned, or a particular UI aspect isn’t intuitive, or if certain functionality can be made better - raise an issue, talk to the maintainers of the repository through the appropriate channels.</p>
<p>Your first contribution might not be big but it’s a start, which is all you need. This will prove a catalyst for all your further interactions with the open source community and will help you push through the I-can’t-do-it barrier.</p>
<p>My very first PR was adding a button to the web interface of my project and that made all the difference. It was like breaking through an invisible wall and I was a more confident programmer after that experience.</p>
<h4>More ways to get coding (and never want to stop)</h4>
<p>Programs like RGSoC provide an excellent opportunity for you to:</p>
<ul>
<li>code for three months</li>
<li>contribute to open source</li>
<li>be a part of a worldwide community</li>
<li>meet a new diverse group of people who share the same liking for code in different parts of the world</li>
<li>and get recognition for it</li> 💪🏼
</ul>
<p>RGSoC even allows you to blog about your experience.</p>
<p>No matter your background, tech or non-tech, everyone has something to offer to the OSS community. The Rails Girls Summer of Code program offers you a unique environment to foster growth and I’d like to conclude this article with a simple thought - Don’t hold back, and take the leap!</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/TanSA05" target="_blank">Taneea Agrawaal</a> is a former RGSoC student (2016 edition) who has since gone on to work as a Technical Analyst at Goldman Sachs in Bengaluru, India and lead local meetups for women in tech.</p>
Alumni Interview with Jessica GreeneRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-03-17T00:00:00+00:002020-03-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/alumni-interview-jessica<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/Alumni-Interview-Jessica-bw.png" alt="" /></p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>“My claim to fame is making coffee for the late Christopher Lee!”</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jessica Greene has been living in Berlin for 10 years. After five years in the film & television industry and a career in specialty coffee as a barista & roaster, she took the leap into coding and has since gone on to work as a backend-focused software engineer at Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees.</p>
<p>Even if making hot beverages for Saruman himself doesn’t impress you, the following interview detailing Jessica’s time working on the <a href="https://nextcloud.com/">Nextcloud</a> project during our last edition of RGSoC in 2018 is bound to.</p>
<h4>What first inspired you to get involved with programming? </h4>
<p>I consider myself a self-taught/community taught developer. After leaving my job at Barn Coffee Roasters in 2017 (and having some much needed time off!) I decided to start my path to becoming a programmer. I had done a very small amount of HTML and worked with flash animations during my art foundation at Leeds art college and my partner works in games and he was very supportive in encouraging me to try programming. I started with online courses, mainly focusing on web technology and then started to explore a couple of other languages such as Python and GO.</p>
<h4>Did you always plan a career in tech? </h4>
<p>Absolutely not! This is my third professional career and I have had a number of other work experiences. Changing careers is incredibly nerve-racking. I was fortunate to have a supportive partner and family as well as being able to gain support from the German government. At first, I thought it would be starting from scratch and that I had nothing to take with me from my past work but that couldn't be further from the truth!</p>
<p>Both my previous careers have fed into my current position, some in obvious ways such as time management/organisation, to the more abstract like documentation structure and production workflows.</p>
<h4>What was your RGSoC project all about?</h4>
<p>Nextcloud is an open source productivity platform, similar to Dropbox or Google Suite. It can be self-hosted and is focused on providing a private and secure platform where the user has control of who can access their files and where they are stored. It also has a number of apps such as a call app, calendar app, and documents app. We chose to work with the developer responsible for the contacts app which was being ported from Angular js and rebuilt using VUE.js.</p>
<h4>Which skills did you find most useful during RGSoC?</h4>
<p>The big difference between doing RGSoC over working on my own projects was the collaboration aspect, not only with my teammate Arati but also our coaches. We tried to implement some agile practices into our workflow such as stand-ups and review sessions. I found skills from my previous job as head of production at the Barn helped. Time management and self-organisation were key and luckily these were skills I could bring with me. Patience is also a big virtue for working as a programmer, perhaps especially as a junior.</p>
<h4>What challenges did you encounter during the program? </h4>
<p>There were a lot of things that had to be set up on our machines and working with different operating systems could be tricky at times!</p>
<p>At first, I did not have a partner for the RGSoC so I put a message in one of my local meetup groups. You have to work really closely with your partner during RGSoC and I was nervous about how this would be with someone I did not know previously.</p>
<p>In the end, I got on extremely well with my partner, Arati. We managed to strike a friendly and professional balance that supported both our individual personalities. We have remained close friends since the scholarship. Pairing with another programmer can be scary, you have to be prepared to be in a vulnerable place which can feel uncomfortable. However, the learning curve of when you work through a problem with another person is increased. Having to explain to each other what we had understood really helped cement our knowledge and we kept each other motivated. We didn't always pair but we had lots of check-ins with each other.</p>
<h4>What do you do in your current job role? </h4>
<p>At Ecosia I work in a team called Engagement, who focus on ways we can connect users to the impact their searches are having. This past year I have been building a service to allow users to sync their personal counter value across devices. The server is built in GO using GRPC to transfer information. It's been a great opportunity to learn more about the technology while building a brand new service. I really enjoy working with the team here, especially the other junior developer.</p>
<p>Having support within the company really motivates me to keep improving my skill set and I love hearing about the tree planting projects we are partnering with.</p>
<h4>How did your participation in RGSoC help you get to where you are today? </h4>
<p>Straight after the scholarship I started an internship at Ecosia (where I now work). Having the scholarship on my CV definitely helped prove I was capable of collaborative development work. Additionally, Ecosia was just moving their front end code over to VUE.js which I had spent the scholarship working in. Having built a support network via the scholarship through our coaches and my teammate Arati, I felt really confident and ready to start my first job.</p>
<h4>Do you still do any programming? </h4>
<p>Outside of programing at work I am involved in a couple of local community groups including PyLadies, Women Who GO and Open Source Diversity. I also have a couple of side projects for my personal learning. It’s definitely important to have a balance and I try to make sure I also have offline time where I can. Then I love to read, go to the sauna and go for walks.</p>
<h4>Do you have any advice for new RGSoC students and for women and non-binary people who wish to work in tech? </h4>
<p>Persevere! It is nerve-racking to get into any new industry and it is different for everyone. I recognise I have been extremely fortunate and privileged to live somewhere where there is a vivid tech industry with many companies looking to employ developers and many meetup groups to support underrepresented and marginalised groups. Community has been core to my success, not only the shared learning experience but also the power to stay motivated and keep going. I really recommend, be it online or in person, finding people in a similar place to you with whom you can share successes and frustrations.</p>
<h3>Supporting RGSoC students</h3>
<p>If you’ve been inspired by Jessica’s story and would like to help more beginner coders get started and bring more diversity to open source, you can <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donate to the RGSoC crowdfunding campaign</a>. Every cent goes towards funding RGSoC student scholarships. And it’ll make you feel good, we promise.</p>
What and Hows of RGSoCAkshita Aggarwalhttp://twitter.com/AkshitaAggarw182020-03-09T00:00:00+00:002020-03-09T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/student-what-and-hows<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/2020-Apps-Open-PNG.png" alt="Apply now!" /></p>
<p>Today we are delighted to feature a post by guest blogger and RGSoC Alumni, Akshita Aggarwal, who offers some sound advice for anyone thinking of applying as a student this season. It’s a very worthwhile read. Enjoy!</p>
<h3>Your Questions Answered</h3>
<p>Since the announcement of Rails Girls Summer of Code 2020, I have been getting a lot of messages from aspiring participants of how they can increase their chances of getting selected, what goes into the application process, etc.</p>
<p>This blog is an attempt to answer all of those questions to the best of my abilities.</p>
<h4>Q1. What is RGSoC?</h4>
<p>RGSoC is a 3-month-long Open Source program (July to September) that enables people to contribute to some super-exciting open source projects while being paid to do so :)</p>
<h4>Q2. Who can participate?</h4>
<p>All people with non-binary gender identities or who identify as female (transgender or cisgender) are welcome to apply.</p>
<h4>Q3. What are the steps involved?</h4>
<ol>
<li>Since RGSoC is a program where people participate in pairs, the first step is finding a partner</li>
<li>Each team needs to look for coaches to help them during the coding process. So the second step is to look for coaches</li>
<li>Once the application period begins, the next step is to choose the project to contribute to. Choosing a suitable project would be step 3</li>
<li>Filling the application form would be step 4</li>
</ol>
<h4>Q4. How do I find a teammate?</h4>
<p>It is usually preferred to team up with someone you have coded with before or someone you are comfortable working with. In case you haven’t worked with someone before, you can look for teammates in your college or in local communities that you are part of. Also, Twitter can be a good source for finding teammates.</p>
<p>This link details how to use Twitter for finding a teammate: <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/#find-teammate" target="_blank">https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/</a></p>
<h4>Q5. How do I find coaches?</h4>
<p>A coach can be any person who is willing to guide you through the application and the coding period. It is advisable to look for coaches with whom you can meet offline as this eases the process of seeking help. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for remote coaches at all. In my case, I chose my college seniors as coaches as they were easily approachable (2 seniors helped us remotely and 2 of them locally). Again, you can look for coaches in your college as well as your local community. There are lots of people out there ready to help. All you have to do is ask. You can approach people on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc and ask them for help.</p>
<h4>Q6. What should we do before the application period begins?</h4>
<ol>
<li>Finalize your teammate</li>
<li>Finalize the coaches</li>
<li>Decide on a programming language both of you (as students) are comfortable to work in. This step isn’t compulsory as you might want to choose a project that interests you but is in a language you haven’t worked with. In our case, we were sure that we wanted to improve our JavaScript skills and hence decided to look for JS projects only. This step depends on the goals of the team. Choosing a language beforehand helped us to curtail our project search to only JS projects</li>
<li>If you have time in hand, try looking at past RGSoC projects to get an idea of the kind of tasks that are assigned. (This is not mandatory)</li>
</ol>
<h4>Q7. What do I need to do once the application period begins?</h4>
<ol>
<li>Go through the list of projects and shortlist a few that you both are interested in contributing to (on the basis of your skills, your language of interest, the idea of the project)</li>
<li>Go to the GitHub Repository of the project(s) you are interested in and try reading the documentation to learn more. This could be a difficult process, especially for newcomers to open source. Make sure not to jump to the code base directly as this can be daunting at times due to the length of it. Seek help in case the documentation is difficult to understand</li>
<li>For getting help, go to the communication channel of the organization to which the project belongs. This could be a Slack/Gitter channel. The project details page usually has the link for the communication channel. Some projects do not have such channels and for them, communication takes place on the RGSoC project details page in the comments section. Introduce yourself in the channel (by saying that you are an aspiring participant and wish to begin making contributions). The maintainers would surely respond with steps to help you get started. Contributing within the application period is not at all mandatory but doing so will not only help you to understand the project better but also gives you an edge in the application process. It is equally important to communicate with the maintainers (mentor) of the project and discuss your ideas with them on Slack/Gitter/RGSoC project page.</li>
<li>Simultaneous to the contributions, start drafting your application. The application form consists of 3 main sections. As mentioned on the RGSoC official website:
<blockquote>The application form is split into three sections, where you will be asked:
a. questions about yourself, your experience with coding so far, and other information that is relevant to our decision-making process. You and your teammate will fill in this information separately
b. to select your chosen (and second choice) project from a drop-down menu
c. about your team setup. Do this together as a team</blockquote>
<p>For part (a), make sure to tell your story and your journey with the world of programming. For part (b), choose your favorite 2 projects. For part (c), answer the question in terms of how the two of you would be comfortable working together as a team.</p>
<p>An important part of application writing is to make sure to get it reviewed by someone (this could be your coaches, seniors, etc.). Getting the application reviewed enables the resolving of grammatical errors along with getting a third-person opinion on your essays.</p>
<li>Choose whether you wish to work full-time or part-time. From the RGSoC website:</li>
<blockquote>During your application, you will have the option to select whether you are applying as a full- or part-time student, or both. Both are subject to the same selection process and adhere to the same guidelines. If selected, part-time teams receive the same support and opportunities but the monthly stipend reflects the difference in project working hours.</blockquote>
</ol>
<h4>Q8. I am a beginner in programming. Should I participate?</h4>
<p>RGSoC includes projects of varying levels of difficulty as well as projects of various different programming languages. This is done to ensure that people with varying skill-sets and expertise can contribute. Also, things can be learned along the way. Make sure that you being a beginner in programming shouldn’t stop you from participating.</p>
<h4>Q9. My teammate and I have different skill-sets. How should we decide on one project?</h4>
<p>In my case, I was fortunate enough to find a team-mate who wanted to work with the same programming language. But if that’s not the case with you, there isn’t much to worry about. Usually, a number of projects require working with more than 1 language, so you can choose one of them. If that’s not the case, one of you can help the other to learn a specific language and then contribute. After all, one of the aims of RGSoC is to learn new things.</p>
<p>More details can be found on the official website of <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/" target="_blank">RGSoC</a>.</p>
<p>All the best with the application process!</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://github.com/Akshitaag" target="_blank">Akshita Aggarwal</a> is a former RGSoC student (2018 edition). This blog post originally appeared at <a href="https://medium.com/@aggarwalakshita1/what-and-hows-of-rgsoc-d4ee14f29a0e" target="_blank">https://medium.com/@aggarwalakshita1/what-and-hows-of-rgsoc-d4ee14f29a0e</a> on 16 December 2019.</p>
</li></ol>
RGSoC 2020 student applications are open!RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:002020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/applications<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/2020-Apps-Open-GIF.gif" alt="RGSoC 2020 Applications are now open!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>RGSoC 2020 student applications are now open! (thanks to Rebecca Conrad for the original illustrations)</b></div>
<p>It has been a bumper year for project submissions. Our dedicated volunteer reviewers (thanks, team) have spent the past few weeks, in a haze of caffeine, reading, evaluating and discussing all 48 proposals and have just finished making their (often taxing) decisions. Phew!</p>
<p>We thank everyone who entered a project. While we cannot take them all to the next stage, they were all incredibly interesting and had a lot of merit. As a result of being on our Teams App, some people have already started contributing to the projects that weren’t chosen, so they will still benefit from the process. The RGSoC community is amazing! 😍</p>
<h3 id="students-start-prepping">Students, start prepping!</h3>
<p>Now for some really exciting news. <strong>RGSoC student applications have officially started on Monday, 02 March 2020.</strong></p>
<p>Here’s your chance to join a global movement that champions underrepresented groups in the field of tech. If you identify as female or non-binary, have at least 12 months’ experience of coding, and possess a passion to progress as a developer then you’re in the right place!</p>
<p>RGSoC offers a:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>unique opportunity to learn while making valuable OS contributions</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>3-month community-funded scholarship (01 July - 30 September 2020)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>network of mentors, coaches, and supervisors who offer code-based and non-technical support throughout the program</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>choice of incredible open source projects to contribute to while you learn</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>chance to kick-start (or change into) a career in programming career with valuable experience on your CV/resume</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Sounds good, eh?</p>
<p>Everything you need to know about applying can be found in the <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/">student guide</a> so please make sure the first thing you do is read it carefully.</p>
<p><strong>When you’ve organised your teammate, apply in the Teams App at <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/apply">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/apply</a></strong></p>
<p>Don’t forget, your <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/">teammate</a> should be living in the same region so that you can meet up every day. And remember, you’ll be working together for many, many hours over the three months, so it is a good idea to pair with someone you get on with well.</p>
<h3 id="good-to-know">Good to know</h3>
<p>After the application stage closes on 30 March, our courageous band of reviewers will read each and every entry and face the most difficult part of the RGSoC calendar - choosing the successful candidates.</p>
<p>While we’d prefer to offer a place to everyone, the number of scholarships relies on the success of our fundraising campaign. So if you know anyone who can support it, please refer them to <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/
</a>. Who wouldn’t be tempted to see their name in lights in exchange for a small donation? Well, on the RGSoC website, anyway.</p>
<p>To help you make a stronger application, think about including details of:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>how long you have been coding and what you already (like to) contribute to</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>any communities you are involved with, such as meetups, workshops or conferences</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>dreams, goals, long term plans</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>details you may have discussed with the project maintainer/mentor that led you to choose the RGSoC project(s) in your application</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>experience of co-working (good and bad - especially if you resolved any issues)</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>It’s best to start filling the application form early, even if you’re still searching for <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching/">coaches</a> and/or a <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">working space</a>.</p>
<p>Your application can be saved as a draft for you to continue and submit any time before the deadline. That’s <strong>23:00 UTC on 30 March 2020, remember.</strong> Sorry, but any applications received after that time cannot be considered.</p>
<h3 id="your-choice-of-projects">Your choice of projects</h3>
<p>We’ve got a whole host of delectable <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects">open source projects</a> for you to choose from this year. A list of projects and links to read more about each one is included below. We’re now <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">crowdfunding</a> to ensure as many student teams and projects can partificapte in RGSoC starting in July.</p>
<p>Your coaches should be able to advise which projects would be good for you to choose, considering the languages they involve and difficulty level of the tasks. Of course, it’s also important the project interests you, so always keep that in mind.</p>
<h3 id="volunteer-reviewers">Volunteer reviewers</h3>
<p>In 2018, we received 195 applications from student teams. We hope to have even half that number again this year, but it also means there is a lot of work ahead of us. It takes time to read and review all those applications, and we can’t do it without help.</p>
<p>If you are interested in joining our reviewer team, then please email us on <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a>. (As much as we appreciate all offers, in the interest of being fair applicants cannot also be reviewers.)</p>
<p>Good luck for your applications. We can’t wait to read them!</p>
<h3 id="projects">Projects</h3>
<p>Here’s a brief list of all the selected projects to whet your appetite:</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/315-adaboost">adaboost</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: machine-learning-algorithms, cpp11, google-test, cuda boost-python</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/365-backend-and-middleware-for-meeting-rooms-management-system">Backend and middleware for meeting rooms management system</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Python</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/308-bench-routes-production-grade-monitoring-benchmarks-and-alerting">Bench-routes</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Benchmarking, ChartJS, Golang, Monitoring, React, Scalability, Web-Sockets</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/367-code-curious-workshop-organising-app">code curious workshop organising app</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Ruby, HTML, CSS, Javascript</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/320-community-app-boilerplate">Community App Boilerplate</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Flutter, Dart, Firebase, Git, UI/UX</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/362-contrifoss-website">ContriFOSS-Website</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Python, Django, React, SQL, Git</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/303-cosmos">Cosmos</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: browser extensions, c++, computer science, java, python</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/319-dashboard-management-system-for-codeuino-s-new-design-initiative">Codeuino</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: UI/UX, React, MongoDB, Angular, databases, Javascript, Nodejs, web-development</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/369-data-science-in-clojure">data science in clojure</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: clojure, R, data science, data visualization</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/353-deep-editing">Deep Editing</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: css, flask, git, html, java script, python, tensorflow</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/372-ebwiki">EBWiki</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: UI, UX, dev ops, ruby, ruby on rails, web dev</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/359-h2">H2</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: typescript, javascript, electron, tensorflow</p>
<ul>
<li>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/299-if-me-org-mental-health-communication-app">if-me.org</a></td>
<td>Mental health communication app</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Ruby on Rails, React, Postgres, HTML, SCSS, CSS, Flow, Storybook, Rspec, Capybara, Jest, Enzyme, Webpack</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/314-ignitus">Ignitus</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: React, Redux, Redux-Sagas, Heroku, Docker, Node.js, Redis, Emotion, Prop-Types, MongoDB, Mongoose, Travis, Sketch, Figma, InVision, Framer</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/305-improve-servo-s-web-compatibility">Improve Servo’s web compatibility</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Rust</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/366-improve-the-desks-control-system-for-the-coworking">Improve the desks control system for coworking</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Bootstrap, Flask, Jinja, LGPD, MySQL, Python, SQLAlchemy</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/318-kaocha">Kaocha</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: clojure, testing, functional programming</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/370-latexgo">LatexGo</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: nodejs, emscripten, latex</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/355-le-community-portal">Learning Equality Community Portal</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Django, JavaScript, Python, Vue</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/304-mentor-mentee-platform">Mentor Mentee Platform</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: CSS, Database, Design, Education, Figma, Git, Github, HTML, JavaScript, Node, Progressive Web App, Rails, React, Ruby, Storybook, UI/UX</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/309-mentorfix">Mentorfix</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Javascript, React, NodeJS, GraphQL, MongoDB, SASS Semantic, UI</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/368-metro-app">Metro App</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Flutter, Dart, Firebase, Git, UI/UX</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/361-napari">napari</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: python, image, visualization, n-dimensional, array, qt, GUI, OpenGL</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/260-pydatastructs">PyDataStructs</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: data-structures, algorithms, python3</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/371-rokono-control">Rokono Control</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: C#, CSS, HTML, Javascrip, Syncfusion, asp.net core</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/364-ruby-2d">Ruby 2D</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: C, gaming, graphics, ios, opengl, ruby, tvos, webassembly</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/354-rubyx">RubyX</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: assembler, compiler, computer science, performance, ruby</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/316-sathi-voice-enabled-chatbot">Sathi - Voice Enabled Chatbot</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Machine Learning, Image Processing, GitHub, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval, Python, HTML, CSS, JS</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/297-sciencemotions">ScienceMotions</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, Animation, Webpack, Rails, Rspec, React</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/360-scikit-image">scikit-image</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Python, image analysis, image processing, array</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/356-stretchly">Stretchly</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: nodejs, electronjs, css, html, javascript</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/306-vanilla-framework">Vanilla Framework</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: SASS, SCSS, HTML, JavaScript, Flask, Python</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/293-water-monitoring-system">Water Monitoring System</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Arduino, CSS, HTML, IoT, JavaScript, NodeJS</p>
<ul>
<li>Name: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/307-wiki-education-dashboard-make-the-survey-system-fast-and-usable">Wiki Education Dashboard</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Technologies: Rails, React, Ruby, Wikipedia, performance</p>
Alumni Interview with Ipshita ChatterjeeRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-02-17T00:00:00+00:002020-02-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/alumni-interview-ipshita<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/Alumni-Interview-Ipshita.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>In the second of our series of Alumni Interviews, Ipshita Chatterjee from New Delhi tells us how the experience of working on <a href="https://coala.io/">coala</a> with RGSoC 2017 helped jump-start her career as a software engineer. Now working as a member of Technical Staff for Adobe, Ipshita is still passionate about diversity in technology and has some brilliant advice for new students.</p>
<h4>When did you first become interested in programming?</h4>
<p>My first brush with Computer Science was at age 13 when I took an HTML elective in high school. The power of a few simple lines of code to create beautiful web pages fascinated me immensely and motivated me to pursue a career in programming.</p>
<p>I pursued a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Engineering at the Netaji Subhas University of Technology at the University of Delhi, which subsequently led to my first job in the tech industry.</p>
<h4>Did you always plan to have a career in tech?</h4>
<p>Computer Science, to me, is empowering - a tool with which we can forge and transform our future. The sheer transformational power of technology, in impacting lives all over the world captivated me from a very young age. I have planned to pursue a career in this field ever since.</p>
<h4>So, what was your RGSoC project all about?</h4>
<p>I worked on writing linter bears for coala, a platform-agnostic static analyzer - a unified command-line interface for linting and fixing all your code, regardless of the programming languages you use. At the end of the summer, I was able to introduce the support for HAML linting to coala, adding to the vast repertoire of languages supported by the tool.</p>
<h4>Which skills did you find most useful during RGSoC?</h4>
<p>RGSoC is a program that calls for technical and non-technical skills in equal measure, as it is effectively a preview of what a software development job looks like. Coding, testing, documenting, reviewing and technical design skills are essential for working on an open source project for three months.</p>
<p>In addition, project management skills like breaking down large goals into smaller, incremental tasks, tracking daily progress, effective and open communication, and collaboration with your team and the larger open source community are key to a successful summer.</p>
<h4>What challenges did you encounter during the program?</h4>
<p>The entire experience of RGSoC, right from the application phase, has been a steep and enriching learning curve. RGSoC was my first foray into open source development and through the application process, I learnt to venture out of my comfort zone and tackle new challenges.</p>
<p>RGSoC gave me the opportunity to share my experience on an international platform at Codemotion Berlin, which was an unforgettable experience for me.</p>
<p>Initially, I was skeptical and hesitant to ask for help, but through the summer, I realized that no question is too trivial and the community is here to help out. The RGSoC team’s support allowed me to chart my own course of success, focusing on developing my skills regardless of any external benchmarks.</p>
<p>RGSoC made me realize the power of communication and community. I learnt to establish open and honest channels of communication, and respect and incorporate diverse perspectives. The learnings from this program have proved extremely useful for my professional and personal growth.</p>
<h4>What do you do in your current job role?</h4>
<p>I currently work in a software engineering role at Adobe, on a vast array of cloud technologies. A typical day comprises of coding, testing, debugging, collaborations with my teammates and learning more about the tools and technologies in use in the cloud computing world.</p>
<h4>How did your participation in RGSoC help you get to where you are today?</h4>
<p>RGSoC has been a life-altering experience for me and I am indebted to it for the connections and opportunities it has given me. Being a part of this wonderful community, working towards promoting diversity in technology, a cause that is very close to my heart, has been immensely fulfilling. Through RGSoC, I have been able to forge meaningful professional connections all over the world and use these learnings to kickstart my career in technology.</p>
<h4>Do you have any advice for new RGSoC students and for women and non-binary people who wish to work in tech?</h4>
<p>Do not be afraid to venture out of your comfort zone and try new things! It is often intimidating to see other people’s accomplishments, but everything, big and small, starts with the first step. No question is too trivial and don’t hesitate to ask for help. You’ll be amazed at how much you can achieve.</p>
<h3>Supporting coders of the future</h3>
<p>If you’ve been inspired by Ipshita’s story and would like to help more beginner coders get started in open source, why not <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donate to the RGSoC crowdfunding campaign</a>? 100% goes towards supporting future RGSoC student teams and bringing more diversity to tech.</p>
Crowdfunding for 2020 scholarships has commencedRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-01-24T00:00:00+00:002020-01-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/crowdfunding-campaign-2020<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/385291213?amp;loop=1" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<!--<p><a href="https://player.vimeo.com/video/385291213">RGSoC 2020’s Crowdfunding Campaign is now Open!</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user51331690">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>-->
<p>There is already so much buzz around the program this year. With student teams coming together, coaches signing up to help, and mentors submitting projects it gets more exciting by the day.</p>
<p>Now our focus turns to the scholarships, and <strong>we need your help</strong>.</p>
<h3 id="your-chance-to-make-a-difference">Your chance to make a difference</h3>
<p>Ten teams. That’s our aim. Provide ten teams - that’s 20 students - a chance to work on open source projects this year. But the cold reality is this requires funding.</p>
<p>By donating, you contribute to the scholarships that enable someone from an underrepresented group to get started in open source. Just take a look at what we’ve achieved so far since 2013:</p>
<p><img src="/img/2019-11-20-Stats 2013-18.png" alt="RGSoC Stats 2013-18" /></p>
<p>Thanks to our early bird sponsors, we’re well on our way again in 2020. But we can do better. Aim high, but dream <strong>BIG</strong>. Let’s shatter even our own expectations and see how many teams we can fund this year.</p>
<h3 id="donatebecause">#donatebecause</h3>
<p>Visit our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donation page</a> and pledge whatever you can. Large or small amounts, it’s all important. It all helps bring diversity to tech and it all plays a part in training the women and non-binary individuals who are passionate about coding.</p>
<p>Over the next few months we’ll be sharing some personal stories in a new series of <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/categoryview/#alumna-series">Alumni Interviews</a>. These first-hand accounts are in former students’ own words and shine a light on how big an impact our humble program makes 😊</p>
<p>We also want to hear your reasons for supporting RGSoC 2020. Use the hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23donatebecause&src=typed_query">#donatebecause</a> and <strong>you</strong> could be the reason someone joins our incredible community.</p>
<h3 id="thank-you">Thank you</h3>
<p>We can’t say it enough. For what you make possible, thank you.</p>
<p><a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/"><img src="/img/blog/2020/Please Donate.png" /></a></p>
Alumni Interview with Keziah NaggitaRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-01-20T00:00:00+00:002020-01-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/alumni-interview-keziah<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/Alumni-Interview-Keziah.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>In our new series of Alumni Interviews, we are proud to showcase the interesting paths RGSoC students have gone on to since working on their projects.</p>
<p>First up, Keziah Naggita. As a student in 2016, Keziah worked as part of a remote team on <a href="http://qutebrowser.org/index.html">Qutebrowser</a> before going on to coach in 2018. Currently, Keziah is pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.</p>
<p><strong>When did you first become interested in programming?</strong></p>
<p>I started programming seriously in my second year at university when I interned in the Artificial Intelligence and Data Science lab at Makerere University, Uganda. During the internship, I learnt how to communicate logic using python, which was very interesting.</p>
<p><strong>Which skills did you find most useful during RGSoC?</strong></p>
<p>Writing clean, well-tested code and working with a diverse team.</p>
<p><strong>What challenges did you encounter during the program?</strong></p>
<p>Initially, the big codebase was very intimidating. We patiently and deeply studied module by module to understand the flow and different components of the code, which later made it easier to contribute to the codebase.</p>
<p>Timezone differences were a big challenge because we all had different timezones. Mentors, supervisors, coaches and ourselves lived in different parts of the world. We held several focused meetings, documented our meetings and communicated over Slack to keep communication consistent.</p>
<p>Working with Git is continuously a learning process. Initially, things like making a pull request and squashing commits were a challenge, as time went on, with more and more trials, massive failures and small victories, Git became a part of us.</p>
<p>I am very grateful to RGSoC because this process helped me grow both professionally and personally. And by the time the summer was over, I was more confident in my ability to work with Git, and contributing to Open Source.</p>
<p><strong>How did your participation in RGSoC help you get to where you are today?</strong></p>
<p>RGSoC to me is a reminder of diving into the unknown, moving to unfamiliar territories and making meaningful contributions to the community. At the beginning of RGSoC there were several things I didn’t know how to do, for example, TDD, working with Git and so much more. When I eventually made some significant contributions to qutebrowser, it changed the way I saw myself. I learnt to believe in myself, my ability to learn anything I put my mind to, and trusting the process.</p>
<p><strong>Do you have any advice for new RGSoC students and for women and non-binary people who wish to work in tech?</strong></p>
<p>Believe in your ability to learn and excel at anything. Trust the process, celebrate progress, breath and make wonderful friends in the community. RGSoC avails to you a great support system to fall back on, make use of it! All the great software engineers you see started with “hello world”.</p>
Submit Your Open Source ProjectsRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2020-01-03T00:00:00+00:002020-01-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/projects-submissions-2020<p><img src="/img/blog/2020/2020_Projects_Open.gif" alt="Project Season Open" style="width:600px;height:338px;" /></p>
<p>Are you working on an Open Source project you think would be perfect for a coding near-beginner to work on? What luck! RGSoC is accepting <strong>project submissions</strong> for the 2020 season starting from <strong>06 January 2020</strong> 😄</p>
<p>Simply apply in the <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams App</a> before <strong>9am, Monday 10 February 2020</strong> CET.</p>
<h2 id="get-familiar-with-the-basics">Get familiar with the basics</h2>
<p>What makes a really good RGSoC project? Full details are available on our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">mentors page</a>, which we recommend you read before applying.</p>
<p>There are some basic requirements. Keep in mind every project needs:</p>
<ul>
<li> a mentor, the dedicated contact person for the team throughout the program</li>
<li> <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching/" target="_blank">coaches</a> (min 2, max 4) who offer students all-important day-to-day support</li>
<li> to be beginner-/junior-friendly</li>
<li> at least one open-source license</li>
<li> to abide by the RGSoC <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/code-of-conduct/" target="_blank">Code of Conduct</a></li>
</ul>
<p>One thing you don’t need to worry about is using Rails. Despite the name, Rails Girls Summer of Code is programming language agnostic. Former projects have used Python, Rust, and Javascript, to name a few.</p>
<h2 id="what-next">What next?</h2>
<p>After the deadline (9am, <strong>Monday 10 February 2020</strong> CET, remember), our team will look through all the submissions and announce successful projects in early February. While not every project will be chosen for the program, we value every entry. The sheer variety of projects makes RGSoC such a rich and rewarding experience.</p>
<p>Selected projects should shout about it on <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Rails-Girls-Summer-of-Code-620914904656191/">Facebook</a>. It’s a superb way to connect with students and get some love for your project.</p>
<p>In March and April, potential student contributors will have the chance to apply for the program and choose the project(s) they wish to work on. They may contact you (or whoever is the project <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">mentor</a>) for more details to make sure it’s the right project for them.</p>
<h2 id="using-the-teams-app">Using the Teams App</h2>
<p>Sure, you know your way around a computer. Even so, we want to make it easy for you to apply with this step-by-step guide on how to add projects to the Teams App. Did we mention the deadline for submissions is 9am, <strong>Monday 10 February 2020</strong> CET?</p>
<ul>
<li>Sign up for the <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams App</a></li>
<li>Authenticate with <a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a> (you’ll need an account)</li>
<li>Click on “Submit your project” under “Summer of Code” in the navigation bar</li>
<li>The submitter (you) is entered as the primary mentor by default. If that isn’t the case, enter the correct name, email address and GitHub handle</li>
<li>Add the project name, website, repo, and description, including:
<ul>
<li>what the project is about</li>
<li>what stage it’s currently at</li>
<li>a few words about the team behind it</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>If your project has additional coaches to help the students during the program, add their information in the description</li>
<li>Add features and tasks: outline how you imagine the students to contribute, features you’re planning to work on, issues that need help</li>
<li>Add requirements: describe skills and experience students should bring to work on the project, e.g.
<ul>
<li>Provide a small example or coding challenge for students to solve upfront</li>
<li>Add links to online courses or katas students should be confident with</li>
<li>Frame possible features students could work on</li>
<li>Or just ask the students to contact you for more information about requirements</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Add keywords: this can be a language like “Python” or a framework like “React”, but also specific technologies or concepts</li>
<li>Add the name of your license in the “license” field</li>
<li>You can flag your project as “suitable for beginners” by using the available checkbox</li>
<li>Click Submit</li>
</ul>
<p>Well done! You’ve taken the first step to becoming an RGSoC legend.</p>
<p>You can also see a walkthrough of this process on our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/pages/help">Help page</a></p>
<h2 id="still-got-questions">Still got questions?</h2>
<p>If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the website feel free to <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">email us on contact@rgsoc.org</a>.</p>
<p>We can’t wait to see what you’re working on. And if you know of a great project someone else is doing, point the maintainer in this direction and get the magic started.</p>
Join the New RGSoC Orga TeamRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2019-12-02T00:00:00+00:002019-12-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/orga-team<p>Call us biased, but we think our volunteers are superstars. Rails Girls Summer of Code wouldn’t be possible without their help and hard work.</p>
<p>We’re now putting together a winning team for 2020. Whether you’re super organized or if your talents lie in programming, designing, writing, emotional support, legal know-how, campaign management, fundraising, or inspiring people, today we’re asking you to step up and join our team.</p>
<p>Don’t forget - if you’re a former RGSoC student, you can still participate this time in a supporting role. Who better to guide newcomers than someone who has already enjoyed the experience?</p>
<h2 id="orga-team">Orga team</h2>
<p>Organizers eat, sleep and breathe RGSoC. This is the small group of people who make sure the program runs smoothly. They have an intimate knowledge of how the program works and dedicate many, many hours to making it happen.</p>
<p>There’s no denying, being part of the Orga team can be a lot of work. Here are just some of the things we need to take care of to make sure our teams are informed, involved and cared for:</p>
<ul>
<li> Writing, editing, posting, and scheduling newsletter, blog and social media posts</li>
<li> Creating eye-catching visuals - images and videos</li>
<li> Regularly communicating with mentors and students</li>
<li> Updating and maintaining the website and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/" target="_blank">Teams App</a></li>
<li> Assessing, selecting and supporting suitable applications</li>
<li> Interviewing prospective students (and sharing good news)</li>
<li> Finding and inducting supervisors and Trust Committee members</li>
<li> Reaching out to sponsors and handling finances</li>
<li> Issuing fair stipends to teams in all areas of the globe</li>
<li> Collecting and distributing sponsors' swag</li>
<li> Telling everyone how awesome RGSoC is at meet-ups, in presentations, etc.</li>
<li> Supporting participants with sensitive issues as a <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/code-of-conduct/#contact" target="_blank">Trust Committee member</a></li>
<li> Providing remote support and answering questions on our Helpdesk for when teams get stuck and local coaches aren’t available</li>
</ul>
<p>The list goes on. Does any of this sound like something you could help with? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">We’d love to hear from you.</a></p>
<h2 id="short-on-time-you-can-still-help">Short on time? You can still help</h2>
<p>By reading this, you’ve already taken your first step to becoming an RGSoC ambassador. You’ve got contacts - friends, family members, colleagues, sports club partners, penpals, project collaborators - we could never hope to reach alone. Spread the word about RGSoC and help us find key contributors to our 2020 team.</p>
<p>Make some noise on social media by sharing our posts on <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Rails-Girls-Summer-of-Code-620914904656191/">Facebook</a>. Don’t forget to use the #RGSoC hashtag.</p>
<h2 id="be-prepared">Be prepared</h2>
<p>We’ll soon be launching calls for open source projects, student teams, and sponsors. Here’s a sneaky bit of advice in advance to get you prepared:</p>
<p><strong>Open source projects:</strong> if you’re a maintainer for a project you think would be suitable for our students to work on, start gathering together the details you’ll need to upload it to our Teams App. The information you’ll need to enter can be found <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">here.</a></p>
<p><strong>Student teams:</strong> you’ll need to apply as a pair (2 students working together) - so find someone to team up with before submitting your application. Everything you need to know about being an RGSoC student can be found <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/">here.</a></p>
<p><strong>Sponsors:</strong> alongside community members who donate to the crowdfunding campaign, our very generous sponsors fund the stipends that compensate student teams. Check out our enticing <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/packages/">sponsorship packages.</a> 100% of sponsorship and donations go to the students.</p>
<h2 id="still-got-questions">Still got questions?</h2>
<p>There’s plenty of info on this site, but if you can’t find what you’re looking for feel free to <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">email us on contact@rgsoc.org</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">tweet us</a> - after all, it may help others who have the same question.</p>
RGSoC Returns for 2020RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2019-11-18T00:00:00+00:002019-11-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/season-announcement-2020<p>It’s back! We’re thrilled to announce that Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) will return in 2020.</p>
<p>Following a brief hiatus last year, we’re looking forward to helping a whole new bunch of students jumpstart their careers in coding.</p>
<p>But first we want to thank everyone who made the 2018 program such a roaring success. This program can only happen thanks to the involvement of our diligent students and support from the many dedicated volunteers and generous donors. Each and every one of you helped make it an incredible year. A special and heartfelt “thank you” goes out to Anika and Laura for everything they did to make RGSoC run so smoothly since day 1.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">🍀Thank you & good luck to Laura and Anika who have left Travis Foundation to pursue exciting new challenges. Their hard work on projects like <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> has improved the lives of so many underrepresented people in tech, which we’ll continue in 2020 and beyond💪 <a href="https://t.co/JMYT3xH8gq">pic.twitter.com/JMYT3xH8gq</a></p>— Travis Foundation (@travis_fnd) <a href="https://twitter.com/travis_fnd/status/1189122868640178176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 29, 2019</a></blockquote>
<h2 id="so-whats-it-all-about">So, what’s it all about?</h2>
<p>RGSoC champions underrepresented people in tech. It’s our dream to make diversity more visible in Open Source by creating opportunities for women and people who identify as non-binary.</p>
<p>The concept is simple but effective. By connecting budding developers with volunteers in the field, RGSoC provides the chance to do, learn, and develop. Students receive a scholarship to work on an Open Source project full-time for three months (July-September) removing the financial barriers otherwise preventing them from pursuing a career (or career change) in coding.</p>
<p>Ultimately, this program acts as a springboard for future programmers and a more inclusive OSS community. In turn, participants become ambassadors for RGSoC and inspire others to take up coding.</p>
<h2 id="what-next">What next?</h2>
<p>Stay tuned! Each step of the way we’ll be making announcements on social media and this blog. Whether you’re keen to be involved as a <a href="/students">student team</a>, or putting your expertise to good use in a <a href="/about/roles">volunteer role</a>, we’ll let you know how and when to get started.</p>
<p>Don’t forget - if you’re a former student, you can always participate in 2020 as a volunteer. Who better to support newcomers than someone who has already benefited from the experience?</p>
<p>We’ll soon launch the call for open source projects. So, project maintainers, get your thinking caps on; would your project be suitable for our students to work on?</p>
<p>Early in the New Year the crowdfunding campaign will commence. We hope we can rely on your support.</p>
<h2 id="sponsorship-packages-have-changed">Sponsorship packages have changed</h2>
<p>Every cent from our fundraising campaign will directly fund students’ scholarships. This year we’re offering a choice of three sponsorship packages with dynamic new names and more attractive rewards. <a href="/sponsors/packages">Check out the new sponsorship packages</a>.</p>
<h2 id="what-about-conferences">What about conferences?</h2>
<p>In the past we collaborated with conferences all over the world, offering students a chance to attend for free. While recognizing the excellent opportunity for networking and development this offers, we’ve decided not to run this part of the program in 2020.</p>
<p>However, you may be able to source tickets to conferences via our friends at <a href="https://diversitytickets.org">Diversity Tickets</a>.</p>
<h2 id="how-can-i-find-out-more">How can I find out more?</h2>
<p>In the meantime, click around our site for further information and feel free to <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">email us on contact@rgsoc.org</a> if you have any specific questions.</p>
<p>Don’t forget to follow RGSoC on <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Rails-Girls-Summer-of-Code-620914904656191/">Facebook</a>. One of the most powerful ways for you to make a splash is by sharing our social media posts. Don’t forget to use the #RGSoC hashtag.</p>
<p>2020 promises to be another exciting year. We hope you’ll join us for the wild ride.</p>
Code with these open source projects this seasonRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2019-05-08T00:00:00+00:002019-05-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/code-with-these-oss-projects<p>Even though we’re not organising RGSoC in 2019 in order to focus on our rebranding, we still want to support more diversity in open source and use our network to connect awesome people together. This is why we’re happy to share the following list of projects with our whole community! All 18 of them were submitted to us over the last months. Some of these projects are newcomers to the RGSoC community and some have been accepted into past editions; some are established, with a large community, while others are smaller and newer. What all of these projects have in common is their support of initiatives like ours and their interest in making their community more diverse and inclusive.<br />
To get started contributing, read through the submissions, find a project that appeals to you, and contact the maintainers using the information provided or the commenting feature.</p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Algo_Ds_Notes<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: Algorithms, Data Structures<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/230-algo_ds_notes">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/230-algo_ds_notes</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Anna Assistant<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: Javascript, CSS<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/231-anna-assistant">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/231-anna-assistant</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Codebadges<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: NodeJS, HTML, CSS, VueJS<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/248-codebadges">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/248-codebadges</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Codeuino Website<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: React, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Markdown<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/242-giving-new-look-to-codeuino-website">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/242-giving-new-look-to-codeuino-website</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Competitive_Coding<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: C++, Java, Python, Algorithms, Data Structures<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/237-competitive_coding">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/237-competitive_coding</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Cosmos<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: C, C++, Java, Python, Django<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/239-cosmos">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/239-cosmos</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Cynthesize<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: Angular, NodeJS, Python, GraphQL<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/226-cynthesize">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/226-cynthesize</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: dev.to<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: Ruby, Rails, Javascript, Preact, HTML, CSS<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/241-dev-to">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/241-dev-to</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Donut<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: Vue.js, Node.js, HTML, CSS, JS<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/246-donut">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/246-donut</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Free UK Genealogy<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: MongoDB, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/234-free-uk-genealogy">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/234-free-uk-genealogy</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: H2<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: NodeJS, ElectronJS<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/229-h2">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/229-h2</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: LatexGo<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: NodeJS, Emscripten, LaTeX<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/250-latexgo">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/250-latexgo</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Mathball<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: Javascript, NodeJS<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/232-mathball">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/232-mathball</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: MentorFix<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: NodeJS, JavaScript, MongoDB, React<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/252-mentorfix">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/252-mentorfix</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Nextcloud<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: PHP, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, SQL, Android<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/249-nextcloud">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/249-nextcloud</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Probot: build your own GitHub app(s)<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: NodeJS, JavaScript, GraphQL<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/251-probot-build-your-own-github-app-s">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/251-probot-build-your-own-github-app-s</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Ruby 2D<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: Ruby, OpenGL, C, iOS, WebAssembly<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/244-ruby-2d">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/244-ruby-2d</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: ScienceMotions<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: HTML, CSS, React, Rails<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/227-sciencemotions">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/227-sciencemotions</a></p>
<p><strong>Name</strong>: Voice Enabled Chatbot<br />
<strong>Technologies</strong>: Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript<br />
<strong>Link</strong>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/236-voice-enabled-chatbot">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/236-voice-enabled-chatbot</a></p>
<p>If you’re interested in even more projects, on our Teams app you can find an overview of our past projects from <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects?filter=2016">2016</a>, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects?filter=2017">2017</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects?filter=2018">2018</a>. For a deep dive into some of our past projects, you can also read the <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/categoryview/#oss-projects">Open Source Project Spotlight posts</a> on our blog.</p>
How you can submit your open source project — and what is different this yearRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2019-04-05T00:00:00+00:002019-04-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/submit-your-project<p>This year most of our efforts will go towards <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2019-03-21-the-future-of-rgsoc">our rebranding</a>, but we are still committed to connecting awesome projects and underrepresented people in tech. For this reason, we’re opening submissions for open source projects! After reviewing them as we’ve done in the last years, we’ll publish a list with the accepted open source projects which we think are a good fit for underrepresented people from our community. While we cannot offer organisational or financial support this year, we hope that leveraging our network can help some motivated open source contributors find their match in the form of an inclusive and supportive project.</p>
<h2 id="what-will-this-look-like">What will this look like?</h2>
<p>Our project submission form is just like the form from the past years; once the deadline has passed (<strong>April 22nd, 23:59 UTC</strong>), we’ll review all project submissions and “accept” the ones that seem fit for our community. This list will be officially published and shared at the end of April. Interested contributors from underrepresented groups can get in touch with maintainers by using the contact information provided or using the commenting feature. We’re also making <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rails-girls-summer-of-code-community">our community message board</a> available to community members to find a team or a coaching company to support them.</p>
<h2 id="submit-your-project">Submit your project</h2>
<p>Are you a project maintainer with some time to support open source newcomers? That’s awesome! You can find more information in our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects">project mentor guide</a>. If that seems like something you’d like to do this year, you can submit your project as follows:</p>
<ul>
<li>Sign up for the Teams App (you will need to authenticate with GitHub)</li>
<li>Click on “Submit your project” under “Summer of Code” in the navigation bar</li>
<li>Enter the name and information of the primary mentor</li>
<li>Add the project’s name, website, repo and a description</li>
<li><strong>To make sure prospective participants can get in touch with you, please add your preferred contact information (e.g. an email address) to the project’s description</strong></li>
<li>Add features, tasks and requirements</li>
<li>Add keywords, the name of your license, and a link to your Code of Conduct</li>
<li>Flag your project as “suitable for beginners” if necessary</li>
<li>Click Submit!</li>
</ul>
<p>We can’t wait to share some of our favourite projects from the last few years and get to know new ones. We’re looking forward to your application — and if you’re not a maintainer, but can think of a project you’d like to see on our list, ping them to apply or help us spread the word!</p>
The future of RGSoCRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2019-03-21T00:00:00+00:002019-03-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/the-future-of-rgsoc<p>Dear friends! As some of you may have noticed, this year’s RGSoC will be a bit different for all of us. Here is how and why.</p>
<p>It took us a long time to get to where we are today. We’ve successfully organized RGSoC 6 times and over the last years we noticed more and more that the name Rails Girls Summer of Code does not fit our program anymore: We are not focused on “Rails”, but are language agnostic; we are no “girls” anymore and never have been, and although we still fiercely love the Rails Girls community we grew out of, our program has become so different that we want to find a more suitable name for it. A name that tells the world exactly what we stand for, tells sponsors what they can support and applicants what they can expect.</p>
<h2 id="time-time-time">Time time time</h2>
<p>To do this, we need some time. We need to not only think about what name our program should have but also take some time to review all the feedback we’ve collected and implemented over the years, and take time to make our organizational structure better to prevent burnout of organizers, rewrite our guidelines, and make our support better for everyone.</p>
<p>Did you know that RGSoC has always been organized by a very small team? That team handles everything — the application phase for open source projects, communicating with the mentors, supporting the teams’ applications, the selection phase (hello 48-hour shifts of going through all applications in a short amount of time), developing and maintaining the app for all this, reaching out to sponsors and handling finances, finding and onboarding supervisors of the teams, organizing all the weekly calls and catch ups, updating our website, writing blog posts, reviewing pull requests, sending out newsletters, finding a trust committee, all the way through how to offer fair stipends to teams in every corner of the world and collecting swag from sponsors to then lovingly pack them into (not so) little care packages for each and every applicant. What a list! (And not even close to complete)</p>
<h2 id="make-it-simple">Make it simple</h2>
<p>We want to make it easier for us to run the scholarship program and easier for everyone else to understand what we do and to get on board. During last year’s edition, we started planning our rebranding phase, what we would need from it, what we wish for the future and how much time we’d need for it. We started defining our target audience, rethinking our content and brainstorming on a name. But we realized quickly there was no way we could do both — run the program this year and also rework, rebrand and redesign it on the fly.</p>
<p>After jumping into this wild adventure 6 years ago and running ever since, we will take a breather, drink some water, get out our thinking caps and paper and pens and will fix the things that needs fixing and keep the things that work. In the end, we hope to present you with the program you know and love, but better organized. A program that still wants to fund underrepresented people working on Open Source projects. But one that we had time to create. And one with a new name.</p>
<h2 id="where-you-come-in">Where you come in</h2>
<p>Do you want to help us? RGSoC was always a community-focused program and as such, we’d love to get your feedback of what worked and what didn’t over the years, what you’d like to keep and how you’d want to see us grow. We’ve put together a feedback form to collect your input below.</p>
<p><a href="https://rgsoc.typeform.com/to/cUikUg">Give us your thoughts</a></p>
<p>But that’s not all. We still want to make sure we connect great and beginner-friendly open source projects with people who want to work on them; our goal is to publish a list of approved open source projects in April that aspiring open source contributors can work on. You can submit your project <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects">here</a>. We also plan to publish a guide for companies on how to host teams this year. So if you are one of these companies wanting to get involved — <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">let us know!</a> We’ll do our best to connect you with people who want to work on open source projects.</p>
<p>We are looking for sponsors who want to fund our rebranding work and keep our organizing team going this year, so that we can soon announce that we will be back in 2020 with a brand new name and ready to change lives again! If you’re interested in supporting us this year, please drop us a line: <a href="mailto:campaign@rgsoc.org">campaign@rgsoc.org</a></p>
<p>Thank you everyone for making the dream RGSoC a reality until now! Thank you for being part of a wonderful journey. We are so excited to work together with you on a new chapter of our dreams.</p>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/265904630" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/265904630">You Are Accepted To RGSoC 2018!</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user51331690">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
Team Sectumsempra at GHCI 2018!Avneet Kaurhttp://twitter.com/TeamSectumsem182018-12-31T00:00:00+00:002018-12-31T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/TeamSectumsempraGHCI<p>We are so thankful to the RGSoC organizers for giving us the opportunity to attend Grace Hopper Celebration India 2018, which was held in Bengaluru, India from November 14 - November 16th 2018. With the ever so encouraging keynotes, life transforming stories of prominent women paving their way in technology, the much celebrated career fair, it was definitely an experience of a lifetime and I couldn’t miss it for the world. Unfortunately my teammate Rupal was unable to attend due to personal reasons.
The 3 days of the conference were full of learning, networking, and some fun and games too! There was so much to take back and to realize that there is so much more to learn as we tread forward in our journey in tech. And as I put this down in my words, I feel so elated to cherish
the experience yet again, with the dewy memories of time well spent. So here goes how my days at the conference were spent.</p>
<h2 id="day-1-inspiring-keynotes-envisioning-the-future-mottos-to-live-by-and-much-more">Day 1: Inspiring Keynotes, Envisioning the future, Mottos to live by and much more…</h2>
<p>As I arrived at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre, the first thing that caught my eye was the huge queue in front of all the registration booths. So many women from varied technological backgrounds and at different levels in their career paths had gathered for the Grace Hopper India rightly termed as a ‘Celebration’. More so because, it was a celebration of the amazing journeys each and every attendee their had gone through, and how proud it made them feel to be there at that time. The excitement from their cheery voices,
planning on how they are going to spend the much awaited three days, surrounded the conference ground.</p>
<p>While standing in the queue, I was amazed to see how some of us could bond over the the simplest of things such as when they would commence the registration. Uponreceiving the badge, all the women, with their smiles as wide and eyes as bright as they could ever be, swarmed towards the main hall. And that itself was a sight to behold.</p>
<p>After finally gathering in the main hall, all of us eagerly waited for the keynotes to begin. As the welcome presentation by Geetha Kanan, the organizer of the conference commenced, all of us cheered and hooted with excitement while she walked us through the beautiful journey
of GHCI through the years, as well as the women behind it all. We all were so thrilled to see an all women team behind such a reputed and well-appraised conference.
Soon after, the first keynote by Lori Beer took place, and she gave us such important lessons while undertaking our journey in technology. She emphasized how its so essential to dream big. With her talk, we all envisioned to carry forward the dream of achieving the “Fifty Fifty ratio in tech by 2025”.i As I write this down, I reminisce her words, which ring repeatedly loud and clear, in my head: “Be bold, be brave, be yourself, be unstoppable.”</p>
<p>One of the talks that stood out, and for me, it definitely was the highlight of the day was by Vaishali Kasture,one of the keynote speakers. She educated us on the importance of the art of selling, and how crucial it is to be able to put yourself out there, to be able to derive the best for yourself, your company as well as your clientele.
Citing her own example, she mentioned proudly and just as casually , that she came from a non-tech background herself but was in the tech business for quite long now, and to top it all, she was addressing a gathering of 5000 female engineers, which was quite unconventional, thereby highlighting the essential need for all of us to learn how to negotiate well, and to sell as well. While talking about unconscious bias, she pointed out how it is common for us it is to assume that selling and negotiating are associated with masculinity its time to eliminate that. Moreover, she engaged the audience through interesting anecdotes from her experience so far. An interesting thought she provoked, stuck with me. “Out west they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but here we say that the nail that sticks out gets the hammer.” And that was one of the key takeaways for me, that is, mastering the art of ethics, as well as negotiation, and doing it with a lot of empathy and ethics.</p>
<p>All the speakers shared their experiences from their tech journeys, and left us with thought provoking words and all the more encouragement to be engaged with tech as a career, and do things right. Their words, energy, conviction and most importantly, the motivation with which they spoke, spread infectiously and so quickly among the crowds and while young girls quickly soaked their minds with all that was pouring in,
I too, not falling behind gathered it all to take back home with me, not only to cherish, but to carry it forward in my journey in tech. As the day concluded, with happy hearts and craving minds, and we looked forward to know what’s in store for the upcoming days.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-12-20-TeamSectumsempra-GHCI2018.jpg" alt="GHCI 2018" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">GHCI conference 2018 (source: Avneet Kaur)</div>
<h2 id="day-2-and-day3">Day 2 and Day3:</h2>
<p>It marked the beginning of the career fair, and so many women joined the conference on the second day.There was a great lineup of speakers everything ranging from Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, to talks on Career advice, Emerging technologies, Using Tech for Social Development and Innovation, and so much more.</p>
<p>I was really intrigued by one particular talk on “Analyzing Gender Stereotypes in Bollywood movies” by Nishtha Madaan, who is a researcher at IBM. It was interesting to know about the prevalent bias in AI, because of the kind of data that is fed into systems, and what the outcome is. The talk was based on the study of bollywood movies data and images data from wikipedia and analyzed the differences between the appearances, introduction, role portrayal, dialogues, actions of the male vs female actors and highlighted the much prevalent bias.The goal of this study was to methodologically analyze this and find ways to remove this kind of bias. The talk concluded with a well deserved applause roaring through the entire audience. I too enjoyed the talk thoroughly.</p>
<p>Next up I attended various talks centred around various applicationsof deep learning. One of them was about Fake Article Detection from Multilingual Documents using deep learning, which was again quite engaging. Another interesting talk was on Vision Based Railway Track Monitoring Using Deep Learning. Both these talks opened up my horizon of knowledge on things, applications that deep learning plays and possibly can play an essential role in, and how it is being used as an extensive tool in research.</p>
<p>Apart from attending various talks, I also attended the career fair, which was definitely the highlight of the day. Unlike the quiet conference halls, the career fair hall, was brimming with cheery noises, fun and games at various booths, people networking in groups near booths, and ofcourse, girls gathering up to solve quizzes and puzzles to win goodies was a common sight to behold. On both the days, I visited the various booths in the career fair, which had interesting opportunities for all women.</p>
<p>All in all, GHCI18 turned out to be a great experience, full of learning, exploring new things, learning about new tools and technology and most importantly their applications. The highlight of the event was definitely the keynotes on the first day, which filled within us great waves of enthusiasm and encouragement to not only carry forward, but to lead our journey in technology with pride.</p>
DV Team FarewellVioleta & Dianahttp://twitter.com/artnerdnet2018-12-28T00:00:00+00:002018-12-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/dvteam-farewell<h1 id="times-up">Time’s up!</h1>
<h2 id="what-an-incredible-experience">What an incredible experience!</h2>
<p>While most of people went on summer holidays to unwind, we decided to do the opposite. Working throughout summer, combining our full time job with a part-time Summer of Code experience. After an intensive three months of 60+ hours work, it’s hard to believe this Rails Girls Summer of Code experience is coming to an end. Read what the DV Team learned during this coding summer.</p>
<h2 id="living-style-guide---pimd">Living Style Guide - PIMD</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.livingstyleguide.org">Living Style Guide</a> is the Open Source project we have been selected for. It helps developers to create front-end style guides easily with SaSS and Markdown. The project is created by <a href="http://www.twitter.com/hagenburger">Nico Hagenburger</a> (designer and software programmer) with the help of <a href="https://twitter.com/anomiseditrix">Jen Geacone-Cruz</a> (Content Director). Our main tasks were linked to the porting of the project from Ruby to JavaScript: to refactor and enhace code, implement plugins, test code in Vanilla Javascript and improving the documentation.</p>
<p>Our main targets:<br />
- Easy to use in JavaScript projects – in build tools and within the browser<br />
- Extendible: The main API is the DOM tree known from the browser<br />
- Compliance with CommonMark specs – Markdown files render perfectly on GitHub; all additional commands will be CommonMark compliant and won’t leave ugly artifacts when used in README.md files on GitHub</p>
<p>It resulted in a new plugin on npm packages, called PIMD. PIMD stands for “Processing Instructions for Markdown” and is the base for the JavaScript version of LivingStyleGuide – an API to extend Markdown by DOM manipulations as known from the browsers.</p>
<h3 id="how-did-we-work-on-it">How did we work on it?</h3>
<p>Before the project began, we gathered to organize ourselves and created a list of desired outcomes. Our summer would be successful, if we achieved the following:</p>
<p><strong>July</strong>: plan, learn as much as we can, connect with the RgSoc-community and start contributing to Living Style Guide making our first contribution to open source<br />
<strong>August</strong>: keep working hard and make the best out of the summer!<br />
<strong>September</strong>: finish the Javascript version & test Living Style Guide.<br />
<strong>October</strong>: finish the last issues for PIMD project and hopefully be ready to find and start a new tech job as Junior Front End Web Developers in Barcelona when the summer is over.<br />
From the beginning, we tried to stay organized and clearly communicate our goals. Yet, with no timeline in hand, opposite time schedules, no real idea about how the code worked and no instructions, we worked on random issues. One month gone, we lost the excitement without the inputs from the mentors. That changed when we discussed it with our supervisor Lucas and met our new mentor Bright. Things went much better from that moment on, we were lucky to have coaches that are very talented, no only in coding but also in explaining and lifting our spirits.</p>
<h3 id="daily-log">Daily log</h3>
<p>Once the project started, we made a daily log with what we did that day.<br />
Each day we had at least one sit-down where we’d ask about each other’s progress and maybe even teach each other what we learned or how to build something.<br />
After three months of research, tutorials, building and deploying, we finally built the minimum viable product of our project. The last month, we refactored, tested and added new features to each component.</p>
<h2 id="lessons-and-challenges-things-we-learned-along-the-way">Lessons and Challenges: Things we learned along the way</h2>
<p>One of the best and worst parts of our project is that we were given freedom to build using whatever stack we wanted. It was very freeing and made us feel like our mentor really trusted us with making the right decision.</p>
<p>However, as newbie developers sometimes we would spend days or even weeks researching different technologies, not knowing if we could overcome the steep learning curve. It was a challenge itself to know when to ask questions and ask for help, to manage frustration and to know when to stop and get proper rest.</p>
<p>The best parts of the experience were the small victories, the aha moments, sharing the journey with really caring people, admiring Nico’s work and hoping we can be at that level some day.</p>
<p>Spending three months, peppered with lots of success and failure, we loved every minute of it! Which is the best lesson of all from working on the RGSoC project this summer.</p>
<h2 id="what-rgsoc-taught-us">What RGSoC taught us</h2>
<p>Besides contributing to open-source, we learned new tools and technologies and improved our skill-set. This is how Rgsoc helped us kickstart our careers and grow a lot as individuals.
<em>We learned…</em><br />
<em>…</em> it is really hard to predict and allocate time for building a new page or feature - because a lot can go wrong, and can totally derail the project.<br />
<em>…</em> good communication is a huge part of a developer’s job and keeping everyone posted about our progress made a huge difference on our contributions and the team’s spirit.<br />
<em>…</em> how to work with code that doesn’t have an immediate visual result, as we have been working before with websites and games and never with a so complex project.<br />
<em>…</em> a lot about unit testing and the different frameworks and assertion libraries.<br />
<em>…</em> how to work remotely with different people and how to collaborate to other people’s projects<br />
<em>…</em> to back up our code if we are going to experiment Dr Frankenstein style with Git and Github<br />
<em>…</em> advanced Git and Github uses, getting to a proficient level<br />
<em>…</em> how to use Gulp and implement plugins<br />
<em>…</em> more advanced ways of using npm and modules<br />
<em>…</em> about lint, prettier and other code formatting tools<br />
<em>…</em> how to create better documentation and how important it is<br />
<em>…</em> the importance of paying attention to detail, syntax and style<br />
<em>…</em> how amazing and helpful the dev community can be!</p>
<h2 id="achievements">Achievements</h2>
<p>We learned a lot during summer. Among others how to spent hours working on the same problem, freaked out,miscommunicated, lost our code, worked with complete opposite work schedules, were stuck, tried pair coding, coded alone, changed mentors, shifted projects, went to an incredible JavaScript conference, met awesome people, learned the open-source world, faced our fears and doubts and just kept going. Step-by-step. And our hard work paid off, we are celebrating with a few milestones:<br />
- The PIMD-project was released as an npm package.<br />
- We created a PIMD Live Demo and documentation file. <br />
- We implemented new plugins</p>
<h2 id="thanks">Thanks</h2>
<p>We would not be able to thank RGSoC enough for all we learned through this summer. A big big thanks to <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">RGSoC</a> and all the Sponsors for giving us this opportunity and the organizors for their constant support.
And of course, this summer would not have been so amazing without…</p>
<p><strong>Our mentors</strong>: <a href="https://twitter.com/hagenburger"><strong>Nico</strong></a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/anomiseditrix"><strong>Jen</strong></a>. We could not have hoped for better mentors. Thank you Nico for all the patience, guidance and kindness you received us with. We won’t forget the experience of being part of your great project. We hope we can meet you both soon!<br />
<strong>Our Coaches</strong>: <a href="https://twitter.com/tobmaster"><strong>Tobias</strong></a> (React developer-based in Düsseldorf, Germany), <a href="https://github.com/brytannia"><strong>Tetiana</strong></a> (Ruby Developer-based in Kharkiv, Ukraine), <a href="https://www.github.com/cristinaverdi"><strong>Cristina</strong></a> (full-stack-developer-based in Barcelona), <a href="https://github.com/benevbright/"><strong>Bright</strong></a> (React mobile developer- based in Berlin, Germany) and <a href="https://github.com/thujone25"><strong>Bogdan</strong></a> (JavaScript Developer-based in Kharkiv, Ukraine), <strong>thank you so much for all you help, time, energy, patience, source-code sessions, exercises, positive vibes, laughs and so much more</strong><br />
<strong>Our Supervisors</strong>: <a href="https://twitter.com/medk_"><strong>Lucas Pinto</strong></a> you had a big impact on our summer of code, thank you for caring for our well-being throughout the summer and always being there for questions, support and for sharing your own experiences. <a href="https://github.com/SrishtiSengupta"><strong>Srishti</strong></a> thank you for taking over when Lucas went on holidays and for continuing supporting us.
<strong>RGSoC-Community</strong>: Thank you for being so responsive and helpful. We loved to meet you all and have the opportunity of sharing our journey with so many amazing people.</p>
<h2 id="the-journey-continues">The Journey Continues…</h2>
<p>We will for sure continue to code. And are planning to find a job in tech in Barcelona by the beginning of 2019. We want to finish our Front-End Nanodegree, learn React and build up our portfolio with projects built the past months. We also want to learn more about some of the technologies, frameworks and tools we discovered during our journey with Living Style Guide.</p>
<p>We don’t know yet what the future holds for us but we have some idea of where we want to go next. We both want to keep working very hard to become full time Front End Developers. Diana wants to build up her skills on technical writing and Violeta will continue improving her current skills on UI and UX Design.</p>
<h2 id="if-you-want-to-keep-following-our-coding-journey-here-are-some-links">If you want to keep following our coding journey, here are some links:</h2>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/@dvteam">Our Medium Account</a>: we wrote during the Summer of Code about our journey and the conferences we attended.<br />
<a href="https://www.github.com/dianavile">Diana’s Github</a><br />
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianavile">Diana’s Linkedin</a><br />
<a href="https://www.github.com/artnerdnet">Violeta’s Github</a><br />
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/artnerdnet">Violeta’s Linkedin</a><br />
<a href="https://www.twitter.com/artnerdnet">Violeta’s Twitter</a><br />
<a href="https://www.github.com/hagenburger/pimd">PIMD Project Repository</a><br />
<a href="https://www.github.com/livingstyleguide">Living Style Guide Github</a><br />
<a href="http://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org">RGSoC daily logs</a>: a history of every team hard work during the summer</p>
RGSoC Teams at GOTO Berlin!Avneet Kaurhttp://twitter.com/TeamSectumsem182018-12-20T00:00:00+00:002018-12-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/RGSoCTeamsGOTOBerlin<h2 id="our-experiences-at-goto-berlin">Our experiences at GOTO Berlin</h2>
<h3 id="arati--team-popcorn">Arati- Team Popcorn</h3>
<p>The GoTo Conference, my first conference, concluded an already
unforgettable summer and I have RGSOC to thank for both. From the morning
train ride mentally preparing for the day, to the evening capped off by a social
event or a chat with a new acquaintance, I was constantly exposed to new
concepts, people, tools, companies and more.
For instance, “Functional Programming in 40 Minutes“ by Russ Olsen made
me curious about learning Clojure, particularly since he said learning languages
was a hobby of his. The timing of the conference couldn’t have been better. It
came right at the point where I was starting to try to figure out how to apply my
math background to programming. I had the opportunity to meet several people
involved in machine learning, a field that is constantly brought up when I mention
my intention, and attended enough talks about the subject to have an
understanding of what it involves.
The main impression I was left with, however, is that of being intensely
inspired. I had expected to be exposed to new concepts, technical information
and tools. What I hadn’t expected was to gain insights in other areas of my life.
One particularly inspiring talk was “How Software Can be a Force for Good”.
Hearing Francesco Mondora describe the unconventional approach to business
at his company renewed my hope in the impact a single person can have on the
world. Their emphasis on making a positive difference, whether it is to the
environment or in the lives of the people working at the company, has given me a
lot to think about for my own life. It has shown me the work place as a context to
not only live out your values fully, but also to support them in a way that only a
team can.</p>
<h3 id="rupal-and-avneet--team-sectumsempra">Rupal and Avneet- Team Sectumsempra</h3>
<p>My teammate Rupal and I, Avneet had the opportunity to attend GOTOBerlin 2018, all thanks to RGSoC organizers and GOTOBerlin organizers as well.
It was a 3 day conference with diversified tracks. We were particularly interested in the Applied AI and Blockchains track of the conference and mainly attended the talks in that domain. It was an experience of a lifetime and we learnt so much during the 3 days at the conference. So here’s an insight into how our days at the conference were spent.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-12-20-gotoBerlin-TeamSectumsempra1.jpg" alt="Avneet and Rupal from team Sectumsempra posing with Dajana, GOTO organiser" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Avneet (Left), Dajana Günther (conference organizer) (Centre), Rupal (Right) (source: Avneet Kaur)</div>
<h4 id="day-1">Day 1</h4>
<p>We were welcomed on the first day by the volunteers at the registration booth. As we stepped into the hall for the first keynote, it was huge and full of motivated technologists. We were overwhelmed by the atmosphere and felt great to be part of something so huge. We seemed to be a little late for the first keynote. After it ended, we decided on which talks to attend for the day and proceeded with it. There was an interesting session on paving careers in technology by various professional leaders in technology. They talked about how their journeys in tech have been and how many of them became leading CEOs and founders of companies, even after following unconventional career paths. We did realize at that moment that its necessary to continuously improve and adapt to different tools and technology in order to excel in the field. They also talked about career expectations we should have and how we should not be afraid to leave a company to join another if we feel that we are not getting the right dues. They talked about the importance of diversity in technology and how their respective companies are promoting it. We were overwhelmed with the heaps of information we gathered and quickly jotted down as much as we could.</p>
<p>Another interesting talk we attended was based on how Information Technology plays an important role in CERN. The talk also talked about how IT has led to the overall growth of the particle physics laboratory in the past so many years. Moreover, it was surprising to know that running that particle physics laboratory takes so much of electricity that takes up most of a country’s electricity.</p>
<h4 id="day-2">Day 2</h4>
<p>We were extremely excited on this particular day as we were supposed to give a talk on our RGSoC journey and motivate other girls as well to participate. This was our very first talk and we very nervous and excited at the same time. We were elated to see how enthusiastic the girls were when we started to tell them about RGSoC. They cheered on as we shared our experiences about how wonderful the journey has been. They were quite amazed by the opportunity and were looking forward to apply.</p>
<p>Further that day we attended a very interesting talk on “The mathematics in Simpsons” which sounded quite bizarre at first but it turned out to be the highlight of the day. Simon Singh the author of the book by the same name as the talk opened the talk by narrating an intriguing anecdote about how he met the writers of the show “Simpsons”, and interestingly all of them were mathematicians. His talk was centred around the various instances of cleverly inserted mathematical concepts and figures into the show “Simpsons” and how the writers’ love for mathematics found its way into the show. He concluded his talk by narrating another interesting anecdote of how a famous singer changed the lyrics to her song after Simon pointed out a few mathematical errors in the lyrics!. The crowd cheered as he played the corrected version of the song and the hall was soon filled with huge rounds of applause. Another funny thing that we observed was that before his talk, the stall where his books were kept was empty, but as soon as his talk was over, people rushed to the stall and started asking for his books. My teammate Rupal was just lucky enough to get the last signed copy. After a day of technical talks revolving around various aspects of technology, Simons talk proved to be a great refresher and lightened the mood.</p>
<p>Later in the evening, we attended the GOTO Gathering, where, all the attendees had gathered to play interesting games while enjoying a great time together. After a cheery evening day, we went back home with happy smiles and with great enthusiasm, looked forward to attending the next day.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-12-20-gotoBerlin-TeamSectumsempra2.jpg" alt="Rupal and Avneet with Simon Singh, a keynote speaker at GOTO Berlin" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Rupal (Left), Simon Singh(Centre), Avneet (Right) (source: Avneet Kaur)</div>
<h4 id="day-3">Day 3</h4>
<p>On this day we attended various talks on topics such as Blockchain and its applications in industry, Languages of the Future, Agile development etc. We quite enjoyed the one on applications of Blockchains. The talk was based on various ways in which blockchain technology could be adapted into daily life. For example, the speaker explained how a good implementation of blockchain can be used to trace grocery items, like a how a banana reached a particular home after being passed through a chain of farmers, wholesalers, and vegetable vendors. Moreover, it even talked about how use of blockchain can do away with the need for physical documents and hence the trouble when a physical document such as a permanent residency card or passport are lost. Further we learned about the challenges that prevent blockchain from being widely accepted and used in the industry.
Further we also attended a talk on PoP songs and Machine Learning which was quite interesting, followed by another talk on how its important to focus on Software principles first and Machine Learning second. Then we met other scholars, made friends and had a great time sharing our knowledge with them as well as learning from them.</p>
<p>All the talks we attended gave us a new insight to how technology is being used in various ways and how it is continuously growing. We learned about interesting concepts of frugal innovation, changing the lives of people in developing countries. We also learned about how important it is to start teaching young children to code to prepare them for the future.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-12-20-goToBerlin-TeamSectumsempra3.jpg" alt="Rupal and Avneet with Laura Gaetano, RGSoC organizer" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Avneet (Left), Laura Gaetano(Centre), Rupal (Right) (source: Avneet Kaur)</div>
<p>Interestingly, on our last day in Berlin, we met Laura, one of the RGSoC organizers, and she was really kind to show us around some of the great places in Berlin. We are really grateful to her for that, and my teammate rightly said, “Laura made us feel home in Berlin, and made our trip a memorable experience.” All in all, we had a great time at GoTo Berlin conference and we are really thankful to the RgSoC organizers for providing us the opportunity to attend and make memories of a lifetime. It was a great learning experience and we consider ourselves very fortunate to be able to attend the event and also learn so much from the technologists of today.</p>
Sharing your knowledgeSabine van der Eijkhttp://twitter.com/Sabin_E2018-11-26T00:00:00+00:002018-11-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/potatoCode-at-MirrorConf<h4 id="team-potatocode-at--the-future-of-the-web--mirrorconf">Team potatoCode at 🔮 <em>the future of the web</em> 🔮 MirrorConf</h4>
<p>Asked by 🔮<a href="https://www.mirrorconf.com/">MirrorConf</a> and Rails Girls Summer of Code to attend and speak on the conference in Braga, Portugal. We were excited and full of ideas: our talk would be about beginning devs and what hurdles they can encounter. To begin with, the organisation team did an excellent job in taking care of their speakers and because of this there was a very welcoming atmosphere. We felt very welcome! Our talk was due on the first day of the conference, among other great topics.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" title="Youtube video of selected scenes from MirrorConf 2018 (part 1)" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uFBDLT7GmbA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits"> Credits to Mirror Conf potatoCode 🙋♀🙋♀ Alina & Sabine at 0:44 seconds
</div>
<p>To kickoff our talk, and out of curiosity, I asked the audience how many of them had just started programming about a year ago, some 30 hands were raised. Then I asked them who wasn’t programming at all and another 50/60 hands were raised. So I concluded: “Awesome, I then assume all others are mid-level / senior developers, this talk will be for you!”. Total attendees must have been around 250/300.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-11-24-potatoCode-at-MirrorConf-AlinaSabineTalk.jpg" alt="Alina & Sabine talk, hurdles of a beginning dev" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Credits to Experta Global (@ExpertaGlobal on twitter October 18)</div>
<h2 id="everyone-can-be-a-good-mentor">Everyone can be a good mentor</h2>
<p>In this Summer of Code project we were lucky to have good coaches and a supportive mentor and supervisor, we voiced that everyone can be a good mentor for a beginning developer. It’s not only mentoring in a traditional way that’s important. Among other things, if you don’t like to teach it’s still good mentoring to write extensive documentation. Or to answer questions on reddit and stack overflow. There are so many ways in which you can contribute meaningfully to the growth of your junior, and for that matter of your team members. Another example is to write comments on Pull Requests you get.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We think this counts as exercise. 🤔🏃♀️🏃♂️😉 <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MirrorConf?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MirrorConf</a> <a href="https://t.co/c204QdTk3p">pic.twitter.com/c204QdTk3p</a></p>— Hi Interactive (@hiinteractive) <a href="https://twitter.com/hiinteractive/status/1053276275559854081?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 19, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<h2 id="noblesse-oblige">Noblesse oblige</h2>
<p>What the conference talks all boiled down to, one way or the other, is that developers have one job. That job isn’t programming, it’s an ethical responsibility. It takes awareness to contribute in a thoughtful and meaningful way that doesn’t exploit, harm, disrespect, shame, or exclude any user of the product you work on. Whenever you’ve got a hunch that what you’re developing could be harmful or doesn’t respect a user’s privacy it’s a warning to stand up and question your colleagues and stakeholders. Take a stance and explain your doubts, help to make the web a safer place.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity”</em> Amber Case</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-11-24-potatoCode-at-MirrorConf-AmberCase.jpg" alt="Amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Credits to Hi Interactive (@hiinteractive on twitter October 19)</div>
<p>The French saying “Noblesse oblige” can help you remind you of your responsibility as a programmer. Nobility obliges could just well be Developers oblige. Developers are more than ‘just’ code writers, a developer ideally should be fully aware of her/his social responsibilities. By the way it’s not obligatory, it’s a requirement that every developer should fulfill for a more inclusive web. To quote Vivianne Castillo: <em>“You can have comfort OR you can have courage. But you can’t have them both at the same time. Choose.”</em>. In the spirit of the talks at this conference and of Developers oblige, choose for courage to speak up!</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Choose courage over comfort!”</em> Vivianne Castillo</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-11-24-potatoCode-at-MirrorConf-VivianneCastillo.jpg" alt="Choose courage over comfort! Vivianne Castillo" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Credits to Expertera (@ExperteraGlobal on twitter October 18)</div>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Saying NO is a design skill. Asking WHY is a design skill. Rolling your eyes is not a design skill.”</em> Mike Monteiro</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-11-24-potatoCode-at-MirrorConf-MikeMonteiro.jpg" alt="Saying NO is a design skill. Asking WHY is a design skill. Rolling your eyes is not a design skill. Mike Monteiro" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Credits to Simona Ritrovato (@strillart on twitter October 19)</div>
<h2 id="obrigada-mirrorconf-">Obrigada 🔮MirrorConf! 🙋♀🙋♀</h2>
<p>I think we can’t thank the 🔮MirrorConf organisation enough. The team and the help we got from Laura, Zemith, José, Joáo, among others of Subvisual was outstanding! Also we would like to explicitly thank Ana Sofia for arranging that we could attend the conference, awesome job! Obrigada! 🙋♀🙋♀</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-11-24-potatoCode-at-MirrorConf-subvisualTeam.jpg" alt="Subvisual Team oganizing MirrorConf" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> credits to XING Portugal (@XING_pt on twitter October 18) </div>
<iframe width="560" height="315" title="Youtube video of selected scenes from MirrorConf 2018 (part 2)" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/91j7NhcbU5I" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits"> Credits to Mirror Conf find potatoCode Sabine at 0:11 seconds </div>
<hr />
<blockquote>
<p>Team potatoCode 🙋♀🙋♀</p>
</blockquote>
<h6 id="sabine-van-der-eijk--alina-leuca">Sabine van der Eijk & Alina Leuca</h6>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-11-24-potatoCode-at-MirrorConf-AlinaSabine.jpg" alt="🔮MirrorConf speakers Alina & Sabine" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> credits to Subvisual, organisation 🔮MirrorConf</div>
Full Stack Fest in BarcelonaAmalia Cardenashttp://twitter.com/anybodycancode12018-11-16T00:00:00+00:002018-11-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/FullStackFest-AmaliaCardenas<p>One of the highlights of this summer was attending the Full Stack Fest in Barcelona. The Full Stack Fest is a language agnostic conference that focuses on the future of the web. The conference was outstanding, I learned a lot, met some great people and overall the conference had a positive impact in my personal development.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-20-FullStackFeast-AmaliaCardenas-Img1.jpg" alt="Klaus Fleerkötter , Anemari Fiser , and Amalia Cardenas at the Full Stack Feast" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Klaus Fleerkötter , Anemari Fiser , and Amalia Cardenas at the Full Stack Feast. (Photo taken by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>All talks were great sources of learning and inspiration, but there was one that was particularly inspiring for me. In this blog post, I want to share what I learned from this talk.</p>
<p><strong>Avoiding Digital Bias by Adam L. Smith</strong></p>
<p>The talk on avoiding digital bias given by Adam L. Smith was one of my favorite talks during the conference.</p>
<p>From Adam’s talk I learned that machine learning is a field of computer science that gives computer systems the ability to learn rather than be explicitly programmed. Developers working on machine learning algorithms analyze data, extract features from the data that they want, and train models to behave in a certain way.</p>
<p>The use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning is impacting a broad range of fields. For example, machine learning is already helping predict severe weather patterns, detect privacy breaches in healthcare, and it is affecting the way repairs are performed on critical infrastructure.</p>
<p>While the impact that machine learning algorithms can have on science and society is promising, Smith argued that careful thinking and planning are required to avoid inappropriate bias. As he pointed out, “Machine learning can’t be fair or just unless it is given fair and just data.”</p>
<p>For counting, sorting, grouping and extracting certain types of patterns, machine learning is a useful tool. However, moral values and the ability to transfer high level knowledge from one domain to another is something that current algorithms are not equipped to handle well – although research is being conducted to correct this.</p>
<p>One of Smith’s main points was that, some bias is natural, but when personal data such as gender, age, race, socio-economic background, political preference, etc., are processed by machine learning algorithms, there is a significant and unique risk for unfair bias.</p>
<p>Smith argued that great care is needed to eliminate unwanted bias. During his presentation, selection bias, confirmation bias, training bias, and inappropriate bias were discussed and eye-opening real world examples of how these types of biases appeared in various projects was presented.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-20-FullStackFeast-AmaliaCardenas-Img2.jpg" alt="Adam L. Smith explains four types of bias" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Adam L. Smith explains four types of bias. (Photo taken by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Real world examples of bias</strong></p>
<p>An example presented by Smith highlighted findings from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Automated testing and analysis of the Google advertising system revealed that male job seekers were shown more ads for higher paying executive jobs. One reason for this was that women clicked less on higher paying job ads, thus the model had trained itself not to display these types of advertisements to women candidates. This type of bias is problematic, because encouraging male candidates to apply for higher paying jobs further increases a bias that already happens offline.</p>
<p>Smith also presented an example of bias in facial recognition algorithms used by the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs to authenticate valid passport photos. A man of Asian descent had his passport photo rejected because the facial recognition software erroneously identified his eyes as closed, even though they were clearly open. This example highlights how issues can arise when models include biased data. Currently most of the facial recognition models are trained with facial data heavily skewed from the US and Europe.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-20-FullStackFeast-AmaliaCardenas-Img3.jpg" alt="An example of bias in passport photos" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>An example of bias in passport photos. (Photo taken by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Possible solutions</strong></p>
<p>Smith highlighted ways to address these biases and provided possible pitfalls that can arise. One proposed solution for addressing bias was to increase the amount of data used to train models. Quadrupling the amount of data has shown to double the effectiveness of an algorithm. However, Smith cautioned against the risk of training models with data publicly available on the Internet as it can reinforce existing biases. This is especially dangerous as it can take years before a bias that is packaged into an algorithm is detected or corrected.<br />
<br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-20-FullStackFeast-AmaliaCardenas-Img4.jpg" alt="Example of existing biases" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Biases can emerge when datasets accurately reflect unfair aspects of society. This image showcases how using publicly available data from the internet can reinforce these existing biases. (Photo taken by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Regulation was another solution that was mentioned during the presentation. In Europe at least, good legislation that protects people from discrimination due to their identity and other protective characteristics is already in place. In addition, GDPR does offer algorithmic accountability and protection, and requires the creation of algorithms in a transparent and verifiable manner in order to mitigate against algorithmic decisions that negatively impact someone’s life, freedom, legal status or vital livelihood.</p>
<p><strong>A testing model to avoid digital discrimination</strong></p>
<p>The talk closed by providing a testing model to avoid digital discrimination. An important first step that needs to be taken when designing an algorithmic system is to identify the stakeholders of the system.</p>
<p>It is also important to consider the risk and impact of all algorithms we build. Smith argued that most of the algorithms we build are low risk and low impact. However, we still need to be vigilant. The misuse of algorithms for example in the case of political advertising, can have dire consequences for how democracies function.</p>
<p>To make algorithms more robust and mitigate against potential bias, Smith also proposed the need for diversity in teams who can provide a wider perspective than a homogenous group. Finally, once an algorithm goes live, it’s important to constantly re-evaluate and adapt it to changing social norms, new data, and unanticipated experiences.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-20-FullStackFeast-AmaliaCardenas-Img5.jpg" alt="Slide showcasing ways to avoid digital discrimination" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Slide showcasing ways to avoid digital discrimination. (Photo taken by Amalia Cardenas)
</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Closing Thoughts</strong></p>
<p>I want to thank the organizers of the Full Stack Feast in Barcelona for the opportunity to attend this wonderful conference. I also want to thank the Rails Girls Summer of Code organizers for encouraging us to attend a conference as part of our summer training. Finally, I want to thank Klaus Fleerkötter , Anemari Fiser, and Mónica Calderaro for including me in the Thoughtworks community at the conference. This made the experience less daunting, and incredibly enriching.</p>
<p>Keep in contact with Amalia</p>
<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/amaliacardenas/">LinkedIn</a></p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/amaliacardenas">GitHub</a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/anybodycancode1">Twitter</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.anybodycancode.com/">Blog</a></p>
OSS EU blog postPaavinihttp://twitter.com/paavininanda2018-11-12T00:00:00+00:002018-11-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team101DaysOfSummer-at-OSSEU<p>We, Paavini and Nupur as the team “101 days of summer” got the chance to attend Open Source Summit in Edinburgh from 22 October to 24 October. Here is a short summary of our experience-</p>
<h3 id="day-0---211018">Day 0 - 21/10/18</h3>
<p>We arrived at the conference two days before the events began to be used to the time lag between Edinburgh and India and also explore the beautiful city of Edinburgh. So by this day, we had already explored a lot. We were super excited for the conference.<br />
On the day before the conference, we collected the batches from Sheraton hotel. Then we went to attend the <b> Better Together Diversity Social Reception </b> at the same place sponsored by Google. We made new friends from Germany and United States (Rupa from Codechix and People from Yocto). We also met another undergrad student from India who was also from Delhi. We chatted about their work in open source and told them about RGSoC. Upon hearing about this, they were happy to know that we were part of such an awesome community.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU1.jpg" alt="Badges" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<h3 id="day-1---211018">Day 1 - 21/10/18</h3>
<p>The day started at 8:00 am with <b> first time attendee breakfast </b> held in the Convention center, Edinburgh. We were in the beginning shy and were not talking to people but then we met Dr.Erik, a very friendly person whom we later found was a part of the OSSEU team. We were surprised. His main message for us to enjoy the conference the most as first time attendees was to plan out the sessions and talks that we wanted to attend, meet new people, talk to them and learn from their experiences.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU2.jpg" alt="Erik" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>The next thing was the Keynote by Jim Zemlin, Director Linux Foundation</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU3.jpg" alt="Jim" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>He gave an overview of all the projects that were going on in Linux foundation ranging from cloud computing, blockchain to automotive. He discussed about how the several tracks at OSS EU were going to be. He also mentioned about the diversity empowerment summit which we were very happy to hear about. He discussed about Linux has grown shows how open source has grown over the years
Then there was a line of speakers for the keynote. Shuli Goodman, Executive director, LF energy discussed about how she and her team want to reduce 94% of carbon dioxide within the next 10 years. She mentioned that she is looking for 10K developers to help her run this initiative.</p>
<p>Then the next thing that we did was attending Laura’s session on Inclusion and Diversity.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU4.jpg" alt="Laura" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>She talked about the problems that people face while working for open source. Big companies are supporting open source but many people don’t get paid, so they work on weekends. So only people who can afford can contribute.
She discussed about the problems that arise in having biases in workplaces that is what happens when homogenous group of people make a product. She gave the example of 2015 flickr auto tagging incident where black men were being tagged as ape, and the video of the soap dispenser that got viral because when a black hand was put below it, it didn’t dispense but when a white napkin was put, it did. She also talked about the amazon’s recruiting tool which was biased and discarded the resumes if it had the word “women” in it. So she explained why there is a need to be aware of such unexpected consequences.
Finally, she discussed about how the open source projects can be made more accessible. Some points were proper documentation, making the project easy to understand, making the project welcoming, making the guidelines to report bugs, adding tags to the issues which can help the beginners find the issues which might be suitable for them. Her concluding statement was “Open source is about people !!!” to which we all absolutely agreed.</p>
<p>We then interacted with lots of Sponsors who had set up booths and collected some swags. It was very interesting to explore so many open source organisations all under one roof and know about their projects and the awesome work that they are doing.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU5.jpg" alt="Hall" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>It was almost lunch time by the time we ended up visiting the booths, so we went to attend the Women in Open Source lunch by Adobe at Sheraton Grand. There we met so many other awesome women, some of who were already in their full time jobs and were a way more experienced in open source than us.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU6.jpg" alt="Sheraton-lunch" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>Next, we attended a session on Machine Translation by - Suneel Marthi. He explained how he and his team at Amazon tried building a German to English language translator and discussed the intricacies of the problem.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU7.jpg" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>The talk broadly discussed about Statistical(SMT) and Neural(NMT) methods to solve this problem. Statistical methods included making alignment functions on the basis of word positions, phrase based conversions etc. In context to Neural methods, attention based mechanism and byte-pair encoding was discussed. It was interesting to note that the latter was a paper by the University of Edinburgh who had won several competitions using this.
There was also a brief talk on Sockeye, Flink and Amazon Sagemaker which were the platforms tried and tested by Suneel.</p>
<p>Next in line was the session on Scalable Machine Learning with Kubeflow by Barbara Fusinska.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU8.png" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>The major aspects covered in this talk were the questions, what is machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence? It felt like a discovery to know that Kubeflow was actually the amalgamation of Kubernetes + Tensorflow! We discussed how data scientist’s viewed any problem. The architecture for any problem had three major components: algorithm choosing, model building and model choosing plus serving. Different technology stacks which can be used for these three parts was further taken into consideration. It was a light talk made interactive with QA session and fun quotes such as the one shown above!
P.S. The quote on the shirt of the scientist above said “I invented the satellite but all I got was this lousy t-shirt” :)</p>
<p>The day ended with the All-Attendee Reception held at the National Museum of Scotland. It was a beautiful place with people dressed in traditional clothes and bagpiper music filling the air. We also got a glimpse of the statue of Dolly, the first cloned sheep.The live performance by the energetic performers further cheered up everyone. We met people from working on linux kernel and media streaming and went back happily to our warm and cozy hotels.</p>
<h3 id="day-2---221018">Day 2 - 22/10/18</h3>
<p>This day started with the keynote sessions on varied topics -</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU9.png" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>The first talk was The Future of AI is Data by Eric Berlow, who is the Co-founder of Vibrant Data. It focussed on highlighting how data obtained from various sources such as nature, science etc. could be used to simulate the behavior of people. For eg. he considered prisoners who had a painting in their cells. He noted that their nature would depend a lot on the emotions which were depicted in this painting. Two metrics, mood and arousal was considered -</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU10.png" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: National geographic</div>
<p>The left image is an example of predators displaying low mood and high arousal, whereas the right image shows high mood and high arousal. Thus, pictures falling under the category of the right image would be good in simulating a positive mood and should hence be used.</p>
<p>The next keynote session was by related to Building an Open Source Culture at Microsoft by Stephen Walli. A lot of things have been changing with Microsoft acquiring github and participating in Open Source. The changes within Microsoft include the changes in industry, which is the cloud; changes in customers, which are several new organisations which work together in partnership as well as the culture, leaders and demographics over the world.</p>
<p>The third keynote for the day, Exceeding Diversity and Inclusion Goals to Fuel Open Source by Johanna Koester, highlighted what diversity actually meant. It didn’t just imply inclusion of all genders and races, but also the diversity of ideas. Successful stories of people from under-represented groups and their contributions were also highlighted.</p>
<p>The last keynote was on Understanding Patterns of Mass Violence with Data and Statistics by Patrick Ball, who is a Human Rights leader. He undertook two differing examples to highlight the correctness of methodologies selected as well as the biases in data which should be taken into account. These included data obtained from mortality in Chadian prisons from 1980s and homicides committed by police in the US 2005-2011. It was sad to know about the suffering of people as well as the biases in data which could have further prevented suitable help being given to them.</p>
<p>After this was a break, and we went to the sponsor showcase to interact with more people whom we couldn’t meet yesterday. Red hats from red hat were really cute and we couldn’t stop ourselves from clicking selfies :P</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU11.jpg" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>Next began more rounds of sessions and we made sure to visit a good mix of all varieties -
Revitalising Open Source Contributions and Participation across Mozilla by Daniel and Riccardo. They talked about the Open innovation project in which they had analysed data from various open source communities. Bitergia Analysis Dashboard represented visualisation from this data. Various models called Archetypes were suggested for different types of projects such as the audience vs governance model, general vs specific model. An example to clear out this difference was the fact that the android and wiki project differed completely.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU12.jpg" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>Making Community Decisions without Consensus by George Dunlop.
The major problem as highlighted was to take decisions in non-consensus. The example of Xenproject was clearly presented. They became aware of a vulnerability called XSA-7 intel sysret, they informed all the members who were on the predisclosure list. However, one of the companies in this list missed this message. They came to know about it pretty late and hence they caused public release date to be delayed. This was abused as the company misusing the privilege of being on the predisclosure list. The main problem was thus, to decide who should be in this list. To answer this questions, we needed to find the best solution and do it in such a way, that everyone’s voice should be felt like heard. If we could achieve this, we can solve any problem without consensus.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU13.jpg" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Paavini’s camera</div>
<p>Panel discussion: Outreachy Linux Kernel internship report - Moderated by Julia Lawall.
It began with an introduction about Linux Kernel and Outreachy. It was more of a 5 minute talk by three outreachy interns who talked about what they did in their internship with Linux Kernel. The discussion ended with the topic about how the Outreachy program can be expanded more and how the involvement of women in open source can be increased.</p>
<h3 id="day-3---231018">Day 3 - 23/10/18</h3>
<p>I thoroughly enjoyed the keynotes held on the third day which related to astronomy and physics, loving open source, game design and banking.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU14.png" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Nupur’s camera</div>
<p>The first keynote was called Astronomy with Gravitational Waves by Alexander Nitz We deep dived into the universe understanding what are neutron stars and black holes. We heard a recording made when a black hole was created in space!!! We also tried to understand the concept behind binary mergers and various experiments which are currently active over the world. It was amazing to know so much about science in open source.</p>
<p>The second keynote was about How to Stop Worrying and Love Open Source by Julian Friedman. This talk was told in the form of a story, with the hero being cloud foundry and the villain as kubernetes. There was a fun joke where a person said that he had been using the “same broom since over 20 years”, just that he had changed the stick 25 and the brushes 17 times :P He introduced Eirini which is a container orchestration of cloud foundry as relating to this, using the same brush with different sticks. His talk ended with a list of awesome 5 learnings!</p>
<p>The third keynote was called Open Source Game Design by Brenda Romero. It was for the first time I heard of this concept. Usually game designers were silent to their developments and won’t share the details. Brenda told us about her journey about how she started into this field, how one of her projects which was on a sensitive issue became popular. How she managed about this issue, since a sensitive situation couldn’t be publicized and how she once revealed her complete set of game ideas to another developer even “before it was built”, which is the concept of open source game design!</p>
<p>The final keynote on Open Source Banking by Ed Cable expressed how we could tackle Poverty. He had been involved with the Mifos initiative which is open sourcing the bank infrastructure, and helping fight poverty by including greater sections of people to get financial help.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU15.jpg" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Nupur’s camera</div>
<p>Next there was a mentorship panel discussion on Exploration of Insights and Issues Related to Mentoring Programs. The speakers involved were Hong Phuc Dang, Josh Simmons, Julia Lawall, Daniel Izquierdo and Jeffrey Osier-Mixon with Jeffrey as the moderator.
The topics of discussion were value of mentoring, different types, metrics and mentoring & diversity. The values which a mentor gained included improving communication skills and learning to represent the same things in a better way.
Open source was described as a very intimidating field to a newcomer.It has various learning layers and becomes difficult to understand how to start, etiquettes involved, etc.
Types of mentoring program were long term, short term, cohort/peer mentoring, corporate, and formal vs informal. The session ended with an analysis on cases where people who had been mentored, got involved with the community for a longer time. Hence, good mentoring plays an important role in motivating students and building communities.</p>
<p>After this, we met our super supportive mentor Josh and Manish for lunch. Josh had guided and motivated us throughout the whole span of our contributions and could be credited for the successful completion of the RGSoC project. (Thank you so much mentor :P) We had a great time meeting both of them face to face at last!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU16.jpg" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Nupur’s camera</div>
<p>Post lunch, we attended one more session and the closing game which was lively, and fun-filled!
The session was titled Improving the human Vector with Emoji by Vincent Batts. The basic idea of the talk was that currently fingerprinting is done by humans which is prone to errors. This is because usually we do not match the long string of chars but just look at the first and last two hexadecimal characters. Other example where such checking is involved include containers digests, shaID, etc. Each emoji basically combines 2 hexadecimals, thus instead of looking at the first and last chars, we would now be looking at more chars. This was a simple idea to be taken but the learnings were bigger -
Don’t take yourself too seriously; laugh at poor choices, otherwise things get too rigid
Open source these days involving business and vp decisions is not so good. People under commit and over deliver because of time constraints. Thus, don’t be hasty
Take a deep breath; toy with something unrelated and not critical
Look for accepted norms with weak assumptions; Like for our case, did looking at first and last two emojis make any difference? Challenge accepted norms!</p>
<p>Conclusion:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/OSSEU17.jpg" alt="Talk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Brenda’s Slide</div>
<p>It was truly inspiring to see various fields being associated so closely with Open source. It is time all of us come together and help out each other for a better tomorrow. Cause, there is more we can do !!</p>
<p>The Open Source Summit was a good learning experience. We met amazing people, made lasting networks, got motivated to work more for the open source community and the linux kernel, had amazing food (although slightly limited because of vegetarian dietary restrictions), visited beautiful castles in the heartwarming city with a lovely weather and made memories :) We are extremely thankful to the RGSoC community, Mozilla and Linux Foundation who made it possible for us! ❤️ Hoping to visit again next year!</p>
92 days of Summer of CodeGyujin and Sujin2018-11-08T00:00:00+00:002018-11-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/sunshine-team-goodbye<p><strong>Time flies ✈️</strong>
We could not be happier with the decision we made to apply for RGSoC and cannot believe it is time to say goodbye already. This summer has been literally amazing.</p>
<p><strong>Learned so many things</strong>
First of all, we could experience how other great developers work — how they discuss the issues and co-work through Github and slack, how they maintain the product people from all over the world use, how hard it is and how well they manage them. The maintainers were super busy working on Babel 7 which was released about a month ago.</p>
<p>Reading tons of open source codes also helped us a lot. This part actually took the most of our time and was the hardest part. Add to the Babel document site with <a href="https://babeljs.io/repl">Repl</a> which we worked on and Babel Core, we had to go through <a href="https://docusaurus.io/">Docusaurus</a> since Babel document site is built on it, <a href="https://astexplorer.net/">ASTExplorer</a>, <a href="https://github.com/zalmoxisus/redux-devtools-extension">Redux Devtools</a>, <a href="https://codesandbox.io/">CodeSandbox</a> and other several JSON tree view libraries. Taking time to understand various projects helped us a lot with JS project structures, how these wonderful open source products are implemented and learned how others approach problems. We got able to grasp others’ code quicker, speed up our code reading skills. :)</p>
<p>Of course, we got to know better how Babel works inside. We studied about AST(Abstract Syntax Tree) and Babel core. It was also our first time to use CSS-in-JS and flow, static type checking system for JavaScript.</p>
<p><strong>But the most important thing we learned was OPEN SOURCE SPIRIT!</strong>
This summer was a great opportunity for Sunshine team to learn about not only actual technical skills, but also <em>open source spirit — improving by cooperation, not competition.</em> Friends in Babel community and RGSoC were so nice and generous, they helped us a lot with the code and also constantly found good aspects in our works. We learned how to stay positive and thoroughly evaluate others’ work with warmth — the most valuable asset to keep working as a developer. It really helped us to be confident. Now we have no fear to dive into the open source world!</p>
<p><strong>After RGSoC</strong>
* Keep workin’ on
We know that it would not be easy but we still hope we can keep contributing to Babel Project. Of course, we want to improve <a href="">our first merged PR, Time Travel UI</a> and also AST output panel we worked lately. Other than that, someday we want to implement Redux or other state management system! :)
* <a href="https://twitter.com/sujinleeme">Sujin</a> will continue to pursue her Master’s Degree study in Music and Engineering.
* <a href="https://twitter.com/MarinaGJCho">Gyujin</a> is going to keep working as a frontend engineer.</p>
<p><strong>Thanks to</strong></p>
<p><strong>Dear RGSoC team!</strong>
We cannot say thank you enough to our super kind and lovely supervisor, <a href="https://twitter.com/anasofiapinho">Ana Sofia Pinho</a>! She was always kind and helping, our team relied on her so much. We cannot imagine our RGSoC without her and so sad to say goodbye. 😢 We’d also like to thank <a href="https://twitter.com/Saptak013">Saptak</a> who helped us to keep on track when Ana was on vacation, <a href="https://twitter.com/kernel_girl">Vaishali</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/senorhuidobro">Ramon</a> who interviewed us and gave us this great chance. Our team also had a fantastic opportunity to meet Ramon in person when he visited Seoul for holidays! We hope we could meet other RGSoC members too!</p>
<p><strong>Awesome mentors from the Babel!</strong>
<a href="https://twitter.com/left_pad">Henry Zoo</a> , <a href="https://twitter.com/existentialism">Bryan Ng</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/loganfsmyth">Logan Smyth</a> gave us so many ideas for Repl and always answered kind and fast even though they were super busy to manage release next version of Babel (which was released on 27 August! tada! 🎉 — <a href="https://babeljs.io/blog/2018/08/27/7.0.0">Babel 7 Released · Babel</a>). We also send a word of gratitude
to <a href="https://twitter.com/CompuIves">Ives van Hoorne</a>, he helped us understand how <a href="">react-sandpack</a> will be integrated to Babel Repl.</p>
<p><strong>Our local coaches!</strong>
We thank <a href="https://twitter.com/incleaf">Hyeonsu Lee</a>, so much for visiting us often and helped us understand other open source projects. <a href="https://github.com/corazzon">Joeun Park</a>, even though she could not help us in the last month due to her busy work, as a female developer, her presence was such a big support for us. <a href="https://twitter.com/adhrinae">Dohyung Ahn</a> helped us a lot to figure out what to do for the project, answered really quick on slack when we had questions. <a href="https://github.com/onyoon7">Byungjun Yoon</a> is the only coach who volunteered, he gave us big smile and joyful vibe. <a href="https://twitter.com/wagurano">Seongjun Kim</a>, a warm hearted Ruby professional, always tried to monitor us if we are on track even though he was not a JS developer. He was our emotional prop!</p>
<p>Thanks to all of you for awesome 3 months!! We will never forget this summer. ☀️</p>
An enriching journey, Summers’ 2018 - Team 101 Days of SummerNupur Baghelhttp://twitter.com/nupur_baghel2018-11-06T00:00:00+00:002018-11-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/101daysofsummer-blog2<h2 id="everything-is-a-dream-we-cant-stop-smiling">Everything is a dream, we can’t stop smiling!!!</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2019-09-15-101daysofsummer-blog2-01.jpeg" alt="Happy times!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>In our happy workspace (Photo credits: Nupur's Laptop)</em></div>
<p>(In our happy workspace (our hostel room :P) with tons of memories from this Summer with Servo and RGSoC ❤️ We wish we had taken a picture with Rakhi and Josh from one of our remote calls :P We’ll take one soon… ;) <br /><br /></p>
<p>The summer is about to come to an end and we are already sad about it :( We didn’t even realise how fast all the time escaped while we were busy scratching our heads over hidden surprises in Rust :P It has been the best summer so far <3
Thanks to Ana, Vaishali and every member of the Rails Girls Summer Of Code organising team who made it possible for us. We couldn’t ever thank enough our wonderful team with our super-excited and super-helpful mentor Josh, extremely lively and cheerful supervisor Rakhi, and the definitely the both of us….</p>
<h2 id="something-about-servo-and-our-work--">Something about Servo and our work -</h2>
<ul>
<li>Created by Mozilla Research using the new systems programming language <strong>Rust</strong>, Servo is an experimental project which is supporting Firefox’s new browser engine <strong>Quantum</strong>. It has been known to be safe, fast and concurrent which give it its superfast speed 🚀.</li>
<li>Our main task this summer was to add support for <strong>Responsive Images</strong> in Servo. This feature would allow us to specify different image sources in our html such that only the perfect one which suits our device would get loaded. It would save time as well as bandwidth because you would not want a heavy image meant for a desktop to get loaded on your phone!! Moreover if your device width changes for eg if you rotate your tablet to horizontal from vertical view, then a new and wider sized image will get loaded.
If you want to know more about responsive images, they have been explained very well in <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimedia_and_embedding/Responsive_images">MDN docs</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-brief-summary-of-things-we-learnt-">A brief summary of things we learnt 📝</h2>
<p>### DOM and DOM API’s
Writing DOM Doge API was a lot of fun. This was the first starter task that we were supposed to complete. Here is the <a href="https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Implementing-a-web-standard-(RGSoC)">link to the task</a>. This gave us an insight into what document object model of a web browser is and how a DOM API can be implemented in Servo.</p>
<h3 id="dereferencing-in-rust">Dereferencing in Rust</h3>
<p>When we pass the objects as a pointer, there might be a need to dereference the object to be able to use it. In the very beginning, we were actually stuck on a very basic error.
<code class="highlighter-rouge">
a = Root<Something>
</code></p>
<p>We had to extract Something and use it. All we had to do is dereference, but how? It is very simple.
<code class="highlighter-rouge">
b = *a
</code></p>
<p>And use b directly. * Can be used to dereference as many times as you want.</p>
<h3 id="match">Match</h3>
<p>A very good alternative to if else conditions in Rust. An example is -
<img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2019-09-15-101daysofsummer-blog2-02.jpeg" alt="how to use match example" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Photo credits: Paavini's Laptop</em></div>
<h3 id="borrowing">Borrowing</h3>
<p>Borrow errors and ownership is something that make Rust safer but the errors related to them can be irritating at times.
<code class="highlighter-rouge">
One way to avoid those is to try and use a let binding to increase the scope of the variable if its being enclosed by `{}`
</code></p>
<h3 id="unwrapor-">Unwrap_or ()</h3>
<p>Unbinding Option<> wrapper can be easy to use by a simple .unwrap(). But if in case you want to provide some default value to the variable (when the option’s value is None), you can provide that using unwrap_or().</p>
<h3 id="mutability-and-domrefcell-binding-in-rust--">Mutability and DomRefCell binding in Rust -</h3>
<p>Since by default every variable is immutable in Rust, once declared inside a structure its value cannot be changed. But DomRefCell does the magic and addes the capability to mutably borrow and alter its value at a later point of time.</p>
<h3 id="intermittent-tests-in-servo">Intermittent tests in Servo</h3>
<p>Our second PR could not be merged for may days because of these. These tests are something that one is not supposed to worry about :P. These are the tests that might pass on one’s local machine but when being built and tested by bors-servo, lead to some failure or vice-a-versa. This basically happens because of some timing issues in the tests. If bors-servo is complaining about these tests then all you have to do is create a issue with tag-intermittent, and magic, it won’t block your PR anymore.</p>
<h3 id="closures-in-rust">Closures in Rust</h3>
<p>We cannot use <code class="highlighter-rouge">self</code> inside closures because passing <code class="highlighter-rouge">self</code> is unsafe. One has to use <code class="highlighter-rouge">this</code> instead.</p>
<h3 id="backtrace">Backtrace</h3>
<p>This gives you the power to get the whole backtrace of every call of a particular function. We had to use to all the time to know why some of tests that we had were failing. This is how you use it -
<code class="highlighter-rouge">
println!("modifying edit_point: {:?}", Backtrace::new());
</code></p>
<hr />
<p>Couldn’t understand anything of what was said above?
Here is a very good source to get started with these basic things in Rust - http://intorust.com/
Every time we faced issues in any of the above, our mentor Josh was there to help us! Not just him, everyone on IRC channel of Servo used to help us in solving these little things. We completely loved the Servo community <3 So feel free to ask anyone anytime you feel like contributing or get stuck somewhere!</p>
<h2 id="let-us-get-to-know-about-some-statistics-now-p">Let us get to know about some statistics now :P</h2>
<ul>
<li>In total we got <strong>20 PR’s</strong> merged by the end of RGSoC. Approximately 10 each for the both of us. Hooray!!</li>
<li>We worked on more than <strong>5 algorithms</strong>, to name a few….</li>
<li>updating the source set</li>
<li>reacting to environmental changes</li>
<li>selecting the correct image source</li>
<li>updating image data</li>
<li>reintroduction of parse a sizes attribute</li>
<li>correcting behaviour of currentSrc</li>
<li>Our code resulted in passing of more than <strong>700 new tests</strong> 😮 Seems unbelievable? Go and search for the word fail at - <a href="https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/21280/files?utf8=%E2%9C%93&diff=unified">click me!</a></li>
<li>And finally, we wrote more than <strong>1000 lines</strong> of code!</li>
</ul>
<p>You can view pull requests made by both of us as well :D
- <a href="https://github.com/servo/servo/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+author%3Anupurbaghel+">Nupur’s Contributions</a>
- <a href="https://github.com/servo/servo/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+author%3Apaavininanda+">Paavini’s Contributions</a> <br />
That’s all for now!! (We guess its a good progress indeed! ) <br /> <br />
<img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2019-09-15-101daysofsummer-blog2-03.gif" alt="think-gif" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Gif taken from http://www.reactiongifs.com/thinking-yes/</b></div>
<h2 id="the-most-interesting-things-which-happened-to-us-">The most interesting things which happened to us ⚡⚡</h2>
<h3 id="landing-our-pull-requests-prs-">Landing our pull requests (PRs) :</h3>
<p>We enjoyed completing our code and putting up new PRs every week and even wrote code for several small-to-large algorithms. But the fun part is, we jumped with joy each time any PR got merged, even if it was not a lengthy algo but just a new test we had written. The happiness and excitement made sure we were pumped up for the next task in line!</p>
<h3 id="seeing-the-responsive-images-work">Seeing the responsive images work</h3>
<p>Implementing responsive nature of images in Servo was one of the main tasks of our internship. A part of this was being implemented since last few years but with our code, we have finally completed this feature. Hurray!!<br />
Er, a few small parts remain, but with we are making sure that’s done too :) Resizing the screen in Servo now leads to changing sizes of the images (Well that’s being responsive :P)</p>
<h3 id="hundreds-of-passing-tests">Hundreds of passing tests</h3>
<p>Adding new code resulted in new tests to start succeeding. But after successfully implementing the reacting to environment changes algorithm (a hard nut to crack), we were able to see hundreds of passing tests. We had to deal with a bunch of failing tests too. But finally being able to resolve all those was purely satisfying. It was such a happy moment :) We could feel the impact we were able to make in such a large codebase.</p>
<h3 id="learning-new-things-from-rakhi">Learning new things from Rakhi</h3>
<p>We had a video call with our supervisor every Monday. We discussed about the program including what were the things which were troubling us and were we being slow on making contributions (to mention she was also with Servo last summer so she had a complete idea)
But apart from this we also chatted about some stories of our life which make such impact and leave long lasting impressions. Rakhi’s expressive, lively and frank nature made us open up to her completely. We cherish our interactions and we will definitely make sure we keep in touch <3 You are awesome!</p>
<h2 id="its-not-the-end">Its not the end!</h2>
<p>Although the summer is about to end, all our enriching memories will last for life!! The happiness in our hearts is truly overwhelming. We enjoyed contributing a lot and would continue with the good work every now and then. Since we have learnt so much from everyone we would love to guide more people who want to start with open source :) Feel free to reach out to both of us!</p>
<h3 id="twitter">Twitter</h3>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/nupur_baghel">Nupur</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/paavininanda">Paavini</a></p>
<h3 id="github">Github</h3>
<p><a href="https://github.com/nupurbaghel">Nupur</a>
<a href="https://github.com/paavininanda">Paavini</a></p>
<h3 id="medium">Medium</h3>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/@nupurbaghel">Nupur</a>
<a href="https://medium.com/@paavininanda">Paavini</a></p>
<h3 id="join-the-servo-community-on-irc">Join the Servo community on IRC</h3>
<p>#servo on <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC">irc.mozilla.org</a></p>
<p>Thank you once again to everyone who helped us reached this stage!! Thank you RGSOC ❤️
Will miss this family a lot…..</p>
Team DelSquared-Our Summer of Code, 2018Sharmistha Swasti Guptahttp://twitter.com/SharmisthaSG_2018-11-04T00:00:00+00:002018-11-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/DelSquared_RGSoC_blogpost<h2 id="andits-a-wrap">And…it’s a wrap!</h2>
<p>September is approaching to an end and we still can’t believe how fast the last three months have gone by. This is Arushi and Sharmistha, from India, and we worked this summer on the Tessel project. The experience has been simply wonderful. Sitting for hours trying to figure out how to go about our first pull request, the weekly and monthly meetings with our team, closing the first issue we worked on, receiving the package with Tessel modules (and stickers of course!!!) - these are a few of the many instances that have made our summer a truly memorable experience.</p>
<p>Back when we first started working with Tessel, we were really really excited about being able to actually contribute to open source, because that meant collaboration with so many people around the world. The excitement hasn’t gone away yet, even as the end of the program approaches, and we intend to continue working with Tessel and mentor the newcomers. During this program, we actually learnt quite a lot about how such developments boards work. Before that, everything for us was like a black box. Feed code, and run the program. Not anymore.</p>
<p>After having delved neck deep into online resources, tutorials and repositories on GitHub, we have gained a lot of related knowledge on hardware, communication protocols, and even hardware. Here are some highlights of the work we did:</p>
<ul>
<li>Worked on an ESP32 Hello World tutorial for Windows 10 and submitted a blogpost for the same. (currently under review)</li>
<li>Had a mini Tessel hackathon in which we tried to build a SoundBot of sorts. We controlled LED bulbs with live music and made them fluctuate in sync with the music beats. We used a Tessel board and an ambient module for the same. The blogpost is currently under review and would be out soon!</li>
<li>Figured out a way to build diagrams of the Tessel components using Fritzing and submit them in the required format. We really had to bang our hands for this one. It was proving to be pretty annoying :p</li>
<li>Worked on a few documentation issues, some of which we were able to close while others are under review or need to be updated.
Learnt a lot about the I2C protocol as we had to browse a lot of online resources to learn how devices talk to each other using these communication protocols. We are currently working on implementing I2C to create a demo for communication between an ESP32 and an accelerometer module.</li>
<li>Worked with several APIs and softwares like Moddable, ImageMagick. We’re still exploring Moddable but it seems like a amazing tool for communicating to micro-controllers which are based on JavaScript.</li>
</ul>
<p>## Looking Ahead</p>
<p>We intend to keep working on a few aspects of Tessel Reach and the Fritzing issues because we are pretty close to solving them. Also, we found a lot of interesting resources and tools that we can share with the people who are interested in working with Tessel.
Some of the resources we found were:</p>
<ul>
<li>Moddable API [https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable]</li>
<li>Working with Fritzing [https://learn.adafruit.com/make-beautiful-fritzing-parts-with-eagle2fritzing-brd2svg/get-ready-git-clone]</li>
</ul>
<p>As and when time permits, we are thinking of writing a blog detailing a few approaches we have in mind, which future contributors to Tessel can use and achieve. We weren’t able to fulfil these in the limited time we had, but we would surely like to see these tried out or try out ourselves sometime we’re free.</p>
<p>This summer of code has had a profound impact on us, as we have learned not just the technical stuff but also working on real-life projects and working with people across the globe. Sitting down to summarise our work every week, and setting targets for the next week helped us and the mentors evaluate our progress, and we have progressively worked on the feedback we received each week, bettering ourselves. We have also started embracing unfamiliarity and challenges, as we learnt about many new things we had never heard of before, like Moddable. From being novices at understanding the technical intricacies, we have come a far way and we believe this knowledge will immensely benefit us, as we both want to pursue a career in robotics.</p>
<p><strong>Last but not the least…(<em>drumrolls</em>)</strong></p>
<h2 id="a-huge-shout-out-to-our-amazing-team">A huge shout out to our amazing team!</h2>
<p>We would like to extend a big thanks to the amazing people that we have had a chance to work with. For both of us, it has been the most supporting team we’ve seen so far.</p>
<h3 id="organisers-vaishali-thakkar-ana-sofia-pinho">Organisers (Vaishali Thakkar, Ana Sofia Pinho)</h3>
<p>Firstly, thanks for the conference tickets! Yayy!</p>
<p>RGSoC has provided us with an opportunity to attend GoLab 2018, to be held in Florence, Italy from Oct 22-23, 2018. We are more than excited to attend the same and are very eagerly looking forward to the trip.</p>
<p>Also, Sharmistha says she’ll always remember her best birthday gift, which weirdly came wrapped up in a package saying “technical interview round” :P We really appreciate the efforts put in by you guys, to make the selection announcement special for each and every team. Kudos.</p>
<h3 id="supervisor-bhumika-goyal">Supervisor (Bhumika Goyal)</h3>
<p>Thanks for checking in on us, time and again. And thanks to you too for helping arrange our conference tickets. We always had a sense of security that if at all anything goes wrong, we have someone who’ll listen. Thankfully, it never came to that :P
The group meetings have been a lot of fun too. Looking forward to that one last Hangout call with everyone, towards the end of the month.</p>
<h3 id="mentors-kelsey-bresemann-nick-hehr">Mentors (Kelsey Bresemann, Nick Hehr)</h3>
<p>Thank you guys, for being the most chilled out mentors, and for being so responsive to all our queries (even the most stupid ones). Brihi and Shravika would always tell us that the Tessel project mentors were simply superb, and we couldn’t agree more. You were really supportive throughout, keeping our morale up with encouraging words. The weekly meetings were awesome and we learnt a lot from your valuable insights, not just about Tessel but also about not hesitating to reach out to others for help. Most of our meetings were with Kelsey, while the recent ones were with Nick. Hope we can meet Kelsey’s cat in our last weekly meeting :p</p>
<p><em>PS</em>: I recently stumbled upon Kelsey’s treasure of travel blogs on Medium. Super excited to read them all. (Sharmistha)</p>
<h3 id="coaches-brihi-joshi-shravika-mittal-ambar-pal-siddharth-yadav">Coaches (Brihi Joshi, Shravika Mittal, Ambar Pal, Siddharth Yadav)</h3>
<p>We pride ourselves on getting the craziest of our friends to coach us. It’s been a hell of a ride. We have a common messaging group, and it receives an average of 50 messages a day, since the time of applications. Though most of them revolve around Ambar’s attempts to be funny, or Siddharth’s random “GOOOOO DELSQUARED!!!” messages, our coaches have been a rock of a support. Be it Tessel related technicalities (Brihi, Shravika), hardware issues (Siddharth), approaches and ideas (Ambar) or logistics (everyone), it’s been a great team. We know for sure that the group isn’t going anywhere. Looking forward to the daily dosage of spam messages, which can honestly make anyone laugh.</p>
<p>This has been a great summer people!</p>
<p>Adios! :)</p>
Summer Down with Over 200 Commits and Over 70 Issues Closed 💻 🎊Stellamaris Njagehttp://twitter.com/StlMaris2018-10-31T00:00:00+00:002018-10-31T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/akaringular-final-blog<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/akaringular.jpeg" alt="Final Pic!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Final blog! (Photo credit: Dickson Otieno)</em></div>
<p>As we write this blog , we can’t help but think of all the amazing things that have happened to us in the past three months. It looks like yesterday when we kicked off RGSoC but in reality it is now 100 days. RGSOC happened when we were trying to do some soul searching. Figuring out where to start and what to do with our lives. It was a door opener for us. A reason to dive deeper into tech and the open source community. We have made more than 1000 steps in our career growth.</p>
<p>Here are some of our highlights:</p>
<p><strong>1. Major Growth Curve</strong></p>
<p>It was exciting and challenging at the same time. Exciting because positive things happened to us and Challenging because at times things got tough. Apart from becoming experts in version controlling using git and github , we have had a chance to understand RSpec testing, Microservices in Rails, Deployment on Heroku, Rollbar, Javascript, UI…The list is totally endless. But the bottom line is we now have more skills than we had three months ago.</p>
<p><strong>2. Our Networks have grown</strong></p>
<p>Throughout the period we met so many amazing people. Our supervisor Mr. Rammon is one person we cannot forget. He was very friendly and always checked on our progress. The RGSoC community became our second home. We exchanged ideas with our peers on how we could grow the community. EBwiki coaches had our backs and we will forever be grateful.</p>
<p><strong>3. Bond grew stronger</strong></p>
<p>We became better friends. Together we burnt the midnight oil to make our code work. When we were happy about the work we had done, we would hang out together to relax and rejuvenate. We also attended events such as African Women in Tech Conference, Girls Get Geeky Kisumu, Nairuby Conference and Rails Girls Kampala and Nairobi events. Even when things were rocky we fixed them , like fetching water from the well when our taps ran dry. It was a really cool three months.</p>
<p><strong>4. Self Discovery</strong></p>
<p>RGSoC has really helped us realize our areas of expertise. For Rachael,front-end was working great and Stella back-end seemed more friendly. Sometimes we wrote beautiful code and other days quite nasty code but our coach Rachel took that positively and gave us a recommendable advise on the way forward that really encouraged us to keep trying. We are planning to keep contributing to the project and reduce the issues to a manageable number.</p>
<h2 id="life-after-rgsoc">Life after RGSoC</h2>
<p>The summer may have to an end, but to us it’s a continuity of a journey that we bagan three months ago. How will we use the skills and knowledge acquired during the period? We plan on mainting the pace. Learn something new each day and of course continue contributing to open source projects. We also plan on sharing the knowledge and encouraging others to apply for such great opportunities.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Ends are not bad things, they just mean that something else is about to begin. And there are many things that don’t really end, anyway, they just begin again in a new way. Ends are not bad and many ends aren’t really an ending; some things are never-ending.”
-C. JoyBell C</p>
</blockquote>
How lucky are we to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard!Avneet Kaurhttp://twitter.com/TeamSectumsem182018-10-29T00:00:00+00:002018-10-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-sectumsempra<p>As our RGSoC journey is near its close, we can’t begin to express how heart-wrenching for us, it is going to be to bid our farewell.
While RGSoC has been in itself has been a transforming experience, it also more importantly for us, had a greater impact, of validation
in our lives. Apart from being a delightful experience, it proved to be a much needed boost to our confidence, that we are marching
the right way forward towards establishing ourselves in the field of Information Technology and Computer Science.</p>
<p>RGSoC became a home for us. It became part of our lifestyle. It taught us things that we won’t be learning back at our institute or school. It proved to be a support-system for us, that exists even after the summer’s over.</p>
<p>RGSoC for us was more than just about contributing to an open source organization, learning to code, dealing with errors and getting your patches merged. It was about the process we went through while achieving them. It is a journey of self-discovery, of making mistakes, reflecting back, realizing and learning from them.
RGSoC leaves us with a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going. It added flight to our wings.</p>
<p>Professor Dumbledore sums up the moral of RGSoC in a sentence:
> <em>“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”</em></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-blog2-teampic.jpeg" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our supervisor - Nada (Top), Rupal (bottom left) and Avneet (bottom - right) (source: Screenshot from Hangouts, Avneet's phone camera - Moto G4 Plus)</div>
<h2 id="a-word-of-gratitude">A word of gratitude</h2>
<h3 id="with-love-to-our-supervisor-and-friend-nada">With Love to our supervisor and friend Nada:</h3>
<p>We are ever so grateful for the continuous support of our lovely supervisor Nada. She has been a friend and guide, and we have learnt so much from all that she shared with us. We will definitely miss having our weekly calls and discussions with her. Thank you so much Nada.</p>
<h3 id="the-chapel-community-our-mentors-and-coaches">The Chapel Community, Our mentors and coaches:</h3>
<p>We were able to embark on this wonderful journey due to the endeavours an constant encouragement from our mentors Michael and Ben, our forever helpful coaches and guides Louis and Engin, and also our other lovely coaches Ian, Lydia, and Sarthak to whom we are forever grateful.
There were so many times we were stuck and needed guidance, and our mentors and coaches always came to our rescue. They helped us to explore topics, completely unknown to us and devoid of our understanding. More so, as guides they helped us to tread on the correct path.</p>
<p>And this is the main reason why our goodbye’s wouldn’t be easy, and our heartfelt gratitude, never enough.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-blog2-gitter1.jpeg" alt="Alt Text" /> <img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-blog2-gitter2.jpeg" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Words of encouragement from our coaches. They always come to our rescue!(source: Screenshot from our communication with the chapel community on Gitter)</div>
<h3 id="the-rgsoc-organizers-and-the-community">The RGSoC Organizers and the community:</h3>
<p>The RGSoC community has been simply wonderful, we got a chance to make new friends and learn from their experiences. Right from the day, we received the acceptance email from the organizers, it has been a magical experience. We are ever so grateful to the RGSoC organizers for giving us this opportunity. And we hope that with your love, endeavours and encouragement, many other girls like us can have this metamorphic experience.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-learnt-this-summer">What we learnt this summer</h2>
<p>The goal of the project was to develop a Parallelized and Distributed Radix Sort. It has been a mind stimulating experience with loads to learn owing to the challenges that came our way. Starting from a simple version of Least Significant Bit radix sort, progressing over to a recursive Most Significant version, and then trying out various ways to parallelize the algorithm, and finally looking at how to make the sort work in a distributed manner using multiple locales. The work involved trial and experimentation on the code and comparing execution time of the various versions of the code. Our codes went through numerous iterations of feedback from the coaches and mentors which helped us improve immensely. We learnt about the art of performance testing to be able to evaluate how well our code is performing, and along with that being able to point out what parts of our code need to be optimized for improving overall performance. We are in a position to say that we have a fair understanding of what seemed like big words like Parallelism and Distributed Computing, to us in the beginning of summer.</p>
<p>Due to the constant encouragement of our coaches and mentors, we are no longer afraid to ask for help and have learnt that no question asked is silly. They were always ahead of us in extending the helping hand, and responding quickly to our queries on the gitter channel. We learnt about how to collaborate as a team, working on different tasks, while keeping track of the overall progress. We learnt the importance of effective communication and the art of being patient while testing and writing code. We are thankful to them for providing us such a positive environment to be able to learn and grow along the way.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-blog2-pic2.jpeg" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Team Sectumsempra - Avneet (left) and Rupal (right) (source: Avneet's phone camera - Moto G4 Plus)</div>
<h2 id="our-personal-experiences">Our Personal Experiences:</h2>
<h3 id="avneet">Avneet</h3>
<blockquote>
<p><em>All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time. ~ Mitch Albom</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I reflect upon my journey, I did ponder upon how I had a myriad of experiences associated with it. In a few words If I have to sum up an important lesson that I learnt, that of acceptance, and realising that only then can I rise, if I know that I fell, the following quote best describes it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest. Except when you don’t. Because, sometimes, you won’t. I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.” ~ Dr. Seuss</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>And I resonate with it because along with the numerous of iterations of code that I wrote, came with it numerous iterations of self validation. Atleast that’s how I thought it was. But it is only now that I have gained a more insightful perspective, of being able to accept that I was pushing my boundaries all the time. It was only through the continuous feedback and guidance from our mentors and coaches, was I able to improve. Working with the Chapel community made me feel like I’m a part of something exciting, and that was the sole reason that I was motivated till the end. I did learn a great deal, enough to figure out, I have definitely loads to learn still. I did come out as a way more evolved person than I was before. I purely saw each an every code I wrote, the fixes and everything, as a window of opportunity. And looking back, I wouldn’t want to spend my summer any other way.</p>
<p>Another important lesson, beautifully summarised by the following quote, gives me the inspiration to continue to find my way forward.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are” ~Max Depree</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Every time I tried to work on something new, it did seem difficult at a first glance, but RGSoC and the Chapel community has taught me better to not be deceived by the complexity of things, and keep trying. And eventually, it made me believe, that we all have the great potential within us waiting to be unearthed. This summer has been full of life-altering learnings paving a way to continuous improvement and I will strive hard to carry it forward with me.</p>
<p>I have emerged as a more confident person than ever. All thanks to the constant encouragement and guidance from the RGSoC and Chapel community. Thank you! I am eternally grateful.</p>
<h3 id="rupal">Rupal</h3>
<p>The summer’s over already? Are you kidding me?</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsem-hagrid.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy</div>
<p>Well, it’s never ‘over’. Not yet.</p>
<p>I had to pinch myself to digest the reality. However, looking back at all the amazing things that had happened in the past three months gives me real chills.</p>
<p>When I applied to RGSoC for the first time, I was this doe-eyed sophomore who was trying to figure out the whole concept of engineering and career options at an academic research institute IIIT Delhi. In awe of the many amazing geeks, coders and passionate BYLDers (development society in my college) I met, I wanted nothing more that to be involved in some such cool communities and be doing some cool projects and become a source of inspiration for others, just like my seniors were for me. I used to feel adrift - not exactly belonging, but still with the faith in myself that I chose what’s right for me.</p>
<p>And then in my second year, I came across the RGSoC community and past scholars. Thence, the journey began.</p>
<p>I still remember the date: <strong>17th May 2018</strong>. It was the day when searching and reading through a lot of follow up and rejection emails, after three months long wait, I found <em>my</em> <strong>Hogwarts letter</strong>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-giphy1.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy</div>
<p>And ever since then, the whole period have been very rewarding for me. If I try and put them all (the experience, emotions tagged with each one of them, mistakes and learnings and accomplishments) out here, the list will just go on and on. But don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief for you.</p>
<p>In addition to giving us great memories to cherish, it also marked the beginning of our Open Source journeys. We have been collaborating from four different time zones across the world: IST, EET, EDT, PDT. That’s the best part. It was my first time collaborating with people from overseas. And, it has been a great one.</p>
<p>Along with a lot of amazing and thought provoking things we worked on this summer, one thing I learnt during the program that I wish to share with Y’all: It is okay if you don’t know something in advance, everybody starts as a beginner. It’s more about how willing you’re to learn after that. There have been a lot of ‘trivial’ things (although not-so-trivial for me) that I got to learn this summer. There have been times when I used to feel very small about not knowing something as small as “Git workflow” which, apparently, everybody on the Chapel channel was hella great at. But you know what, chuck those thoughts away and ask for help if you’re feeling stuck.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-giphy2.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy</div>
<p>I promised myself that I am going to make this summer that best summer of my undergraduate for me. Won’t leave any stone unturned. And, I did. No matter how silly and tiring the tasks were, I sailed through them and did my best.</p>
<h3 id="my-advice-to-rgsoc-19-aspirants">My advice to RGSoC ‘19 aspirants</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>Network</strong>: Meet new people and talk to as many people as you can. You’ll never know
who you’ll run into one day. It might just be your life mentor, your next recruiter, your
potential thesis advisor, or maybe your “he is the one” person. :P
Go to conferences, meetups, workshops, attend short talks that your university arranges
for you. Talk to the speakers over there, ask for their current running projects and ask
them if they can look at your profile and can recommend you at their company or can
mentor you. Sounds far-fetched, right? Believe us, this works. It has worked for us, at
least. :D</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Communicate</strong>: Be it the application period or the RGSoC internship period, make sure
you don’t leave any communication gaps. Be clear with what you want. Be concise while
asking for favour or help, but ASK! Don’t shy away.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Set the bars high for yourselves</strong>: In our experience, we have observed that when it
comes to career, expectation bar is embarrassingly low for women. And this is majorly
because why we don’t see ourselves being able to match men. Think that you’ll achieve
big, and so you will!</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Kate Winslet just puts it right:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeRcIf4sZiM" title="Kate Winslet advice to women"><img src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/DeRcIf4sZiM/0.jpg" alt="Kate Winslet advice to women" /></a></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Youtube</div>
<ul>
<li><strong>Give back and help others</strong>: Peer-support is the key learning from RGSoC program. We
need to have each other’s back. We need to tell each other that “I’m there for you, to
help you.” And, this is how we grow. TOGETHER.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-giphy3.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy</div>
<ul>
<li><strong>YAS Girl, you can do it!</strong> The feeling that “I’m not ready. Not just yet” always clouds us
too often. You’ll never be prepared, there’s always be a scope for improvement. But,
don’t let that hold you back. If you so want something, go get it. Period.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-blog-img-last.jpeg" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Google Image Search</div>
<ul>
<li><strong>Party is must!</strong></li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-giphy4.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy</div>
<ul>
<li><strong>C’mon, a Dork dance is must. Amy’s style</strong></li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-giphy5.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy</div>
<h3 id="next-steps">Next Steps</h3>
<p>We feel that we would now be able to make a smooth transition into the world of open source. We are no more dubious of our selves while trying out to figure out how to contribute to open source and whether what we do would be suffice, we would now definitely just dive right in!
And we feel there are no better words to express how we feel for RGSoC than to say.
> <em>“There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart” ~ Mahatma Gandhi</em></p>
<p><strong><em>Alvida, RGSoC!</em></strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-28-team-sectumsempra-giphy6.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy</div>
The end of the beginningLori and Amaliahttp://twitter.com/HarlemExpat2018-10-26T00:00:00+00:002018-10-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/BarcelonaDuo-farewell<p>Sometimes endings are really beginnings. We are finishing the summer of code, but the truth is this is the beginning of our tech career. This summer has been a way for us to see what it would be like to work full time as developers. We experienced working as part of a team, and it normalized what being a developer really meant.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo7.jpg" alt="Amalia and Lori working" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Lori and Amalia at Thoughtworks (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br />
<strong>What we learned this summer</strong></p>
<p>Apart from the technical skills we gained this summer, we also emerged more confident. We went from feeling ashamed that we didn’t understand something to thinking, “we don’t understand it, yet”. This is an important mind shift. One needs to be comfortable with not knowing something, especially in tech. We learned that since technologies evolve and change every year it is important to get comfortable with not always knowing the answers.</p>
<p>Aside from the technical training and support we were given in git, TDD, Ruby and Rails we were also taught agile methods. From day one our coaches guided us in agile practices. Over time we recognized that beyond buzzwords, it is also a manner of thinking: we do the best we can with the information we have. When we get more information (experiences and reflection on our experiences through retrospectives) we do better. This commitment to constant reflection, feedback and improvement, created a growth environment. This has had a positive effect on even the way we organize our work at <a href="https://codebar.io/">Codebar</a>.</p>
<p>We also learned how to build and maintain connections between team members, especially since we were distributed in different countries across different time zones. We were lucky to meet the Exercism team in person at the beginning of the summer. The long dinners, chats over early morning coffee, and bouldering created a bond between us that will endure long after the summer.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo8.jpg" alt="Katrina, Jeremy, Lori, Amalia, Nicole, and Karlo at the launch of Exercism" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Katrina, Jeremy, Lori, Amalia, Nicole, and Karlo at the launch of Exercism (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br />
Finally, we learned that environment matters. In our host company, Thoughtworks Barcelona we found an environment where we were able to thrive. From the first day, our coaches addressed us as developers and the community at large welcomed us as their equals. We felt included in everything from social events, office- wide meetings, and tech talks. Because of the encouragement, belief and inclusiveness we morphed into developers.</p>
<p><strong>Thank yous</strong></p>
<p>We want to thank our mentors. First of all we would like to thank Katrina. It was awesome to see her program in Brighton. Her response to our awe was priceless: “I have been doing this for over 10 years: you’ll get there.” She also sent us GitHub stickers and hoodies.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo9.jpg" alt="Amalia and Lori sporting their GitHub hoodies" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Amalia and Lori sporting their GitHub hoodies (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br />
We also want to thank our second mentor Jeremy and team members Nicole and Karlo. Working with you has been a bonus this summer. Jeremy’s explained complex parts of the codebase via Slack in a way that was informative and fun. Nicole helped us ramp-up on the research supporting the evolution of the Exercism platform. Karlo gave us quick code snippets. All of you made us feel like a part of the team.</p>
<p><strong>Our Coaches: David, Emily, Javier, Klaus, Maikha, Nacho, Jorge</strong></p>
<p>We had the most amazing coaches in the history of the world. Words seem inadequate to express how much they have given us. Their official role was coach, but they also acted as a mentors and friends. They encouraged us when we were down, uplifting us with wit, humor, and hugs. In particular,</p>
<p><strong>David</strong> We asked you to become a coach, you became as a mentor and a friend. You believed in us before we believed in ourselves. There are no words to describe the gratitude we feel for having you in our lives. Thank you.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo10.jpg" alt="David, Lori and Amalia after a long work day" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>David, Lori and Amalia after a long work day (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Emily</strong> Our advocate and role model. You planted a seed and helped us keep our eyes on the prize. We are on our way thanks to you.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo16.jpg" alt="Amalia, Emily and Lori enjoying the last days of the program. " /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Amalia, Emily and Lori enjoying the last days of the program (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Javier</strong> You took terrifying concepts and made them fun for us. Thanks for the TDD sessions and explaining YAGNI.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo15.jpg" alt="Lori, Javi and Amalia calming their nerves before the lunch and learn" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Lori, Javi and Amalia calming their nerves before the lunch and learn (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Jorge</strong> What a lesson on inceptions! You stayed late. You came early. Your genuine care for us was evident. Thank you.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo12.jpg" alt="Jorge, Lori and Amalia during an early morning session" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Jorge, Lori and Amalia during an early morning session (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Klaus</strong> Thank you for the session on landing our dream tech job. Thank you for the roadmap. Your commitment to inclusivity (at the office, at the Full Stack Fest) opens doors for people.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo11.jpg" alt="Amalia, Klaus and Amalia at a training session" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Amalia, Klaus and Amalia at a training session (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Maikha</strong> (to us “Magic Maikha”). You are beacon of peace, tranquility and strength. We are lucky to have worked with you. You are going to change the world as you have changed ours.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo13.jpg" alt="Maikha and Amalia after a retrospective" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Maikha and Amalia after a retrospective (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Nacho</strong> (to us “The Nach”). Thank you for your empathy. You always knew what to say when we didn’t know we needed to hear it. Your teaching skills are impeccable.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-20-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo14.jpg" alt="Nacho, Lori and Amalia after a long days work" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Nacho, Lori and Amalia after a long days work(image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Our coaching company ThoughtWorks, BCN</strong></p>
<p>This summer we were hosted by the Barcelona office of <a href="https://www.thoughtworks.com/locations/barcelona">ThoughtWorks</a>. There we found an incredible community of people. We were inspired by the breadth and depth of their knowledge. Although our stay was temporary, we always felt like a part of the family. Thank you ThoughtWorkers for showing us that once you eliminate fear of judgement and add compassion to the workplace, people can flourish personally and professionally.</p>
<p><strong>To our family</strong></p>
<p><em>Lori:</em> Thank you mom for reading our blog. Xesús, quérote moito.</p>
<p><em>Amalia:</em> Quiero dar las gracias a mis padres. Los quiero mucho. I also want to thank my partner Giorgos who always supports all of my strange obsessions.</p>
<p><strong>Unlimited Possibilities</strong></p>
<p>We are finishing off the summer full of optimism towards the future. Knowing that it is possible to master anything through hard work, persistence, patience, and practice is really empowering. While the RGSoC is coming to an end, we feel like many doors have opened and that the journey is just getting started.</p>
<p>Keep in contact with Lori:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-king-81b729110/">LinkedIn</a></p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/loriking">GitHub</a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/HarlemExpat">Twitter</a></p>
<p>Keep in contact with Amalia</p>
<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/amaliacardenas/">LinkedIn</a></p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/amaliacardenas">GitHub</a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/anybodycancode1">Twitter</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.anybodycancode.com/">Blog</a></p>
Conference Reactjsday VeronaGeorginahttp://twitter.com/GirlsCodeMK2018-10-24T00:00:00+00:002018-10-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conference-reactjsday-verona<p><strong>YAY I got tickets</strong></p>
<p>Ana Sofia’s email to advise me I got tickets to ReactJs Day in Verona, Italy, my choice of conferences for RGSoC was great. I could tell from her email she was excited for me.</p>
<p>After a few emails backwards and forwards, I knew all the details of the conference, how to get the tickets and the essentials as well as where to get the best gelato especially if I liked Nutella!</p>
<h2 id="pre-conference">Pre-conference</h2>
<p>I had started following speakers on twitter before the conference. It is interesting to hear their travel journeys, their last minute slide changes. It all makes for them to appear more human and relateable. It also prepares me to have a few questions, and a bit of background so I can talk to them.</p>
<p><strong>First time in Italy</strong></p>
<p>The organisers are italian and they very much want to put conferences on that are financially accessible to all their community and to get local italian companies involved.</p>
<p>So to travel to a country not knowing italian added more apprenhension. I should not have been worried, all the talks were in English and were very clear. The italians are great hosts. I had a lovely time visiting Verona, the public transport is easy to understand, the local taxis are plentyful and the hotel where I was staying and hosting the conference were marvellous. They even found a hdmi cable so I could watch my netflix in comfort!</p>
<p><strong>Feeling nervous before the conference</strong></p>
<p>My negative inner voice starts chattering away - it maybe too hard, will I understand what they are talking about? Is it going to be at such an advanced level? What are the people going to be like? I should quit before they find out I am a fraud. I can have some or all of these negative thoughts before I go.</p>
<p>So how do I gain control of my mindset and be ready to learn and have fun.
Affirmations, practice, support.</p>
<p><strong>Affirmations:</strong> I am not meant to know it all. It is good for all to have different perspectives and diversity. If you are learning you are going to be challenged. It is ok to say you don’t know something, in fact it helps the speakers go over details. Keep going to conferences. Not all are the same. They have different communities, different speakers, but the same goal that you have a great time, learn and meet the community.</p>
<p><strong>Practice:</strong> Keep going to conferences you will get more comfortable.</p>
<p><strong>Support:</strong> Get to know someone who will support you either remotely like Ana Sofia, or reach out to someone who is going too.</p>
<h3 id="summary">Summary</h3>
<p>I have attended a few conferences now. This one like the others is seriously lacking in equal representation. Therefore it is even more important as a woman to go, and that RGSoC continues to do what it does. Women need to start feeling comfortable being the minority until things change, standing out but also having a valid reason to attend. Thank you to all the conferences that are proactively addressing this balance.</p>
<p>There were great live demos, live recordings, humour, reassurance and support to each other and a great community.</p>
<p>Conferences like this brige the gap between reality and vision, best practice and deadlines, passion and ideas of where we are heading in the future.</p>
<p>This was a conference about the framework that our project for RGSoC, Bahmni used. It would be exciting to find out more about this. It confirmed what we found difficult and similar pain points. I found out alternative ways of solving problems we had on our project. It also confirmed to me that I had grown as a developer and understood more than what I thought!</p>
<h3 id="speakers-and-schedule">Speakers and Schedule</h3>
<p>There were so many great speakers, thank you to the organisers <a href="https://twitter.com/grusp">@Grusp</a>and <a href="https://twitter.com/__fevr">@_fevr</a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/gthodgkinson/status/1051597083457871872">Great React JS Speaker Video</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-05-conference-reactjsday-verona-speakers.jpg" alt="reactjsday-speakers" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> ReactJs Day Speakers (photo taken by Georgina Hodgkinson)</div>
<p>Ah fair city of Verona. The setting of Shakespears Romeo and Juliet. Although it turns out its not Shakespeare’s story in fact it had been told before in poems and in a book and probably word of mouth from the port city of Verona. This makes me think of my coding. I change and tweak my coding as I grow as a developer to suit newer situations and environments, but the core story of all developers is the same. I was trying to solve a need for our RGSoC project in the best way I knew how with all the support</p>
<p><strong>Updates on React Router</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/mjackson">Michael Jackson</a></p>
<p>Live demo, he built up code through his talk, he changed code as the need demanded and as he explained scenarios. His talk flowed easily. Professional speaker, making jokes when the technology wasn’t quite behaving. He was very clear and used visual studio as his editor. We used react router for our project in Bahmni and it was so good to see and understand the reasoning of why his library had developed.</p>
<p><strong>Navigating the hype driven world of frontend development without going crazy</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/thekitze">Kritijan ‘Kitze’ Ristovski</a></p>
<p>Motivational, supportive, humourous confident speaker. He talked about FOMO (fear of missing out) and FOMOTWTSTYCFE (fomo tweets that you can find elsewhere). His advice to frontend developers don’t get too comfy, stop learning ‘just in case’ stuff, stop seeking external approval, stop feeling insecure about your code. His 3 positive points was to make front end money - find your niche, stick to it and make it profitable.</p>
<p><strong>Testing React Components and coding with confidence</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/skidding">Ovidiu Charaeches</a></p>
<p>I liked this talk and found it very useful as this is an area I still need to develop. I found during my project with RGSoC and Bahmni that I wanted to learn more about testing. He went through the anatomy of tests which I found very useful and hope to have time to implement. He explained the testing positives to gain clarity, confidence and regression. I liked the concept he introduced of tight vs loose unit tests so that as code evolved your tests were able to adapt and were not in themselves rewrites.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-05-conference-reactjsday-verona-testanatomy.jpg" alt="reactjsday-testanatomy" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> ReactJs Day Test Anatomy (photo taken by Georgina Hodgkinson)</div>
<p><strong>Lets manage our local state with GraphQL</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/NikkitaFTW">Sara Vieira</a></p>
<p>I was very interested in this talk as I had not needed to use GraphQl and wanted to know why people would consider using this rather than redux.</p>
<p>She made some very valid reasons. I didn’t realise however that it needed the library Apollo. I loved Sara’s motivational slides.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-05-conference-reactjsday-verona-nooneisanexpert.jpg" alt="reactjsday-nooneisanexpert" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> ReactJs Day No one is an expert (photo taken by Georgina Hodgkinson)</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-05-conference-reactjsday-verona-learnfromeachother.jpg" alt="reactjsday-learnfromeachother" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> ReactJs Day Learn from each other (photo taken by Georgina Hodgkinson)</div>
<p><strong>A reappreciation of redux: Why my team at PayPal removed apollo Client and went back to Redux</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-millington/">Max Millington</a></p>
<p>It was very interesting to see that there was respectful disagreement as to what solutions are better. He started his talk off saying that front end developers have a lot of options. He referred to twitter and not just his own opinions. He did put the biggest argument for using and returning to Redux was the impressive developer tools. Max then followed up talking about functional programming.</p>
<p><strong>Bridging the gap between design prototyping and code</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/CompuIves">Ives Van Hoorne</a></p>
<p>Ives was very passionate and energetic in his talk. He explained that design and code needed to come closer together rather than in isolation and with duplication. He referred to old technology software dreamweaver that gave him the inspiration for code sand box. This is such a useful tool for developers to show, explain code and have a visual output to view without further setup or customisation. In fact previous talkers had already used this in their demos.</p>
<p><strong>Behavioral Programming with React: request, wait and block</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/lmatteis">Luca Matteis</a></p>
<p>This was a hard talk for me to understand and reassuringly he did say that this was a theory that was different to most peoples understanding of programming. It was based on a thesis paper by David Harel, Assaf Marron and Gera Weiss. The concepts that I understood was that there is a big problem between the scenario of the need and the actual coding that gets delivered. To address this problem Luca explained using the game tic tac toe illustration of request, wait and block and to program from a behavior perspective using threads.</p>
<p>It is defintely something I need to read more about to get a deeper understanding. However if I need to look at specifications and requirements of software I will understand that there is the alternative way that addresses the problem of technology independent and reactive systems.</p>
<p><strong>Advance patterns in building React Components</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/manjula_dube">Manjula Dube</a></p>
<p>This was another interactive talk. Code was shared, best practices and audience participation which I found very useful to see what developers thought about certain code and styles and there is always multiple ways to solve a problem.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-05-conference-reactjsday-verona-codesolution.jpg" alt="reactjsday-codesolution" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> ReactJs Day Code Solution(photo taken by Georgina Hodgkinson)</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-05-conference-reactjsday-verona-audienceparticipation.jpg" alt="reactjsday-audienceparticipation" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> ReactJs Day Audience Participation (photo taken by Georgina Hodgkinson)</div>
<p><strong>Making games and physics work with Reason & Reprocessing</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/_philpl">Phil Plückthun</a></p>
<p>I loved this talk as an ending talk. It was needed to be light hearted but still very thought provoking. He explained in a story type talk about he agreed with friends on an 8 hour flight to do a hackathon. He built up the story and was very honest and brave about his mistakes. There was a lot of support that he had learnt through his failures and underestimation of time needed to resolve not coding but the understanding of learning a new language and the concepts of basic physics in his game.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-05-conference-reactjsday-verona-timepressure.jpg" alt="reactjsday-timepressure" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> ReactJs Day Time Pressure Project (photo taken by Georgina Hodgkinson)</div>
<h4 id="you-can-continue-to-follow-my-journey-after-rgsoc-here">You can continue to follow my journey after RGSoC here:</h4>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/gthodgkinson">Georgina’s - Twitter</a></strong></p>
Our little infinity - RGSoC 2018!Rahmeenhttp://twitter.com/rahmeen_habib2018-10-21T00:00:00+00:002018-10-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/$we-init-blog-post-2<h1 id="little-infinity">Little Infinity</h1>
<p><em>Dear RGSoC,</em><br />
<em>You gave us forever within the numbered days, and we are grateful ❤️</em><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-16-we-int-blog2.png" alt="The two of us :D" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Team $we init (Picture taken by Rahmeen's phone)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><em>And time the tyrant in whose reign nothing does last,</em><br />
<em>Much like the deepest bliss and the rarest fix,</em><br />
<em>This tempestuous timelessness too did pass.</em><br /></p>
<p>We didn’t realise until we started writing this blog that it has been 11 weeks! <br />
11 weeks of contributing to Probot, <br />
11 weeks of reflecting over every day’s work in daily logs, <br />
11 weeks of learning to write production code, <br />
11 weeks of bonding to a community we’ll never let go,<br />
11 weeks of living our long cherished dream ❤️<br /></p>
<h2 id="about-our-work-with-probot">About our work with Probot</h2>
<ul>
<li>Our main task was to develop bots to automate github workflow using Probot. We developed the following 2 bots!
<ul>
<li>First timers only bot <a href="https://github.com/probot/first-timers-only-app">See here</a>
<ul>
<li>Here’s a detailed <a href="https://medium.com/@aggarwalakshita1/automating-github-with-pro-bots-269880a8d22c">blog</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Enforce template bot <a href="https://github.com/probot/enforce-template-app">See here</a>
<ul>
<li>Here’s a detailed <a href="https://medium.com/@rahmeenhabib/rgsoc-18-with-probot-d57d40e6267b">blog</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="and-we-learned">And we learned…</h2>
<h3 id="working-with-the-probot-framework">Working with the Probot Framework</h3>
<p><a href="https://probot.github.io/docs/">Probot</a> is a framework for building GitHub Apps in Node.js. It aims to eliminate all the drudgery–like receiving and validating webhooks, and doing authentication handstands–so you can focus on the features you want to build.</p>
<h3 id="working-with-jsdoc">Working with JSDoc</h3>
<p>JSDoc 3 is an API documentation generator for JavaScript. One can add documentation comments directly to their source code, right alongside the code itself.. Here is the <a href="http://usejsdoc.org/">link to the official docs</a>. This gave us an insight into writing effective comments and we were highly appreciated by our mentors for the code readability.</p>
<h3 id="writing-tests-using-jest">Writing tests using jest</h3>
<p>Effective testing is the key to a successful project. Jest is an effective library for testing JavaScript and hence was our natural choice. Here is the <a href="https://jestjs.io/">link to the official docs</a>. To find out about how we implemented jest in our code, <a href="https://github.com/probot/first-timers-only-app/blob/master/test/util.test.js">refer this</a>.</p>
<h3 id="working-with-eslint-and-prettier">Working with Eslint and Prettier</h3>
<p>ESLint is a tool for identifying and reporting on patterns found in JavaScript code, with the goal of making code more consistent and avoiding bugs. Here is the <a href="https://eslint.org/">link to the official docs</a>.
Prettier enforces a consistent code style across your entire codebase, therby enhancing code readibilty. Here is the <a href="https://prettier.io/">link to the official docs</a>.</p>
<h2 id="quantification-in-numbers">Quantification in numbers</h2>
<ul>
<li>We created 2 repositories in Probot’s beautiful codebase!</li>
<li>We made over 50 commits in the two repositories</li>
<li>We wrote approximately 2000 lines of code</li>
<li>Both of our bots are installed on their repositories themselves.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="whats-next">What’s next?</h2>
<p>Probot’s going to stay with us, <em>forever and a day.</em> We have ideated on future scope of both of our bots (can be found in their respective readmes) and will continue working on improving them.
We’re already working on boosting the open source culture in our local community and atleast a dozen juniors and batchmates have already approached us, expressing interest for open source in general and RGSoC in particular. We were impacted by our seniors RGSoC 2017 scholars Prachi and Ipshita ❤️ and we hope to continue to pass it on so that the legacy continues! :D</p>
<h2 id="have-questions">Have Questions?</h2>
<p>We’re more than happy to help. Feel free to reach out!</p>
<h4 id="twitter">Twitter</h4>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/rahmeen_habib">Rahmeen</a> <br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/AkshitaAggarw18">Akshita</a> <br /></p>
<h4 id="github">Github</h4>
<p><a href="https://github.com/Rahmeen14">Rahmeen</a> <br />
<a href="https://github.com/Akshitaag">Akshita</a> <br /></p>
<h4 id="medium">Medium</h4>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/@rahmeenhabib">Rahmeen</a> <br />
<a href="https://medium.com/@aggarwalakshita1">Akshita</a><br /></p>
<p>A big thank you to Ana, Vaishali, Gregor, Divjot, Saksham, Prachi, Ipshita, Manish, Saptak and Manan for making our dream translate to reality. You’re all awesome <3
Thank you RGSOC for touching our lives making magic happen ❤️</p>
Team Popcorn says TschüssArati and Jessicahttp://twitter.com/TeamPopcornBer2018-10-16T00:00:00+00:002018-10-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-popcorn-over-and-out<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-09-17-popcorn.jpg" alt="Popcorn" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Photo credit: https://illustratedbites.wordpress.com/</em></div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-09-17-whitespace.jpg" alt="White space" /></p>
<p>We spent our summer of code working on the <a href="https://nextcloud.com/">Nextcloud</a> contacts app. Originally built with the Angular.js framework, we supported app maintainer John to migrate it over to Vue.js. With the date for the Beta release now approaching we can report our work has been successful and provided us with a lot of insight and knowledge along the way. Some of our work has also made it into the official <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/nextcloud-vue">NPM package for Nextcloud vue components</a> :tada:</p>
<h2 id="team-popcorns-top-8-highlights-of-the-summer-of-code">Team Popcorn’s top 8 highlights of the summer of code</h2>
<ul>
<li>Coding in person with app maintainer John</li>
<li>Docker workshop with coach Victor</li>
<li>First PR merged into vue branch</li>
<li>Social gathering with coaches and mentors</li>
<li>Learning Vue.js</li>
<li>Team meetings on the train</li>
<li>Trouble shooting issues together</li>
<li>Meeting contributors and our mentor John at the Nextcloud conference</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2 id="finding-our-rhythm-and-getting-agile">🎶 Finding our Rhythm and getting Agile</h2>
<p>Team Popcorn was committed from the start to creating a work environment that would allow both of us to maximise our personal growth and enjoyment of the summer. We held weekly meetings on Mondays which we ran in an Agile format. Its purpose was to refactor our work flow and analyse how we could increase our productivity, but also to improve our experience and allow for personal growth alongside contributing meaningful work to the project.</p>
<p>One thing we found was that by splitting tasks up into manageable and clear goals we felt a lot more satisfaction and less frustration with our work. At first we started working on our own fork of the project but we quickly moved over to our own branches in the master repository so we could keep our work closer to the master branch. We went further still and created issues and made branches for smaller parts of code so we could make more regular PRs.</p>
<p>We also had to address that we both work differently, have different knowledge areas and have different lives outside of the Summer of Code. Communication has been key and talking openly about our feelings has given us the chance to approach subjects before they became issues and ensure we were both getting what we needed from the programme.</p>
<p>As the RGSoC is about learning the skills for working in the tech industry, we also set up knowledge share sessions with some of our coaches to gain more knowledge on topics ranging from Docker to BEM and CSS structuring. We will also be running a few more before the end of the programme.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="sparkles-team-popcorns-update-titles">:sparkles: Team Popcorn’s update titles</h2>
<p>For our daily updates we decided to create a format for our titles and turn them into popcorn flavours. We asked our coaches, mentor, family and well whoever was around to give us three things. The base of our question was a food, a colour and an adjective but we changed it around a little each week :smile:</p>
<p>Here are our top 6 flavours :yum:</p>
<ul>
<li>Flaming Pink Spaghetti Popcorn</li>
<li>Pipoca brincalhona de Paçoca Amarela</li>
<li>Tired Grey Croissant Popcorn</li>
<li>Königsblau Reggae-Feverish Watermelon Popcorn</li>
<li>Lime Green Glamorous Praline Pecan Popcorn</li>
<li>Thankful #0082C9 Kumquat Popcorn</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2 id="mortarboard-arati">:mortar_board: Arati</h2>
<p>On this September day, with no distance from the program to provide perspective, I can safely say that the summer of 2018 is going to have repercussions on my work and life for years to come. Though I may not be able to articulate all the changes I have gone through, the degree to which I have been challenged is undeniable. One of the greatest benefits I have observed so far is that RGSOC has helped me become familiar with unfamiliarity.</p>
<p>Exhibit A: our first week of the summer of code. During this time I was introduced to Vue.js, the offices of Absolventa, working with a teammate (the indomitable Jessica), German keyboards, our wonderful contingent of coaches, RGSOC communication requirements and a gruelling schedule that would hopefully enable me to continue my new job as a full-stack developer while participating in the program. This is without mentioning the changes that were still to come. Having to juggle two remote repositories, a million local ones, strange forks, branches, trees. Vuex. The work process of the app maintainer (yay skjnldsv!) and collaborating remotely. Linting. Getting uncomfortable with CSS, up close and personal with git. What it means to migrate a project.</p>
<p>This constant exposure to novelty has proved to me in a clearer way than ever before that the strangeness of a new beginning doesn’t last. I can now much more easily see past my comfort zone to the day when it turns into a skill or an insight that I can call mine. This is how I was able to quickly fix a branch at work by cherry picking commits even though I had never done it before and to impress my boss along the way. The most significant aspect of the incident was that I sought out the challenge and I did so with confidence, i.e. feeling completely lost for much of the past six months, surviving and realising that coding is not nearly as fun when you know what you’re doing.</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="books-team-popcorns-top-resources">:books: Team Popcorn’s top resources</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://ohshitgit.com/">ohshitgit</a> <em>(Helpful git commands)</em></li>
<li><a href="https://vue-multiselect.js.org/">Vue-multiselect</a> <em>(Multiselect component for Vue framework)</em></li>
<li><a href="https://css-tricks.com/bem-101/">Bem 101 </a> <em>(Article about CSS Bem (CSS structuring))</em></li>
<li><a href="https://ohmyz.sh/"> ohmyz.sh</a> <em>(framework for managing Zsh configuration, particularly useful because of autocomplete!)</em></li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Complete">Code Complete</a> <em>(book given by coach Lora)</em></li>
<li><a href="https://dev.to/">Dev.to</a> <em>(blog about software development/watercooler)</em></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2 id="mortarboard-jessica">:mortar_board: Jessica</h2>
<p>I have certainly learned a lot about programming and contributing to Open Source during the summer, however what was perhaps less expected is that I have also learned a lot about work flows and team work. Our weekly agile meetings and talking with team mate Arati about how we could streamline our workflow gave me a lot of insight to how this may work in a future position. Something else that was new to me was working in an office environment. Both my previous jobs were more physical and in varying work spaces. I have really enjoyed working at our coaching company ABSOLVENTA’s office and I am incredibly thankful to them for providing us not only with computers and workspaces but also a safe, friendly environment to work in.</p>
<p>During the summer of code I was successful in finding a position as a software developer at Ecosia (the search engine that plants trees 🌳). I am so happy to be able to continue my journey and thankful to RGSoC which has helped me so much to prepare for this next step.</p>
<p>I am also inspired by all our coaches, mentors, supervisors and the RGSoC organisers to give back to the community. I am already actively involved in the local chapter of PyLadies and as part of my new position will be able to take time to lead community activities. I hope to be able to participate in future RGSoC sessions as a coach or supervisor and support others on their journey into tech!</p>
<hr />
<h2 id="clap-thanks">:clap: Thanks</h2>
<p>We definitely could not have done this without the support of the following people. Thank you for making our summer of code inspirational, productive, and most of all fun!</p>
<ul>
<li>Our fantastic coaching company <a href="www.absolventa.de">Absolventa</a></li>
<li>Our amazing team of coaches: <a href="https://github.com/lorabv">Lora</a>,<a href="https://github.com/axlwaii">Markus</a>,<a href="https://github.com/camilasan">Camila</a>,<a href="https://github.com/kajatiger">Kaja</a> & <a href="https://github.com/elalemanyo">Victor</a></li>
<li>Our supervisor Neta</li>
<li>And the one and only <a href="">@skjnldsv</a> for his patience, guidence and friendship!</li>
<li>Nextcloud community, espcially <a href="https://github.com/xh3n1">Xheni</a>, <a href="https://github.com/jonatoni">Jona</a>, <a href="https://github.com/jospoortvliet">Jos</a> and <a href="https://github.com/jancborchardt">Jan</a></li>
<li>Our friends and family for understanding and support during some challenging times</li>
<li>Arati’s work for being flexible with her schedule so she was able to work and participate in RGSOC at the same time</li>
<li>RGSOC and the broader community for giving us this opportunity</li>
<li>And let’s not forget our brilliant mascot Popcorn 🐾</li>
</ul>
<p>Over and Out! :microphone:</p>
<p>Arati & Jessica AKA Team Popcorn
<a href="https://twitter.com/TeamPopcornBer">@TeamPopcornBer</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-17-09-team-popcorn.gif" alt="Team Popcorn" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Photo credit: Team Popcorn</em></div>
One ending, multiple beginningsAna Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:002018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/one-ending-multiple-beginnings<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/295082877" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/295082877">RGSoC 2018 Moments</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user51331690">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>We can’t believe time went by so fast, but Rails Girls Summer of Code 2018 is over! And while the program has ended, we know that this is the start of multiple beginnings: It could be a participant’s first time application to a job, receiving their first job offer as a software developer, or working on a new OSS project.</p>
<p>In spite of all these new beginnings, some things will carry on from this year’s RGSoC; we are proudly talking about all the students who decide to continue contributing to the Open Source projects they worked on during the summer, and all the friendships and work relationships that have been developed during our program.</p>
<p>These special friendships are what makes our community exceptional. And as a community, wee got together and coordinated, funded, trained, mentored and supervised 26 people who are now on their way to make a change in tech and in Open Source. We couldn’t be more proud of our students’ growth since day one! You have been inspiring us in the past 3 months and we know for sure that you will continue to inspire a whole lot of other people in the future.</p>
<p>We are profoundly grateful to all of the students, coaches, mentors, supervisors, organizers, sponsors and individual donors who helped make RGSoC 2018 a reality. Thank you for believing in our mission and in the importance of making Open Source a better place for everyone. We hope to have your support in the years to come!</p>
<h3 id="lets-keep-in-touch">Let’s keep in touch!</h3>
<p>And on that note: If you would like to receive RGSoC updates for the next time we launch the program—such as information on the OSS project submissions and student applications opening — please subscribe to our newsletter using this <a href="http://eepurl.com/dItKTr">link</a>. We promise we won’t spam you.</p>
<p>Another thing: if you’d like to keep in touch with our students, coaches, mentors and supervisors, we suggest you check our twitter lists <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/lists">here</a> and our RGSoC twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/i/moments/1013869956545597445">moment</a>.</p>
<h3 id="a-heartfelt-thank-you-to-our-sponsors">A heartfelt thank you to our sponsors:</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-10-15-rgsoc-2018_sponsors-post.jpg" alt="RGSoC 2018 Sponsors (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>RGSoC 2018 Sponsors (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
Feeling adventurous ? become developer : choose another professionSabine van der Eijk and Alina Leucahttp://twitter.com/Sabin_E2018-10-04T00:00:00+00:002018-10-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Hurdles-of-a-beginning-developer<h2 id="hurdles-of-a-beginning-developer">Hurdles of a beginning developer</h2>
<p>So, you’ve done a bootcamp, congratulations you’re now a programmer!! It’s weird to think that now you have a developers’ certificate for the whole world to see, but it still doesn’t feel like you’re a dev. Now you can start applying for jobs as a junior developer and dip your toes in a new project. With this new job comes your first programming experience, and the ups and downs of being a junior in a field of seniors.</p>
<p>When we wrapped up our bootcamp, we didn’t feel confident that we had a dev toolkit; we were so lucky to come across and be able to apply for a Summer of Code together. Entering a program where you can start learning by doing was a great opportunity to dip our toes into a real project and an amazing stepping-stone to an eventual job. We spent some time after our bootcamp classes checking our application and searching for coaches. We had our doubts during the process, thinking we would be so lucky if we were to be chosen, so we chose the projects that we felt comfortable with and most familiar. We reached out to the community to find coaches willing to invest time for a whole three months during the program. Alina already knew who our first coach would be, Daniel. By reaching out to reddit Amsterdam community we found our second coach Jack.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/team-potatocode-first-call-01.jpg" alt="first team call" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Ana Sofia from RGSoC organization</div>
<h2 id="we-felt-a-bit-like-imposters-even">We felt a bit like imposters even..</h2>
<p>With hindsight I guess we’ve been blessed with the way everything worked out for us. We got into the program quickly, even though there were lots of good teams to choose from. I think we didn’t expect that we had been selected, when the news came. I guess we felt a bit like imposters even, with so little coding coding experience and always thinking that we don’t know enough. Even though Rails Girls is meant for teams like ours, there’s definitely still a voice in the back of your head telling you don’t have what it takes.</p>
<p>We’ve realised that it’s actually good to have that voice there, since it will probably stay with us our whole career (we might as well get used to it). Seasoned developers online even have a blogs on the subject of imposter syndrome. It’s good to learn early on that this is there to stay. It’s selfishly nice to know that every developer out there has these feelings, and it doesn’t seem to matter how experienced you are. In the end coding comes down to this feeling, but the only expectations you’re not meeting are the ones YOU CREATE for yourself. Things like algorithms, frameworks, new tech can be learned, with enough effort and time.</p>
<h2 id="a-potato-for-every-occasion">A potato for every occasion</h2>
<p>We learned during the program that there’s so much more to coding, than programming itself. That basic feeling of not knowing enough to do the job is something we will encounter in life on many different ways. But with coding, it’s a day to day business, the confrontation with not knowing. As humans, most of the time we have an option to choose: go bungee jumping for the first time or not. This seems to be the overarching theme of coding, too. There is so much to learn, that every coding challenge is another decision of whether to jump. You never know what you’re going to get. So if you’re prepared to take a challenge, you’ll grow on the fly, and code through it. It will never be the same thing twice, and definitely won’t be as you expected, but it will feel adventurous. I guess what we want to say is that we can choose if we want to live the fear or not. Feeling adventurous ? become developer : choose another profession.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/potatoCode.png" alt="A potato for everything" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Steemit https://steemit.com/potato/@mishakhan93/potato-for-every-occasion </div>
<p>We both had part time jobs when we started Rails Girls. Alina was a growth-hacking trainer, and Sabine was (and still is) a front-end developer at her company. We’ve had to make sacrifices to find time for everything, but we both knew the best way for us to continue our growth as developers was to learn by doing. Actually working on a project for an intense period and lots of hours has caused us to grow exponentially. This is exactly what we wanted and needed when starting a different career path. Working on our project has consolidated a lot of our progress and gave us more confidence in developing and knowing that we can learn if we persevere. We were so humbled to get a chance to do that with Stretchly and Rails Girls.</p>
<h2 id="talk-to-each-other">Talk to each other</h2>
<p>Part of our way of overcoming our fears and anxieties was to talk to each other. As a team we are very open about issues we encounter in the project or in our personal lives. So, whenever we were stressed about an issue we discussed it first thing. It helped us to reconsider or get other viewpoints to a code problem or situation. Having mentors, coaches, teammates to rely on has provided us with an environment where we felt comfortable and safe.</p>
<p>Even so, the list of hurdles we encounter as junior developers grows bigger every day. To name a few, this is what we’ve come across:</p>
<ul>
<li>Not enough documentation written for our innocent junior dev eyes (it takes hours to sometimes decipher documentation)</li>
<li>Working with timezones in any code is a huge pain! Just ask Jan (our mentor), Dan (our coach), or Jack (our coach) and they will confirm</li>
<li>Interview question: What is a DNS? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System">Domain Name System</a> Go figure!</li>
<li>Junior software-engineer job listing: minimum 3 years of experience</li>
<li>Corrupting git branch data to a point of no return (queue Phantom of the Opera soundtrack in the background)</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/bungeejump.jpg" alt="jump and fly" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Courtesy Forbes Conrad Macau Bridge </div>
<p>Just like we’ve found solutions to most of these, we’re determined to chip at this list one issue at a time, and bungee jump as much as it takes :)</p>
<p>Overall, we had a great smooth time at Rails Girls, with very few hiccups along the way because we were lucky to have our amazing supervisors and mentors. Going forward, I think we’ll find that having a network to rely on will be one of the most effective ways to overcome these struggles. We can only hope that one day we’ll be at a level where we can provide the same type of support for future aspiring devs!</p>
Obrigada, Rails Girls Summer of Code!Camila and Stefannihttp://twitter.com/milasouzaaraujo2018-10-03T00:00:00+00:002018-10-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/obrigada-rgsoc<p>Wow, it’s hard to believe that the summer is almost over! And it is even harder to believe that we started working together on this project only (almost) 3 months ago… At the beginning of the project, we were excited to be a part of all this, but we had no idea what was ahead of us. Now we can say that we were part of an amazing project. It was a great summer and we will be always grateful for this opportunity!</p>
<p>Obrigada - or thank you if you don’t know Portuguese :), RGSoC!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-17-obrigada_rgsoc.png" alt="Team Brazilian Housewives coding" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Team Brazilian Housewives coding! picture taken by Julio Albinati</b></div>
<h3 id="how-was-our-experience">How was our experience?</h3>
<p>During our summer, we learned… A lot! We had the opportunity to learn much more than simply programming in a new language or using new tools, but also about teamwork! And many times that was our biggest challenge! We have learned that communication is one of the most important thing when we are collaborating with several people - remotely or not.</p>
<p>In addition, we learned a lot about APIs implementation, Rails, Ruby, MySQL, Git… Oh, all the rebases that didn’t work, such special moments!</p>
<h2 id="so-far-what-did-we-do">So far, what did we do?</h2>
<p>Our summer project is the <a href="https://publiclab.org/about">Public Lab</a>, a community and non-profit democratizing science to address environmental issues that affect people. They are really cool, check it out!</p>
<p>Two months ago when we started working on the project, we had to spend a lot of our first week studying the Public Lab code and documentation. We chose to work on the API because it was something new for us. We studied the basics such as what is an API, what is a RESTful API, RubyGrape and Swagger - an open source tools for creating and documenting API’s.</p>
<p>After refactoring some part of the API we were able to identify the endpoints that needed urgent improvements and we worked hard on making some of them more efficient. Our work was mostly done on the back-end but we are really proud of the new /search page that we are working, that will be soon alive on the project’s website.</p>
<p>We used the <a href="https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/projects/5">Github Projects page</a> to keep track of our work and to break our tasks into small parts:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-17-bra-git.png" alt="Github Public Lab projects page" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Photo credit: Github Public Lab projects page - API project</b></div>
<p>And thank you so much to our amazing team:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Our supervisor <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/1080">Mayar</a>, you’re so sweet and helped us a lot during our summer <3</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Our mentor<a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/1432">Jeff</a>, thank you for your time and all of your reviews of our countless Pull Requests :D</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>And of, course, our coaches, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/3179">Thiago</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/3181">Julio</a>. You helped us so much, especially when we were stuck or lost xD. You are an inspiration for both of us, keep shipping! :)</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="whats-next">What’s next?</h3>
<p>Well, now you can call us the Brazilian <del>housewives</del> developers coding! Now we are super ready to embrace new challenges to come! See you around, RGSoC!</p>
Our RGSoC Journey! - Team RubiesAtibhi and Pratekshahttp://twitter.com/Rubies_11_142018-09-30T00:00:00+00:002018-09-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-rubies-blog2<h2 id="our-happy-ending---all-things-must-come-to-an-end-but-every-end-becomes-a-new-beginning"><strong><em>Our Happy Ending - All things must come to an end, but every end becomes a new beginning.</em></strong></h2>
<p>We cannot believe that it’s September and RGSoC is ending soon. It seems like just yesterday, we were prepping up our application forms !</p>
<h3 id="our-experience"><strong>Our Experience</strong></h3>
<p>We were asked the following question in our application forms <em>“Why are you applying to RGSoC ? What would you like to achieve by the end of the summer ?“</em></p>
<p>Here’s a short excerpt from our answer as the actual answers are too long.</p>
<p>“We want to improve our ability to understand a large codebase and become better developers. We want to become confident individuals who can manage their time effectively. Through RGSoC we want to meet women who have broken norms and set standards to come together and change pre-conceived notions. We want to make new friends from all over the world with whom we can share ideas and get insights on our code !”</p>
<p>As we looked back at the summer, we asked ourselves, “Did we achieve any of that ? “
The answer is a big YES. We achieved all that and a lot more than we had hoped for ! :)</p>
<h3 id="things-we-learnt"><strong>Things we learnt</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>Test Driven Development</strong> - Indians have this term “Jugaad”, roughly translated “jugaad” is a hack or a workaround. Before RGSoC, we used a lot of “jugaad” to make our codes work. Through RGSoC, we learnt to write proper, optimized, linted code that had to adhere to certain standards. We refactored our code many times and no longer use “jugaad”.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Collaborating</strong> - Lots and lots of pair programming sessions ! We have learnt many techniques and strategies by watching our mentors code.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Code Reviews</strong> - We learnt how to work on code reviews and also how to review others’ code.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Git</strong> - Git is awesome. We had to close a PR because our commit history was unclean. Ever since, we have started squashing commits and writing proper commit messages.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Time management</strong> - Juggling University with RGSoC wasn’t easy. We learnt how to utilise our time wisely. These three months meant less outings, less Netflix and chill, but it was totally worth it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Tech Stack</strong> - Ruby on Rails, ReactJS, Enzyme, Jest, RSpec, Capybara.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="challenges-we-faced"><strong>Challenges we faced</strong></h3>
<p>We were completely new to test-driven development and we initially used to write code that worked just fine. When the CircleCi tests would fail continuously, we realized that we had to write clean, efficient code and also write tests before pushing the code.</p>
<p>Initially we used to think our doubts and errors were silly, and that we would be judged for asking such simple questions to our coaches or mentors. Slowly, we learnt that no question is silly, and asking saves a lot of time.</p>
<h3 id="what-we-have-achieved"><strong>What we have achieved?</strong></h3>
<p>1000+ lines of code written!<br />
14 Pull Requests submitted, 8 merged, 4 in progress! <br />
23 issues created (for further enhancement of if-me)!<br />
7 Pair programming sessions!</p>
<h3 id="the-friends-we-made"><strong>The friends we made</strong></h3>
<p>We met such amazing people. We cannot believe we have friends from Korea, Berlin, Delhi, Africa, Spain etc. The love, positivity and goodwill the RGSoC community fosters is just amazing. Special mention to RGSoC Slack. It is our favourite slack channel :)</p>
<p><strong>Terrific Thursdays</strong> - We are going to miss our sweet and adorable supervisor Srishti. We loved chatting with you on Thursdays every week. Thank you for being such a great support during the past three months.</p>
<p><strong>If-me community</strong> - Julia, Alvaro, Camille, we had a blast working with you all. Thank you for all the encouraging words, dealing with our silly doubts and for making us better developers. RGSoC would not have been possible without you all.</p>
<h3 id="rgsoc18-in-tweets-"><strong>RGSoC’18 in Tweets !</strong></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-AlvaroTweet.jpg" alt="Alvaro's tweet" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Alvaro's Tweet (Credit: Twitter)</b></div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-JuliaTweet.jpg" alt="Julia's tweet" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Julia's Tweet (Credit: Twitter)</b></div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-SrishtiTweet.jpg" alt="Srishti's tweet" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Srishti's Tweet (Credit: Twitter)</b></div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-AtibhiTweet.jpg" alt="Atibhi's tweet" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Atibhi's Tweet (Credit: Twitter)</b></div>
<h3 id="the-ending-is-only-a-beginning-in-disguise-whats-next-for-us-"><strong>The ending is only a beginning in disguise. What’s next for us ?</strong></h3>
<p>First and foremost, if-me is amazing and we want to be associated with it for as long as possible. We will continue contributing to it and hopefully become mentors for if-me in the next-edition of RGSoC !
We were the first team from our college to make it into RGSoC, we want to mentor other girls and encourage them to apply to RGSoC next year. Other than RGSoC, we want to mentor others through programs like LearnIt girl, GSoC etc.
We also want to use our learning experience to land awesome internships next year and continue to grow as developers.</p>
Team GirlsCode MK - Code 2 a good summerGeorgina and Evahttp://twitter.com/GirlsCodeMK2018-09-26T00:00:00+00:002018-09-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Code-2-a-good-summer<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>Heatwave: 2018 was the hottest summer for UK</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>And not just the weather. Girls Code MK was on fire with their Bahmni project.</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Lots of learning, fun and motivation for the future</strong></p>
</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="quantitative-measures-of-our-project">Quantitative measures of our project</h4>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-26-girlscodemk_infographic.png" alt="girlscodemk_infographic" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Girls Code MK Infographic (Drawn by Georgina Hodgkinson)</div>
<h2 id="summary">Summary</h2>
<p>We have had a great time. We have learnt so much. A 90 day - 3 month sprint to focus has helped us learn far more than if we spent the time doing a course or boot camp. Having a real project, with real problems changes how you learn. It has also gone faster than what we thought. We will now refer to life before and after RGSoC!</p>
<h2 id="highlights">Highlights</h2>
<p>As our infographic shows the quantitative measures of our RGSoc. The qualitative measures have been far greater. We have laughed, we have struggled with problems, we have found out what we are capable of, we have learnt about ourselves as much as code, we have achieved more than we thought we could. We have tasted success of a project that met its objective and we are proud to demo and show others. Our confidence of learning code, talking about technical projects and discussing what problems we are having and also being more comfortable in saying that we don’t know but know how to find out.</p>
<h2 id="setting-up-and-improving-our-working-environment">Setting up and improving our working environment</h2>
<p>We spent time at the beginning of the project setting up how we would work and our working environment. We put our schedules together and worked out the best times for us to meet, work together and zoom or google hangout with our coaches, mentors and supervisors.</p>
<p>At times we needed to refine and change and open communication was our key to a successful team.</p>
<h2 id="technologies-we-have-learnt">Technologies we have learnt</h2>
<p>Agile working with Jira, slack, zoom</p>
<p>React, JavaScript, CSS</p>
<p>Design layouts using inVisionapp</p>
<p>Git, github, Travis CI, Jest</p>
<h3 id="top-resources-we-would-recommend">Top resources we would recommend</h3>
<p><a href="https://reactjs.org/">React documentation</a></p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/Bahmni/person-management-app">Bahmni Project on github</a></p>
<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/">Stack Overflow</a></p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/topic/programming">Medium website</a></p>
<p><a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/">Mozilla website</a></p>
<p><a href="https://css-tricks.com/">CSS tricks</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.freecodecamp.org/">Free Code Camp</a></p>
<p><a href="https://reactpodcast.simplecast.fm/1">React podcast</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software">Jira Project Management tool</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.invisionapp.com/">InVision App for our UI Designs</a></p>
<p><a href="https://codewithmosh.com/p/mastering-react">Code with mosh react course</a></p>
<h2 id="key-takeaways">Key takeaways</h2>
<p>Richard Branson “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!” So if you are doubting you are good enough. If you get the opportunity say YES and learn how to do it, you won’t regret it!</p>
<p>If you get the chance to apply for RGSoC do it. You won’t regret it.</p>
<p>To learn it takes patience, support and space to grow. We have had all 3 of these during RGSoC.</p>
<p>We all learn at a different pace, in different ways but we all have something to offer and we learn more when we share with each other. RGSoC has a great community and alumni.</p>
<h2 id="life-after-rgsoc">Life after RGSoC</h2>
<p>Georgina has gained in confidence to learn more in the field of software engineering, give more talks and continue to inspire other women and girls into software engineering. The next steps for Georgina, is to attend the React.js conference in Verona in October, look at attending the Node.js conference. Georgina is on the technical path of the toastmaster course to gain more skills in talking in public and to larger audiences. Georgina will also create and pitch her MVP app and present for investment and funding in 2019.</p>
<p>Eva will continue to divide her time between coding and GirlsCode MK including organising Django Girls MK, CryptoParty MK and Ada Lovelace Wikipedia-edit-a-thon. GirlsCode MK has also been accepted to a local accelerator starting October - so that we can make it even better and bigger in the future! With her new-gained coding skills, Eva has already landed a couple of projects that she will take on after RGSoC. And, of course, there’s Bahmni!</p>
<p>We are both going to do a demo of our project at Thought Works office in London and will be streamed to their Berlin office on 2 November.</p>
<h2 id="friends-made">Friends Made</h2>
<p>Other teams of RGSoC on slack, coaches, mentors and organisers of RGSoC, we have your links on social media and hope to continue to follow you.</p>
<h3 id="last-post-would-not-be-complete-without-">Last post would not be complete without …</h3>
<p><strong>THANK YOUS</strong></p>
<p>Thank you to
Supervisor:</p>
<p>Ramon who met us weekly, checking in and making sure our welfare was good. He was always positive, we loved his support and smiles on a Monday morning - far better than any coffee!</p>
<p>Mentors:</p>
<p>Ivo - for his unfailing guidance, the right balance of learning but also guiding so we didn’t become overwhelmed. His weekly meetings, feedback on our code and management of the project. His dedication to writing stories and providing us with information even during his wedding season! Congratulations to his friends that got married over summer.</p>
<p>Wolf - for such a warm introduction and getting us started with the Bahmni project especially giving up your lunch times.</p>
<p>Coaches:</p>
<p>Neil - for all his knowledge and his fabulous git workshop
Kalan - for his guidance especially on testing
PJ and Rob for helping during girls code sessions.</p>
<p>RGSoC Organisers : for setting up RGSoC meetups, organising tickets for conferences, all the admin work that goes into organising these summers. You Rock!!</p>
<p>Ana Sofia
Anna
Vaishali</p>
<p>Bahmni Project specific - Thoughtworks: For their patience and time for letting us help out on their project that they have a keen interest in.</p>
<p>Angshu
Konrad
Sruti</p>
<p>Thank you to our family for their unwavering support and putting up with our mood swings when code wasn’t working or we couldn’t work things out!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-26-RGSOC_glitters.jpg" alt="RGSoC Glitters" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Girls Code MK Door Poster (Drawn by Eva's wife - Valerie Benguiat)</div>
<h4 id="you-can-continue-to-follow-our-journey-after-rgsoc-here">You can continue to follow our journey after RGSoC here:</h4>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/GirlsCodeMK">Eva - Girls Code MK - Twitter</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/gthodgkinson">Georgina’s - Twitter</a></strong></p>
Wrapping Up RGSoC 2018Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-09-19T00:00:00+00:002018-09-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/wrap-up-events-2018<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-19-rgsoc-2018-wrap-up-event_calendar-celebrate.png" alt="Let's celebrate RGSoC 2018 all over the world!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Let's celebrate RGSoC 2018 all over the world! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>It’s September 19th and we are less than two weeks away for RGSoC to be over — this is probably the countdown we are least fond of. However, as we approach September 30th, we realize how many good things came up from the summer like the community support and the amazing growth of our students. We couldn’t be more proud of them! And we also couldn’t be more thankful of everyone’s dedication to our students and RGSoC.</p>
<p>So let’s celebrate all of this! Let’s celebrate us getting together and making tech and OSS more inclusive for everyone! Let’s celebrate making dreams come true! Wherever we are, let’s organize an event — it can be big or small — and invite our friends. We created a list on <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/announcements">this repo</a>, so that you can add your even info or check for information about any events in your location.</p>
<p>Another important thing: let’s keep in touch! When you publish your posts on social media about the events or even messages that you want to share about the summer of code, please add the hashtag #RGSoC so that we can all see it.
<br />
<br /></p>
<h2 id="berlin-event-at-thoughtworks">Berlin Event at ThoughtWorks</h2>
<p><strong>Who is welcome?</strong>: everyone is welcome! Supporters, sponsors, past and current participants, mentors, coaches! <br />
<strong>What</strong>: An evening with food, soft drinks, and time to chat. <br />
<strong>When</strong>: Saturday, 29th of September 2018, 6–9pm CEST. <br />
<strong>Where</strong>: <a href="https://www.thoughtworks.com/locations/berlin">Thoughtworks Berlin</a> (Zimmerstr. 23, near Checkpoint Charlie). The venue is wheelchair-accessible. <br />
<strong>Drinks/Food</strong>: This will be a no-alcohol event, there will be vegetarian food and several non-alcoholic drinks. Please let us know about any food allergies or dietary restrictions in advance, so we can cater to you. <br /></p>
<h3 id="rsvp">RSVP</h3>
<p>If you’d like to attend, please <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/announcements/issues/23">RSVP here</a> by <strong>Wednesday, September 26th</strong> with a comment (and let us know if you are bringing a +1 +2 +3…). If you don’t have a GitHub account, or don’t feel comfortable sharing this information publicly, you can RSVP by email: laura@travis-ci.org.</p>
<h3 id="code-of-conduct">Code of Conduct</h3>
<p>This event is organized under the <a href="http://berlincodeofconduct.org/">Berlin Code of Conduct</a>, please read it carefully and only attend if you agree and abide by this. We will enforce the CoC.</p>
Introducing 2018's ConferencesAna Sofiahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2018-09-17T00:00:00+00:002018-09-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conferences-2018-part1<p>Welcoming underrepresented minorities to tech and Open Source is more than learning to code, it is also introducing people to a community, preferably into a group of people who can welcome them safely. Bringing someone who wouldn’t be able to go to a conference because they live on the other side of the world or don’t have money to attend the event, is doing exactly that. And bit by bit, we are transforming our community into the community we want to be part of.</p>
<p>We are profoundly grateful for all of the conference organizers who are as committed as we are to make tech more diverse and inclusive. A huge THANK YOU to the conferences who gave away <strong>free tickets</strong> and made our students’ dreams come true, especially to those that have been supporting us through the years.</p>
<p>And you know what? There are discounts for you too! Check the RGSoC Promo codes of the conferences below.</p>
<p>We will be coming back soon with more conferences! ;)</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsfullstackfestcomfull-stack-festaspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://fullstackfest.com/">Full Stack Fest</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table-websites">
<table>
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<a href="https://fullstackfest.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-18-rgsoc-conferences-FullStackFest-2018.jpg" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> Sep 3-7, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Barcelona, Spain <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/fullstackfest">@fullstackfest</a> <br />
<b>RGSoC Promo: </b> RGSoC30 <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttps2018reactjsdayitreactjsday-2018aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://2018.reactjsday.it/">reactjsday 2018</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table-websites">
<table>
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<td>
<a href="https://2018.reactjsday.it/">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-18-rgsoc-conferences-reactjsday-2018.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> Oct 5, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Verona, Italy <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/reactjsday">@reactjsday</a> <br />
<b>RGSoC Promo: </b> <a href="https://reactjs-day-2018.eventbrite.com?discount=community_RGSoC">link</a> <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpswwwmirrorconfcommirror-confaspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://www.mirrorconf.com/">Mirror Conf</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table-websites">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://www.mirrorconf.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-18-rgsoc-conferences-Mirror-Conf-2018.jpg" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>Oct 15-19, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Braga, Portugal <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/MirrorConf">@MirrorConf</a> <br />
<b>RGSoC Promo: </b><a href="https://ti.to/subvisual/mirror-conf-2018/discount/railsgirls">link</a><br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsgolabiogolabaspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://golab.io/">GoLab</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table-websites">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://golab.io/">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-18-rgsoc-conferences-GoLab-2018.jpg" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>Oct 22-23, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Florence, Italy <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/golab_conf">@golab_conf</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpseventslinuxfoundationorgeventsopen-source-summit-europe-2018open-source-summit-europeaspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/open-source-summit-europe-2018/">Open Source Summit Europe</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table-websites">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/open-source-summit-europe-2018/">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-18-rgsoc-conferences-Open-Source-Summit-2018.jpg" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> Oct 22-24, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Edinburgh, UK <br />
<b>Twitter: </b> <a href="https://twitter.com/linuxfoundation">@linuxfoundation</a> <br />
<b>RGSoC Promo: </b> OSSEU18COM15 <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsgotobercomgoto-berlin-2018aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://gotober.com/">GOTO Berlin 2018</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table-websites">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://gotober.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-18-rgsoc-conferences-GotoBerlin-2018.jpg" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> Oct 29-Nov 2, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Berlin, Germany <br />
<b>Twitter: </b> <a href="https://twitter.com/gotober">@gotober</a> <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsghcindiaanitaborggrace-hopper-conference-indiaaspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://ghcindia.anitab.org/">Grace Hopper Conference India</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table-websites">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://ghcindia.anitab.org/">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-18-rgsoc-conferences-GHCI-2018.jpg" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> Nov 14-16, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Bangalore, India <br />
<b>Twitter: </b> <a href="https://twitter.com/AnitaBorg_India">@AnitaBorg_India</a> <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<div>
GHCI would like to invite our community who is interested in connecting with the best organizations in technology in India, by simply submitting your resume to the <a href="https://apps.anitab.org/~abi/prod/resumes/web/index.php/GHCI/site/login">GHCI 18 Resume Database</a>.<br />
Note: even if you can't attend the Grace Hopper Celebration India (GHCI) 18 Career Fair career fair you can still submit your resume.
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsfrontend-conffukuokajpfrontend-conference-fukuoka-2018aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://frontend-conf.fukuoka.jp/">Frontend Conference Fukuoka 2018</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table-websites">
<table>
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<td>
<a href="https://frontend-conf.fukuoka.jp/">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-18-rgsoc-conferences-Frontend-Conference-Fukuoka-2018.jpg" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> Dec 8, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Fukuoka, Japan <br />
<b>Twitter: </b> <a href="https://twitter.com/fec_fukuoka">@fec_fukuoka</a> <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
DV Team Activated!Violetahttp://twitter.com/artnerdnet2018-09-07T00:00:00+00:002018-09-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/dvteam-activated<h3 id="starting-a-new-adventure-with-rgsoc-and-living-style-guide-from-coding-newbies-to-professional-front-end-developers-in-11-months">Starting a new adventure with RgSoC and Living Style Guide from coding newbies to professional front-end developers in 11 months.</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-07-rgsoc-dv-team-activated-01.jpg" alt="Starting the summer" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Preparing ourselves before the summer begins (image by Diana Vilé)</b></div>
<h3 id="better-together">Better Together</h3>
<p>November 2017, we started as complete coding newbies, with as little coding knowledge as HTML can be. JavaScript, the word alone, felt like a entire new universe. We can’t even believe how much we have learned in the past 8 months! Coming from a non technical background and being able to code in so little time has been quite a journey. Yet, it made us realize we have definitely unknown abilities and a real passion for programming.</p>
<p>We started with a selected group of 20.000 out of 200.000 applications in Europe, Africa and Middle East region. Earning a full Google Scholarship for Front End Web Developer at Udacity was the fruit of this three months of dedication, hard work, discipline, cooperation with peers coders and taking actively part in a huge social community, in order to stand out and win our spot in the top 2.000 students (out of 20.000). We are now about to finish the last part: React.</p>
<h3 id="rgsoc-coaches--supervisor">RgSoC Coaches & Supervisor</h3>
<p>During the Google Scholarship, we met several times in real life and decided to apply for RgSoc to be able to keep practicing our coding skills in summer. As we were new in the dev community, we reached out to our Udacity community managers who introduced us to Amanda Cavallaro. She helped us find our first two current RgSoc-coaches:</p>
<p><em>Coach 1: Tobias (React developer)</em>
Tobias is a React developer and mentor who believes in helping juniors grow. He is based in Düsseldorf, Germany.</p>
<p><em>Coach 2: Tetiana (Ruby developer)</em>
Tetiana is a Ruby in Rails expert and team leader (she has always wanted to be part of RGSoC!). She is based in Kharkiv, Ukraine.</p>
<p>Skyping with Tobias and Tetiana, gave us the confidence they would have our backs! They not only seem very nice and accessible, but moreover have the attitude and experience needed to guide us through the summer.</p>
<p><em>Coach 3: Cristina (full stack developer)</em>
The third RgSoc-coach to join, we met during a recently peer lab, that Violeta organized for Woman Who Code. We really liked her spirits and clarity so just a week before starting the SoC we invited her to be part of it. She is based in Barcelona, Spain.</p>
<p><em>Coach 4: Bright (React mobile developer)</em>
Bright was introduced to us by Sujin from Team Sunshine when we needed help solving our project’s issues. He is very experienced with JavaScript and will be helping us during the summer too! He is based in Berlin, Germany.</p>
<p>*Coach 5: Tetiana is a Ruby developer and we needed some extra hands on JavaScript, so she introduced as to Bogdan! He is a JavaScript developer based in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He will be helping us close the issues before the summer ends.</p>
<p>We consider ourselves very lucky! As not only do we have gathered a great team of mentors, but also an interesting supervisor Lucas Pinto who has even organized Ruby conferences!</p>
<h3 id="living-style-guide">Living Style Guide</h3>
<p>The Open Source project we have been selected for is Living Style Guide, which helps developers to create front-end style guides easily with SaSS and Markdown. The project has been created by Nico Hagenburger (Designer and programmer) with the help of Jen Geacone-Cruz (Content director). Right now it needs to be rewritten to and tested in Vanilla Javascript, which will be our main tasks, beside improving the documentation.</p>
<h3 id="summer-and-future-goals">Summer and future Goals</h3>
<p>We are looking forward to connect with the RgSoc-community, make our first ever contribution to open source (yay!!), hone our skills and learn many more. We are here to prove ourselves that we can do this! And hope to be ready to find a tech job when the summer is over.
Our summer will be successful, <em>if</em> we achieve the following:</p>
<p><em>July:</em> plan, learn as much as we can, start contributing to Living Style Guide, connect with the RgSoc-community
<em>August:</em> keep working hard and make the best out of the summer!
<em>September:</em> finish as much as we can of the Javascript version & test of Living Style Guide
<em>October:</em> finish the last issues for LivingStyleGuide, PIMD project and hopefully start a new tech job as jr. front end web developers in Barcelona.</p>
<h4 id="dv-team-violeta--diana--barcelona">DV Team (Violeta & Diana)- Barcelona</h4>
<p>Follow us on</p>
<h5 id="medium">Medium</h5>
<p><a href="http://www.medium.com/@dvteam">DV Team</a>
<a href="https://medium.com/@diana.vile">Diana</a></p>
<h5 id="twitter">Twitter</h5>
<p><a href="http://www.twitter.com/artnerdnet">Violeta</a></p>
<h5 id="github">Github</h5>
<p><a href="https://github.com/livingstyleguide/livingstyleguide">Living Style Guide</a>
<a href="http://www.github.com/artnerdnet">Violeta</a>
<a href="http://www.github.com/dianavile">Diana</a></p>
<h5 id="coaches">Coaches</h5>
<p><a href="https://github.com/tobmaster">Tobi</a> <br />
<a href="https://github.com/brytannia">Tetiana</a> <br />
<a href="https://github.com/cristinaverdi">Cristina</a> <br />
<a href="https://github.com/benevbright">Bright</a> <br />
<a href="https://github.com/thujone25">Bogdan</a></p>
<h3 id="for-a-great-summer">For a great summer!</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-07-rgsoc-dv-team-activated-02.jpg" alt="Better together" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Pair programming day (image by Violeta)</b></div>
New Tech Journey With RGSoC! 💻 🎊Rachael Kitemehttp://twitter.com/rachaelkiteme2018-09-05T00:00:00+00:002018-09-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-akaringular<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-05-rgsoc-akaringular_begin.jpeg" alt="New Beginnings!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>New Beginnings! (Photo credit: Google)</em></div>
<p>Finishing school was a little terrifying for us. The world seemed to be telling you that “you are now on your own”. And then you remember that unemployment in your country stands at 40%. Despite all that we were determined to stand out from the crowd and find our way up, only to realize that the only code one could write comfortably was “Hello World” but in different programming languages, that’s when it dawned on us that we had been carrying the name “Developer” on our back and not ready for the job market.</p>
<p>In this harsh world, something quick had to be done. We might have been a little late but we wanted to make a change in our lives. So we made a decision, a decision to concentrate on one programming language, putting all efforts on it. Talk of reading books, attending conferences on the same, helping others get started, hanging out around people with whom we shared the same interests and made them our mentors.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-05-rgsoc-akaringular_languages.jpeg" alt="Programming Languages!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Programming languages (Photo credit: Google)</em></div>
<p>Thanks to Rails Girls Nairobi started by <a href="https://github.com/StlMaris123">StellaMaris Njage</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/cesswairimu">Ceciliah Mbugua</a>, <a href="https://github.com/stlireri">Stella Ireri</a> and <a href="https://github.com/rachaelkiteme">Rachael Kiteme</a> because this accelerated our development journey. It is here that our love for code grew. The discipline and commitment to code daily began. “It is also here that my Open Source Project contribution journey started” , Did we say that it is also here that we heard of the amazing Rails Girls Summer of Code program? Of course imposter syndrome tried to pull us back, but we had vowed to ourselves that we had to aim for the best that we could possibly be and this was a perfect opportunity. Nothing could stop us.</p>
<p>We made it! 🎉🎉🎉🎉</p>
<p>Tik Tok, The clock was ticking and July was fast approaching, and only two days to the commencement of the internship Stella lost her Laptop :sob: :sob:. That was really sad, but this didn’t stop us from getting started. What are friends for? Stella Ireri helped her with one. Yeah, she got set lucky enough to have our kick off call on time together and our new tech journey with RGSoC began!</p>
<p>So far the journey has been incredible. Everyday we learn, we solve challenges but most importantly we are having fun. Many thanks to our coaches, mentors and supervisors for making our journey smooth and enjoyable. We have no regrets being here because we are growing drastically each day as tech ladies and career wise. We are more than ready work with the community till the end of the summer and beyond. I can’t wait to see what I will have grown into. Am grateful to RGSoC community so far.</p>
<h2 id="meet-the-team">MEET THE TEAM</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-09-05-rgsoc-team-akaringular.jpeg" alt="Team Akaringular: Stellamaris and Rachael" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Team Akaringular: Stella and Rachael (Photo credit: Berry Mboya)</em></div>
<h4 id="rachael">Rachael</h4>
<p>Rachael is a Ruby on Rails developer with interest in javascript, .net and css. She has a passion for design (yeah!) She makes very nice logos, designs t-shirts and stickers. <br />
<strong>Fun fact:</strong> She enjoys hiking, gaming and anything that gets her adrenaline high. <br />
<strong>Twitter @rachaelkiteme</strong></p>
<h4 id="stella">Stella</h4>
<p>Stella is a backend Ruby on Rails developer. She loves solving problems and communities. In fact she is a very active member of Nairuby and co-organizer of Rails Girls Nairobi. <br />
<strong>Fun Fact:</strong> She loves travelling a lot. A place with a large water body or one with many trees, or any beautiful place provided by mother nature is her ideal destination and a perfect place to relax. <br />
<strong>Twitter: @stlmaris</strong></p>
<h2 id="how-we-met">How we met</h2>
<p>Bsc. Mathematics and Computer Science at Maseno University brought us together. We shared four walls for fours years. We immediately clicked and have been good friends since then. Fast forward… after campus, Rails Girls Nairobi re-united us.</p>
<h2 id="about-the-project">ABOUT THE PROJECT</h2>
<p>EBWiki means EndBiasWiki. This is a open source project aimed at racial bias, the frequency with which it occurs and how bias affect proceedings when it comes to law enforcement. It is devoted to providing victims, their families and their communities the tools to end the abuse and indiscriminate killing by the police of African Americans and other people of color.</p>
Team ☀️ 'Sunshine' on RGSoC 2018!Sujin Leehttp://twitter.com/sujinleeme2018-08-18T00:00:00+00:002018-08-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-sunshine<h1 id="who-we-are">Who we are</h1>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-19-team-sunshine.jpg" alt="team sunshine photo" title="team sunshine photo" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Team Sunshine: Sujin Lee & Gyujin Cho (image by Sujin Lee)</b></div>
<p>안녕하세요(annyeonghaseyo)! We are Sujin and Gyujin from ‘Sunshine’ team in Seoul, S.Korea. We are working for <a href="https://babeljs.io/">Babel.js</a>, an Open Source JavaScript Transpiler that converts cutting-edge JavaScript into plain old ES5 JavaScript that can run in any browser.</p>
<p>We are full stack JavaScript developers who have common interests in UI development and interactive interfaces. Before jumping into the programming world, we were artists: Gyujin was a designer and Sujin was a musician. We love art, creativity and technology. Based on both sides of programming and art experiences, we say the process of making graphic design or composing a music piece is very similar to computer programming.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/MarinaGJCho">Gyujin</a> is a junior frontend engineer at <a href="https://ridibooks.com">Ridibooks</a>, South Korea’s leading e-reading services company. Staring with ES6, she has used jQuery, Vue.js, React.js, and TypeScript last two years for company product.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/sujinleeme">Sujin</a> is a graduate student in Seoul National University and she has pursued her passions of music and programming with equal vigor, aiming to make creative work that inspires. Nowadays she is strongly interested in making interactive music applications using machine learning. She leads the Women Who Code Seoul Network and is trying to build a more diverse and inclusive tech community here in Korea. Everywhere she goes she always has a pair of running shoes with her to run.</p>
<h1 id="how-we-met">How we met</h1>
<p>Last february, as soon as Sujin came across a news about the opening of the Rails Girls Summer of Code Applications, it just stuck in her mind. Sujin was confident that she could get a great opportunity to contribute to a real Open Source Software project as a member of Open Source ecosystem. After that Sujin searched for a like-minded team mate in Django Girls community in Seoul and Gyujin that’s how we got on the same boat. We asked close senior engineers to be our team coaches and everyone eagerly accepted the request and this is how we formed Team Sunshine to start our open source journey.</p>
<h1 id="what-brings-us-to-join-rgsoc">What brings us to join RGSoC</h1>
<p>It is certain that the numbers for women engineers in the tech industry are already pretty bleak, but the situation is even worse as far as participation in open source projects is concerned. Additionally, we thought there was no room for the entry level of developers in open source projects and we weren’t familiar to open source community until we met RGSoC. Unfortunately, we couldn’t meet any woman open source contributor who works the world’s leading repository of open-source code, in Korea. We were highly motivated by RGSoC’s initiatives to bring more diversity into open source and last RGSoC fellows’s successful stories boosted our confidence. And we couldn’t be more thrilled to think that our code could be running on millions of computers! Yes, RGSoC is definitly worth it.</p>
<p>During our preparation for the RGSoC application, we had to pick candidate two projects. Among other projects, <a href="https://babeljs.io/">Babel</a> was the best fit for our needs. We had already used ES6 features for mordern web development, experienced React for SPAs and moveover we have a passionate concern for the next generations of ES.</p>
<p>We also read a recent <a href="https://medium.freecodecamp.org/were-nearing-the-7-0-babel-release-here-s-all-the-cool-stuff-we-ve-been-doing-8c1ade684039">Henry’s writing</a> published in free code camp medium. We were touched by the warmth of his welcome to Babel open source community. He says that “Babel is in a great position to be an educational tool for programmers so they can continue to learn how JavaScript works”. We thought that through contributing to the project, they can learn about Javascript core concepts such as ASTs, compilers, language specification.</p>
<h1 id="ta-da-what-a-surprise">Ta-da! What a surprise!</h1>
<p>One day in April, we had a video call from Ana and Ramón from the RGSoC team. We felt a little nervous at the beginning of about 5 min, however, it fell from us very quickly because these two warmhearted supervisors made us feel very comfortable. Actually, we didn’t think that we were successful in making them enthusiastic about us so that any of us were expecting to be able to get in.</p>
<p>Two weeks later, Ana and Vaishali requested a second round interview because the selection process had been a bit more demanding than previous editions. It ended up being a surprise call were we learned that we were accepted in RGSoC! 🎉 We were thrilled with the good news and it was a moment we will never forget.</p>
<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Congrats to <a href="https://twitter.com/sujinleeme?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@sujinleeme</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/MarinaGJCho?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MarinaGJCho</a> on ☀️Team Sunshine ☀️! The <a href="https://twitter.com/babeljs?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@babeljs</a> team is super excited to work with ya'll this summer for <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> 😊<a href="https://t.co/JaKjUiHlfE">https://t.co/JaKjUiHlfE</a></p>— Henry Zhu (@left_pad) <a href="https://twitter.com/left_pad/status/988019997023920128?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 22, 2018</a></blockquote>
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<h2 id="our-project-babeljs">Our Project: Babel.js</h2>
<center>
<img alt="label logo" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*XmHUL5DeySv_dGmvbPqdDQ.png" width="50%" align="middle" />
<div class="image-credits"><b>Babel official logo (image by babel.js)</b></div>
</center>
<p>Babel is an open-sourced JavaScript compiler that leader companies like Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify and countless others adopt to ship software for the web. Babel not only allows developers to use the latest syntax in older browsers, but even has its role in shaping the future of the language itself due to its adoption in the community. The SPA frameworks like Angular, React, Vue, Ember also use Babel. It’s downloaded more than 14 million times a month on npm. Isn’t it amazing? ✨</p>
<p>In Bable offical website, there is <a href="https://babeljs.io/repl/">Babel REPL</a>, a playground for ES6; where user can write ES6 code, check the relevant code in ES5; and also the output.</p>
<center>
<img alt="babel repl" src="https://sujinlee.me/content/images/2018/08/repl-example.png" width="80%" align="middle" />
<div class="image-credits"><b>Repl - Babel website (image by Sujin Lee)</b></div>
</center>
<p>Currently, the <a href="https://babeljs.io/team">Babel core team</a> is going to replace CodeMirror to <a href="https://twitter.com/CompuIves">Ives’</a> <a href="https://codesandbox.io/">CodeSandBox</a>, the new code online editor. An end goal is to show a different view of the output code: <a href="https://astexplorer.net/">AST</a>, output code, or <a href="https://github.com/babel/babel-time-travel">time travel</a>. We have just started to work for integration time travel in REPL and are going to contribute for UI development with help of our mentors and coaches.</p>
<center>
<img alt="babel join" src="https://sujinlee.me/content/images/2018/07/Screen-Shot-2018-07-17-at-11.06.38-PM.png" width="80%" align="middle" />
<div class="image-credits"><b>Join babel team in GitHub (image by Sujin Lee)</b></div>
</center>
<h2 id="how-we-work">How we work</h2>
<p>We are part-time sponsored team and we meet from 6pm to 10pm at <a href="https://www.coworker.com/south-korea/seoul/peachtree">PeachTree</a>, a co-working space that supports startups via its networks, spaces, amenities and various programs. The name ‘PeachTree’ comes from the tale of ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’. Just like how Yubi, Gwanwoo and Jangbi pleged their brotherhood under the peach tree. We hope to cooperate in harmony each other in its space under the peach tree.</p>
<p>We have regular meeting with all members. Our team has 6 different time zones; Seoul, Lisbon, NY and more!</p>
<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">☀️<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RGSoC2018?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#RGSoC2018</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RGSoCSunshine?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#RGSoCSunshine</a> DAY8 <a href="https://twitter.com/MarinaGJCho?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MarinaGJCho</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/sujinleeme?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@sujinleeme</a><br />✅ We had two 📞; with <a href="https://twitter.com/AnaSofiaPinho?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AnaSofiaPinho</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/existentialism?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@existentialism</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/left_pad?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@left_pad</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/CompuIves?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CompuIves</a> <br />✅ Checked Sandpack PR to REPL <br />✅ Ready to review code of current babel-time-travel <br />👉 Read More? <a href="https://t.co/M7oEjz8ygA">https://t.co/M7oEjz8ygA</a> <a href="https://t.co/ZraU9wJzCR">pic.twitter.com/ZraU9wJzCR</a></p>— Sujin Lee (@sujinleeme) <a href="https://twitter.com/sujinleeme/status/1017263419802521600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 12, 2018</a></blockquote>
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<h2 id="meet-shining-our-supervisor-mentors-and-coaches">Meet shining our supervisor, mentors, and coaches!</h2>
<center>
<img alt="team sunshine with supervisor, coaches and mentors photo" src="https://sujinlee.me/content/images/2018/07/team-sunshine_first-week-calls.jpg" width="80%" align="middle" />
<div class="image-credits"><b>Team Sunshine Collage (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
</center>
<p>We are honored to have the opportunity to join open source community and collaboration with the experts. We are pleased to introduce our supervisor, mentors, and coaches!</p>
<h3 id="supervisor-rgsoc">Supervisor: RGSoC</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/AnaSofiaPinho">Ana Sofia Pinho</a>
Ana lives in Coimbra, Portugal. She has been involved with RGSoC as an organizer and supervisor since 2016. She handles the marketing and social media related areas of RGSoC.
As a supervisor Ana is our RGSoC contact for the whole summer. She keeps an eye on the general well-being of the project’s progress and assists in the non-coding aspects of the Rails Girls Summer of Code.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="mentors--babeljs">Mentors : Babel.js</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/left_pad">Henry Zhu</a>
Henry is a developer in NYC who left his job at Behance this past March to maintain Babel full time with the support by backers on Patreon and Open Collective. He’s interested in living out the parallels of digital communities and faith through open source.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/existentialism">Brian Ng</a>
Brian is a developer and startup advisor living in Houston, Texas. He helps maintain Babel and contributes to other open source projects in his free time.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/loganfsmyth">Logan Smyth</a>
Logan is a Bay Area-based developer who has been involved with Babel for the past 3 years helping with development efforts, overall maintenance efforts, and user support. He is interested in open source, software language design, and writing good code.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="coaches--local">Coaches : Local</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/YoonByungjune">Byungjune Yoon</a>
Byungjune is a frontend engineer at <a href="https://danoshop.net/">DANO</a>, a health-care startup. He has a desire to make a better world with technology and loves that open source allows him to do just that. He is also interested in social, political, and gender issues. He worked on <a href="https://voteforkorea.org">voteforkorea.org</a> project, the national voting lottery a.k.a, as an incentive, giving to the people who participated in the national election a chance to win a lottery.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/incleaf">Hyeonsu Lee</a>
Hyeonsu is a frontend engineer at <a href="https://ridicorp.com">Ridi</a>, an e-book startup. He loves to learn the new things to get out of the comfort zone. He is familiar with JavaScript and React. He is serving in the military at the moment as a software engineer.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://github.com/corazzon">Joeun Park</a>
Joeun is a senior backend engineer of wide experience on online games and advertising companies. Currently, she teaches data science and machine learning using python language to students from beginners to experts. Joeun runs a YouTube channel, ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLR3sD0KB_dWpvcsrLP0aUg">Today Code</a>’ featuring short, educational videos focusing on data science topics.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/wagurano">Seongjun Kim</a>
Seongjun is a prominent rubyist writing code for world peace, however, he has used java for various type of products in his company. He contributed to make social campaign web platforms, <a href="https://github.com/peace-code/voteaward">voteaward.com</a> and <a href="Source">ansim.me</a> by ruby on rails and tries to raise local ruby community.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/adhrinae">Dohyung Ahn</a>
Dohyung is a frontend engineer who has been working on React-Typescript based projects recently. He is in <a href="https://www.protopie.io/">protopie.io</a> now. He has a huge enthusiasm for contributing to open source culture and he is happy to help programmers to not only improving their technical skills, but also products and projects.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="what-do-we-want-to-achieve-by-the-end-of-the-summer">What do we want to achieve by the end of the summer?</h2>
<p>RGSoC is a shot at life. Again, it is a pleasure to join for Rails Girls Summer of Code program and meet fellow women developers in Open Source Community again. Our primary focus is continuing to learn advanced level of Javascript and growing up to be open source developers! We want to make people recognize the contributions women are making and inspire more women through our lines of code, PRs, and more during RGSoC. If we have a chance, we are willing to give a talk about our open source activities.</p>
<h2 id="follow-rgsocsunshine-on-twitter">Follow #RGSoCSunshine on twitter</h2>
<p>We share our team news, daily working report, funny moments, achievements, compliments and more using <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RGSoCSunshine?src=hash">#RGSoCSunshine</a> on Twitter! 💖</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows. - Helen Keller</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sunshine is the vital and main source of energy for Life on Earth. So if we focus on the Sunshine - work, process, habit - it will bring us positivity in life and we will never feel frustration and negativity.</p>
<p>Just like our team name, we will always look on the bright side of life with a positive and optimistic energy.</p>
DelSquared-Rails Girls Summer of Code 2018 and UsArushihttp://twitter.com/arushi18032018-08-10T00:00:00+00:002018-08-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/DelSquared_RGSoC_blogpost<h3 id="introducing-the-duo">INTRODUCING THE DUO</h3>
<p><strong>Arushi Chauhan</strong></p>
<p>“Stochastic and predictable. Dreamer and doer. Paradox of certainty.”<br />
The above nine words describe me succinctly. I am a third year undergraduate studying computer science at IIIT Delhi. I am passionate about artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning. An ardent MCU fan, I believe that “with great power comes great responsibility” and for me, being able to code is no less than “great power” because it can be used to solve problems and make people’s lives easier. I am a fan of Tony Stark by the way, because his armoured exoskeleton with a rather very intelligent AI is the stuff my dreams are made of :)</p>
<p><strong>Sharmistha Swasti Gupta</strong></p>
<p>I’m always exploring things I collide with, which is probably the reason for my diverging set of interests. I’m equally passionate about hardware programming, robotics, AI as well as social theories on human technology interaction. I’m a voracious reader, thanks to constant encouragement from my parents and grandfather. I also love to travel, write or indulge myself in a game of chess whenever time permits. I am research oriented and I aim to dive into domains that lie at an intersection of my interests and skill set.</p>
<p><strong>What made us click?</strong></p>
<p>“It was our shared love for rubber bands and capsicums that brought us together.”<br />
Jokes aside (making good jokes is another skill we are not-so-good at), our decision to form a team was rather a quick one, because we were having our mid semester exams at that time and were quite busy. Since we are both robotics buffs, Tessel piqued our interest, and as Shravika and Brihi had already worked on it the previous summer, it seemed the perfect choice. Living in facing rooms in hostel and sharing the same study group in the first year of college meant we were close enough to tolerate each other’s idiosyncrasies :p
Filling the application took a lot of painstaking effort and several sleepless nights. I (Sharmistha) slept for just 3 hours over a span of 51 hours while I (Arushi) was glued to the laptop screen for three days and seldom ventured out of my bed. The effort paid off, and we were beyond words when we got to know we were selected. Everyone around us was thrilled, our inboxes were filled with congratulatory messages and we really could not have asked for more. It was Sharmistha’s birthday the day we had our second ‘interview’ and we got to know the result, which was like an icing on the cake (pun intended). Passionate for contributing to open source, we are extremely excited about our internship with Rails Girls Summer of Code and Tessel, and awaiting the many more opportunities to come.</p>
<h2 id="our-coaches">OUR COACHES</h2>
<h3 id="brihi-joshi-and-shravika-mittal--also-team-276-lines-of-code-2017">Brihi Joshi and Shravika Mittal (also Team 276 Lines of Code [2017])</h3>
<p>They are our batchmates at our institute and our inspiration for taking on Tessel as our project. Brihi also went to the same school as mine (Sharmistha), while Shravika and I (Arushi) studied in the same school since third grade which explains the camaraderie we share. They have wonderfully supported us, and patiently cleared the silliest of our doubts. We even have plans of working together on the Tessel board over a mini hackathon, as and when time permits.
Brihi can generally be seen in the library with her laptop, working, and is usually sleep deprived. She works really hard and is a motivation for a lot of young women techies.
Shravika is more on the quieter side but she’s a diligent worker herself. She has a serene aura around her and it feels great to talk to her.</p>
<h3 id="ambar-pal">Ambar Pal</h3>
<p>The craziest of the lot, after Sharmistha maybe :P, Ambar is our senior here at our institute and is graduating this year. He is an amazing comic relief under stressful situations. He was of immense help during the application. His hilarious side was heightened during the anxiety that came along with our desperate efforts to submit our application 15 minutes before the first deadline :P He is a great thinker (when he’s not lost) and a programmer, and we hope to seek help from him while approaching a task requiring extensive planning before the actual implementation. He also promised to sing for us in his ‘beautiful’ voice if we got through. We hope he fulfills this responsibility as our coach soon :)</p>
<h3 id="siddharth-yadav">Siddharth Yadav</h3>
<p>A caffeine and Netflix addict, Siddharth calls himself a ‘ridiculously ridiculous geeky geek’. He is our batchmate at our institute. He is either seen spending sleepless nights watching TV shows or sleepless nights coding. He’s a GSoCer 2017. He’s one of those people who would get to a problem and somehow always find a fix to it. I (Sharmistha) worked on a project with him wherein we were to build a prototype of a self driving car. Nothing was working till a night before the presentation but Siddharth pulled an all-nighter and somehow got everything in a working condition. It is an absolute inspiration to work with him and since he’s a hardware buff too, we hope to annoy him whenever we get stuck on something.</p>
<h2 id="the-team">THE TEAM</h2>
<p>We form a great, happy go lucky team and having daily conversations on our Telegram group relieves us of the tiredness after a long day’s work. We sometimes check our phones to see 50 odd messages of pure randomness on the group and it is somehow never annoying.
We worked together during the application process and all the revisions and the reviews were really smooth. Since the commencement of the internship, Brihi and Shravika have been talking to us about Tessel and the resources we should take a look at. They also talk highly of Kelsey, our mentor, who by the way is an absolute delight. We have had meetings with Kelsey and our supervisor Bhumika, and we are really thankful for their support and willingness to teach novices like us. A horribly timed commitment has impeded our full-fledged start into the internship. However, we aim to compensate for the time lost over the subsequent weeks. Finally, a huge shout out to the entire RGSoC team for this wonderful initiative. We are really thrilled to be a part of this extraordinary community. Looking forward to a great summer. Cheers!</p>
OSS Project Spotlight - Part 4Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-08-08T00:00:00+00:002018-08-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/oss-project-spotlight-part4<p>The last OSS Project Spotlight of RGSoC 2018! We are really happy to see that you have enjoyed these OSS-project-focused posts and if you feel curious about our previous posts, you can check <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-06-11-oss-project-spotlight-part1">part 1</a>, <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-06-22-oss-project-spotlight-part2">part 2</a> and <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-07-17-oss-project-spotlight-part3">part 3</a> here. We will be coming back in the next weeks with more content about this topic. See you soon!</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redpubliclabspan"><span class="color-red">PublicLab</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://PublicLab.org">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/PublicLab">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-08-oss-projects-spotlight-part4-publiclab.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: PublicLab" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: PublicLab (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redlivingstyleguidespan"><span class="color-red">LivingStyleGuide</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://livingstyleguide.org">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/LSGorg">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-08-oss-projects-spotlight-part4-livingstyleguide.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: LivingStyleGuide" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: LivingStyleGuide (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redexercismspan"><span class="color-red">Exercism</span></h4>
<p><a href="http://exercism.io">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/exercism_io">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-08-oss-projects-spotlight-part4-exercism.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Exercism" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Exercism (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redif-mespan"><span class="color-red">If Me</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://www.if-me.org/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/ifmeorg">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-08-oss-projects-spotlight-part4-ifmeorg.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: If Me" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: If Me (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
We Solemnly Swear We’re Up To No Good!Avneet Kaurhttp://twitter.com/TeamSectumsem182018-08-07T00:00:00+00:002018-08-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-sectumsempra<h2 id="the-beginning-how-delayed-rewards-brought-us-extra-happiness">The Beginning: How delayed rewards brought us extra happiness!</h2>
<p>After a thorough application process, a long wait and an interview, we thought we might just be able to make it through, and were eagerly waiting for that one “Welcome to RGSoC” email. In time, an email popped up in our feed which, lured us into thinking we emerged victoriously, but Alas! When the first round of scholars was announced, we were heart-broken that we didn’t make the cut. However, the same email also stated that we were waitlisted candidates, giving us a glimmer of hope. With our fingers crossed, we wished for the best! Almost after another month long wait, we were no less than flabbergasted, when we saw an email from RGSoC, quietly sitting in our inbox, giving us the much awaited news - We were officially in! And we couldn’t contain our excitement thereafter!
This reminds us of the famous quote from the <em>Harry Potter series</em>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.” ― Luna Lovegood, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>And hence began our official journey with RGSoC, and while currently working on our first task, all we wish for and would work towards is making an impact, and let our work speak for ourselves. We are reminded of a few lines, which we truly resonate with:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Lives of great men, all remind us,</em><br />
<em>That we can make our lives sublime,</em><br />
<em>And departing, leave behind, us,</em><br />
<em>Footprints, on the sands of time” — H.W. Longfellow</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Footprints, is what we wish to leave behind. :D</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-07-team-sectumsempra-blog.jpeg" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Team Sectumsempra - Rupal (left) and Avneet (right) (source: Avneet's phone camera - Moto G4 Plus)</div>
<h2 id="the-scholars">The scholars</h2>
<h3 id="avneet">Avneet</h3>
<p>“A student currently at the fag end of her final year, majoring in <em>Computer Science</em>, about to graduate in August 2018. I am interested in the fields of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, computational biology and wish to work towards the integration of healthcare and artificial intelligence someday. Learning through experimentation, till I figure things out, whether it is a subject, or few lines of code, is what I like to do, and I guess, we would be doing that a lot this summer.”</p>
<h3 id="rupal">Rupal</h3>
<p>“I am a junior majoring in <em>Computer Science</em> and minoring in <em>Computational Biology</em>. This is what my profile speaks, how I want to describe myself as is: A curious maniac, who has (mysteriously) learned the art of keeping herself stimulated and keeping up with whatever I do. A programmer, a reader, an extraordinarily passionate bathroom dancer, and a diehard <em>Brooklyn Nine Nine</em> fan, I am a keen knowledge seeking individual whose patience and grit accelerates her ability to articulate difficult concepts and texts smoothly. I’d describe myself as a strong woman who has the courage to voice her opinions, someone who is never hesitant to take actions. I’m one of those people who are if in a conference room and the projector stops working, I’m not the sort to simply call IT and wait. I’ll just (gracefully) crawl under the table and check that everything is properly plugged in.</p>
<p>I am also a sports enthusiast, with basketball being one of my favourite sports. A book in hand, headphones and a decent internet connection is all I need when in melancholy. Quora comes to the rescue when the critic in me tends to rise.</p>
<p>Elevating Medical Sciences using computers and technology is my passion, and it will be my future. I want to become a Computer Scientist and be known for my talent, and not because I’m a <em>woman</em>. I want people to understand that <em>I am more than what they can see</em>.”</p>
<p>I have had this habit of imagining things in my head, things that I aspire to do and achieve, but the results are not always the way I expected them to be. But then, I take a deep breath and reflect back, and am reminded of the famous quote from the <em>Harry Potter series</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” ― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>But this is just a way to pacify myself and keep dreaming with a head held high. :D</p>
<h2 id="our-team">Our Team</h2>
<p>We are grateful to all coaches and mentors for helping us during the application process.</p>
<h3 id="our-mentor">Our mentor</h3>
<p><a href="https://github.com/mppf"><strong>Michael Ferguson</strong></a> and <a href="https://github.com/ben-albrecht"><strong>Ben Albrecht</strong></a>:</p>
<p>We are delighted to have them as our mentors for the project, and hope that under their able guidance, we can have a steep learning curve.</p>
<h3 id="our-coaches">Our Coaches</h3>
<p>We are grateful to them for agreeing to coach us, guide us, and help us grow and learn, as we embark upon this journey. Again, we are extremely thankful to him for all the mentoring at the time of applications.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://louisjenkinscs.github.io/"><strong>Louis Jenkins</strong></a>: He is a recent Computer Science graduate from Bloomsburg interests and experience in the low-level areas such as compilers, operating systems, and the design and implementation of high-performance data structures.</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/e-kayrakli"><strong>Engin Kayraklioglu</strong></a>: He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree on High Performance Computing at High Performance Computing Laboratory</li>
<li><a href="https://saru.science/about/"><strong>Sarthak Munshi</strong></a>: He is currently, working at HackerRank. Most of his work is open-sourced and can be found on his <a href="https://github.com/saru95">github profile</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://ian-bertolacci.github.io/about/"><strong>Ian Berpolacci</strong></a>: He is Currently an PhD student at University of Arizona (started 2016), researching HPC by way of compilers and programming languages.</li>
<li><a href="https://afiuorio.github.io/"><strong>Andrea Francesco Iuorio</strong></a>: He is a MSc. student in Computer Science and mainly works on programming languages development and cryptography.</li>
<li><a href="https://in.linkedin.com/in/kushalsingh007"><strong>Kushal Singh</strong></a>: He is currently working as a platform engineer at Direct-I, India, and has previously been part of Google Summer Of Code.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-duncan-010a7040/"><strong>Lydia Duncan</strong></a>: She is currently a Software Engineer at Cray Inc. and is passionate about programming languages and education</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="our-supervisor">Our supervisor</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/Nada1996"><strong>Nada Ashraf</strong></a> :
Nada Ashraf has been a past participant in Rails Girls Summer of Code, and we are excited to have her on board as our supervisor.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="our-project">Our Project</h3>
<p>We would be working on Chapel this summer, which is a parallel programming language. Our primary objective is to work on the Sorting module and writing a parallelised and efficient version of Radix Sort. Also, we would be working on all other interesting tasks, which comes our way, which would help us to learn a lot overtime.</p>
<h2 id="our-goals-for-the-summer">Our goals for the summer</h2>
<p><em>Tinker, Code and Learn! Way to Go girls!</em></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Grow as we learn</strong>, and be proficient in Chapel and grasp the concepts of parallel programming. The idea is to make our foundation strong. We want to work towards strengthening our ability to comprehend code and contributing significantly to the project we are working on, so that we can be driven towards continuing our endeavours towards open source even after these 3 months are over.</li>
<li>Make it a point to ensure that each and every contribution to our project matter.</li>
<li><strong>Learn to collaborate</strong> and work as a team, utilising each others capabilities and strengthening our weak areas.</li>
<li><strong>Learning new tools and technologies</strong>, and get a flavour of what it is like to face issues, and try to solve them, while enhancing our skills. To get immune to stressful environment when the bugs just won’t budge.</li>
<li><strong>Effective communication</strong> To learn to speak with and take guidance from people who are way better than you in their domains and not getting intimidated by the overawing environment.</li>
<li><strong>End of the BEGINNER’s title</strong></li>
<li><strong>Building a strong network</strong> with the professionals we are going to be working with. And learn a thing or two from them too.</li>
<li><strong>Being a part of RGSoC community</strong> and establishing strong bonds with our coaches, mentors, supervisors, other teams as well.</li>
</ul>
<p>We are thankful to <em>J.K. Rowling</em> , the creator of <em>Harry Potter</em> series, for giving us these profound quotes applicable to our real-lives, ones which can live by and cherish forever. This is from where we also got inspiration for our team name, ‘Sectumsempra’.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“I’ve always wanted to use that spell.” ― Minerva McGonagall, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-07-teamsectumsempra-blog.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: assets.teanvogue.com</div>
<p><strong>Looking forward to a fun-filled summer,</strong></p>
<p><strong>Team Sectumsempra</strong></p>
The First Month of RGSoC 2018Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-08-06T00:00:00+00:002018-08-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/first-month-of-rgsoc-2018<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-08-06-first-month-of-rgsoc-2018_social-media.jpg" alt="The first month of RGSoC: the Kick-off calls!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>The first month of RGSoC: the Kick-off calls! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>The Summer of Code has started and with it, the excitement of a new phase in our lives, paired up with a significant amount of team calls, status updates on the RGSoC Teams App, blog posts, documentation, git and — finally — the first pull requests! Here’s a quick recap of what has happened in the first month of RGSoC, if you don’t follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Rails-Girls-Summer-of-Code-620914904656191/">Facebook</a> yet.</p>
<p><br />
<img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-08-06-first-month-of-rgsoc-2018_kicking-off.jpg" alt="Moments of RGSoC's first weeks." /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Moments of RGSoC's first weeks. (image by Ana Sofia Pinho, tweets by Paavini Nanda, Team DelSquared, Team PopCorn, StellaMaris Njage, Sabine van der Eijk)</b></div>
<p><br />
<span class="color-red">Kicking-off RGSoC</span></p>
<p>Every year we invite students, organizers, coaches, mentors and supervisors to celebrate the kick-off wherever they are. They are free to organize an event or just meet with their coaches in their working space — and this means that sometimes they get surprised, like <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamPopcornBer/status/1013793983909322753">team Popcorn</a>.
This year we also wanted to make something different, so on the first day of RGSoC invited everyone who is participating on the program for a couple of global kick-off calls. It was great to get to know a bit more of everyone. After the initial intros, the conversation moved to very interesting topics, for instance, the moment we found out we loved to code and the advice we would like to give ourselves if we just started coding now. These kick-off calls are a thing to repeat!</p>
<p><br />
<img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-08-06-first-month-of-rgsoc-2018_teams-calls-meetups.jpg" alt="Team meetings and calls." /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Team meetings and calls. (image by Ana Sofia Pinho, tweets by Sujin Lee, Steff Del Rey, Ramón Huidobro, Atibhi Agrawal)</b></div>
<p><br />
<span class="color-red">Team meetups and calls</span></p>
<p>RGSoC Teams are composed by the two students, their coaches (remote or local), their mentors (the OSS project maintainers) and their supervisor (who provides non-technical support). It’s important to start the summer of code with a team call and/or meetup where everyone on the team meets for the first time, discusses the features they will be working during the next few months, how they are going to plan the work and feedback sessions with the coaches and mentors, what they want to accomplish during RGSoC and what their plans are after the summer ends. This might not be very easy for some teams — like the ones that have members in 5 timezones — but it is well worth it and we love to see the pictures they take! :D</p>
<p><br />
<img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-08-06-first-month-of-rgsoc-2018_status-updates.jpg" alt="Don't forget your status updates!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Don't forget your status updates! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho, tweets by RailsGirlsSoC, AnybodyCanCode, Sujin Lee, Laura Gaetano and Gregor Martynus)</b></div>
<p><br />
<span class="color-red">Status Updates</span></p>
<p>RGSoC is a self-guided program and as such, we want our teams to decide on their own workflow; however we’ve learned from experience that doing regular status updates helps supervisors, coaches, mentors and organizers to follow up on the teams’ progress and see if they need their help. It also makes the students more accountable and helps them work at their own pace. In a way it is also a journal of their days at RGSoC, their achievements, how exciting it was to make their first PRs, the times where they just spent a full day researching to find a solution for that bug… It’s a bit of their story, right? If you’re curious, you can check out these updates here.</p>
<p><br />
<img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-08-06-first-month-of-rgsoc-2018_coding.jpg" alt=">Let's code!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Let's code! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho, tweets by Rachael Kiteme, Nico, Julia Nguyen and Georgina Hodgkinson)</b></div>
<p><br />
<span class="color-red">Hands on code and the first PRs</span></p>
<p>After setting up their projects locally, getting acquainted with the codebase, and reading some documentation, it’s time to dive into the code — in their first couple of weeks, students usually pick small tasks and issues to work on with the help of their coaches and mentor. One of the most thrilling moments of RGSoC is when our students publish their first pull request: It’s a great feeling of accomplishment and for many it marks the beginning of their contributions to Open Source Software.</p>
<p>It’s great to see the weeks go by and our students getting more and more familiar with new programming languages and their OSS Projects. We are all cheering for them! And talking about cheering, we would like to give a huge shout out to the coaches, mentors and supervisors who have been volunteering their time to support our students: Thank You!</p>
<p>Last but not least: Thanks to our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donors</a> and <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">sponsors</a> who have made RGSoC 2018 possible <3</p>
Team $we init - Dreams come true!Rahmeenhttp://twitter.com/rahmeen_habib2018-08-03T00:00:00+00:002018-08-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/$we-init-introductory-post<h1 id="dreams-come-true-">Dreams come true !</h1>
<p>Heya! We are Rahmeen and Akshita of team $we init. We both study in New Delhi, India, and are working on Probot this summer.</p>
<h2 id="the-dreamers">The Dreamers:</h2>
<h3 id="rahmeen">Rahmeen</h3>
<ul>
<li>She is incredibly ticklish and smiles and laughs hysterically in ways that are most contagious.</li>
<li>She is super clumsy and is capable of tripping over absolutely nothing</li>
<li>She writes a lot to mute the demons in her head and reads voraciously. You can find her scrolling through her Quora feed almost always.</li>
<li>She has this habit of quoting random Shakespearean, Tagore and Frost quotations and then justifying their relevance in the ongoing context.</li>
<li>She claims of being organised but her hostel room tells another story.</li>
<li>She has motivational one-liners all around her working area- on the white board on her wall, the sticky notes on her desk, on her laptop skin and in her own highly-persistent RAM (yes she remembers a lot from everything inconsequential and forgets the significant).</li>
<li>She loves music, sings a lot but never believes anyone when they tell her she sings well.</li>
<li>She believes “Life is all about rising from the ashes you once witnessed yourself reduce to” and possesses a high resilience factor.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="akshita">Akshita</h2>
<ul>
<li>She is a big foodie, and you will mostly find her in college canteen, eating (xD).</li>
<li>She is a Quora lover and loves to draw inspiration from others’ lives and stories.</li>
<li>She loves to hangout with her friends, in and around Dwarka and visiting the same places again and again. ( She has visited Hashtag and Pacific Mall, innumerable times with her friends).</li>
<li>She loves to make a strict time-table of tasks in hand but rarely follows it.</li>
<li>Completely opposite to her partner Rahmeen who has an amazing memory, she is quite forgetful and would be found digging up stuffs.</li>
<li>She loves working in collaboration with others and is passionate about her work.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="what-unites-us">What unites us?</h2>
<p>We’re both majoring in Computer Engineering from the same University, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, University of Delhi, and are in the same class. We met on Day 1 of college and have been good friends ever since. We started working together when we took an online course on web development. Brainstorming and discussing vividly on assignments and lectures taught us way more than we could have ever imagined. By solving each other’s difficulties and doubts and constantly encouraging the other in their lows, we ensured that neither of us was left behind.</p>
<p>Working with each other was such an enriching and enjoyable experience that we decided to team up with each other for nearly every project we took- classroom presentations, curriculum centric projects, Hackathons and now RGSoC. It would be no exaggeration to say that our common love for programming brought us in togetherness and strengthened our friendship.
We were sitting next to each other(inseparably as always) attending a tech talk by our most adorable seniors, Prachi Manchanda and Ipshita Chatterjee when we first heard about RGSoC. Immediately we looked at each other and it was clear. We had a new goal, a new dream and what made it special was that we wanted to live it and realise it together.</p>
<p>And then was formulated “$we init” over a plate full of sizzling chilly potatoes at the college canteen. Rahmeen, the creative was suggesting mind blowing names as “OneHotEncoder”, “Sopho-no-mores” and Akshita the critic was invariably rejecting them all. And then, together again, they zeroed down to “we’re in it”, more “terminally” (please say you get the pun) stated as “$we init”. Rahmeen couldn’t be prouder of “terminalising” the team name thus (It’ll break her heart if you didn’t appreciate her).</p>
<h2 id="why-probot">Why Probot?</h2>
<p>Having worked with Javascript for almost a year now, we have fallen in deep love with it. NodeJS is one framework that we are extremely passionate about. We have worked with Node on multiple hackathon projects and want to explore it further.</p>
<p>Even before the project list was announced, we were perusing all the then ‘pending’ projects and that was when we found ‘Probot’ and were blown away by its idea almost immediately. We were completely excited by the concept of building Github Apps to automate github workflow. The fact that even we, who are mere beginners here, could install these apps on our repos and see the magic happen, was enough to transport us to the Probot slack channel within minutes after the after the announcement of final projects on 1st February.</p>
<p>The extremely welcoming nature of the community left us in awe. The project mentor, Gregor Martynus, replied to our introductory message on slack within seconds of sending them. He also supplied us with all relevant documentations to get us started. Never had we received such prompt and warm responses to our doubts from any organisation. And like that wasn’t enough, Gregor invited us to probot’s office hours. It was an unbelievable experience, to join such accomplished people on call right on the first day of introducing ourselves on their slack channel!</p>
<p>‘Probot’ seemed a perfect choice to us for three major reasons:
* It is in the language and framework we’ve previously worked upon. Nodejs and Javascript are things that we want to explore further and excel in.
* The idea of the project was completely awesome, given the usability, creativity and reach it promised.
* ‘The Probot Community’ is the most promising community that we could ever build.</p>
<p>To be able to work on a project of such reach and impact under the guidance of brilliant developers from across the world drew us towards Probot and the humility, support and niceness of these amazing developers has held us in it!</p>
<h2 id="the-support-system">The Support System</h2>
<h3 id="gregor-mentor">Gregor (Mentor)</h3>
<p>A member of the RGSoC family for a fourth year now, Gregor is one gem of a mentor. We cannot forget how warmly he welcomed us to the community, inviting us for office hours right on day 1 of introduction. Since then, he has been a constant support, has always kept us motivated and has made us feel so comfortable that we feel that we belong with Probot already! <3</p>
<h3 id="bex-and-jason-co-mentors">Bex and Jason (Co-mentors)</h3>
<p>They are both GitHub employees and maintainers of probot for quite some time now. They have been amazing mentors and have always offered help, generously. :’)</p>
<h3 id="divjot-coach">Divjot (Coach)</h3>
<p>A 2016 batch passout from our college, Divjot is a full-time Software Developer at Swiggy. We wouldn’t be exaggerating if we say that he’s the absolute best senior one could ask for. From resolving out most messed up javascript doubts in minutes to giving detailed life lessons (and one liners like “Don’t worry! If you want to give up, you’re doing something right”), he is one person we can always depend on, without a second thought. He’s vegan and Pun-jabi, funny and a hard taskmaster, loves JS and cooks amazing food.</p>
<h3 id="saksham-coach">Saksham (Coach)</h3>
<p>A two-time GSoCer a 2017 passout from Delhi Technological University, Saksham is always happy to help. And not most people will believe but we found him on Quora (Yay, Rahmeen’s infinite quora scrolling is not always useless). Saksham has a lot of experience with Node.js and loves to share his knowledge abundantly. Workaholic as he is, he’s worried about lack of work when we don’t ask him doubts too frequently, and very cleverly this his how he keeps us on our toes. (Don’t worry we’ll trouble you a lot in the days to come XD)</p>
<h3 id="manish-coach">Manish (Coach)</h3>
<p>Our batchmate and a 2018 GSocer, Manish is a very good friend of ours. Being a CodeHeat winner under FOSSASIA, he is extremely passionate about contributing to open source and loves to help others too.</p>
<h3 id="mananpal-coach">Mananpal (Coach)</h3>
<p>A senior year student from our college, Mananpalhas won almost every hackathon he has ever participated it. Being an extremely passionate developer and open-source enthusiast, Manan has this knack for developing some really cool projects. He works actively for promoting open-source among the students of our college and is an amazing person.</p>
<h3 id="saptak-supervisor">Saptak (Supervisor)</h3>
<p>A graduate from IIIT Allahabad, Saptak is a passionate open source contributor. A GSoC ‘16 student with FOSSASIA, Saptak is currently working as a Software Developer with Gitcoin. We’re super excited to work with him throughout the summer!</p>
<h3 id="say-cheese">Say Cheese!</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-03-rgsoc-WeInit.jpg" alt="Team $we init in one frame" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Team $we init (Collage made by Akshita)</div>
First Week Wrap Up! Team potatoCodeAlina Leuca and Sabine van der Eijkhttp://twitter.com/alinaleuca2018-08-02T00:00:00+00:002018-08-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/first-official-contribution-team-potatoCode<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-02-potatocode-team-alina-sabine.png" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Alina and Sabine (photo by Alina Leuca and Sabine van der Eijk)</div>
<p>We’re well on our way to being a fully-functional team, finally! Today Sabine and I met for the first time to code together and get our wits about the project :) Being part-time comes with its perks, but also its drawbacks.</p>
<p>On the one hand, we have time to do our favorite activities: hang out with the dogs, go surfing, and maybe even take a weekend break away from Amsterdam. On the other hand, both of us have part-time jobs we have to worry about and work around our schedule. We are honored to be one of the first part-time guinea pigs though, and are super excited about Stretchly! We’ve already started work, and are still slowly digging our way through all the code. It’s our first time working with Electron as well, so we’re learning tons already :)</p>
<p>A bit of what happened this week:
We had our first call with our mentor Jan on Wednesday, and he is wonderful! He gave us ideas for first issues and functionalities, and has already helped us figure out how to contribute to the project. We’re excited for a potential visit from him some time during the program!</p>
<p>We also had our first call with our supervisor Ana Sofia and had a blast! Besides discussing all the oportunities we’ll have to meet up in Portugal or Amsterdam, she also helped us a TON to feel welcomed into the program.</p>
<p>On Saturday we got together to work on Stretchly again, and were lucky to have our coach Dan with us the entire day. We managed to get a lot of work done, and especially decipher the app a lot more with his help.</p>
<p>We completed our first little feature – translation of the app into Dutch, and our first pull request!</p>
<p><br />
<span class="color-red">We had our first dinner with all the coaches!</span>
<br /></p>
<p>This was a huge highlight of our week! It was Sabine’s first time meeting Eden, and both of our first time meeting Jack. We got to know each other a bit, and it helps us feeling more comfortable with our coaches. We can only hope it makes the coaches more comfortable with us as well! We hope to do this again (maybe once a month?) during the program.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-08-02-potatocode-team.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">potatoCode team! (photo by Alina Leuca and Sabine van der Eijk)</div>
<p><span class="color-red">What comes next</span></p>
<p>We’re super excited and super nervous! We’re sure the next 3 months are going to bring a lot of learnings, laughter, and also tears!</p>
Introducing Team RubiesAtibhi and Pratekshahttp://twitter.com/Rubies_11_142018-07-30T00:00:00+00:002018-07-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Introducing-Team-Rubies<h3 id="the-journey-of-a-thousand-miles-begins-with-one-step"><strong>The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Step</strong></h3>
<h4 id="and-heres-how-the-journey-of-team-rubies-started"><strong>And here’s how the journey of Team Rubies started!</strong></h4>
<p>Atibhi had just started learning Ruby on Rails and was googling some random error, when Google redirected her to the official page of RGSoC.
She started reading up on it. The more she read, the more convinced she became that she had to apply to this program !</p>
<p>The next step was finding a teammate. She messaged a few people and Prateksha seemed the most interested ! She was her immediate junior in college and was enthusiastic about exploring new avenues.</p>
<p>Together they embarked on the journey of becoming RGSoC 2018 scholars.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies.jpeg" alt="TeamRub" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Atibhi and Prateksha (Credit: Simran Dokania)</b></div>
<p><strong>Atibhi & Prateksha</strong> - They are enthusiastic ECE undergraduates from IIIT Bangalore, India. They are working on if-me this summer which is a community for mental health experiences.</p>
<p>Whenever life gets serious, they watch FRIENDS to let their hair down. They want to dress like Rachel, eat like Joey, joke like Chandler, love like Ross, organize like Monica and run like Phoebe. :stuck_out_tongue:</p>
<p>Atibhi is a 3rd year Undergrad student who thinks she is Monica Geller’s real life version. She has lost over 30kgs and can be found reading or coding if she is not worrying about how to become fitter. She is happiest when travelling. She makes sure she knows the historical background of a new place before she visits it and can spend her nights at museums.
An electronics student by day and open source contributor at night, she hopes to someday combine her love for hardware and software !</p>
<p>Prateksha is a 2nd year Undergrad student, who can be found humming a tune or dancing to one if she isn’t coding. Solving algorithms keeps her engaged in her free time. She loves shopping and exploring new places. She enjoys meeting new people and interacting with them. It amuses her to know about different cultures and ideologies. Apart from this, she loves organizing and volunteering at events.</p>
<h3 id="finding-coaches"><strong>Finding Coaches</strong></h3>
<p>They had found each other but now they had to find coaches. They found four awesome coaches.</p>
<p><strong>Aditya T</strong> - Aditya is their senior at college. He is specialising in Pattern Recognition and Signal Processing. He is presently an Artificial Intelligence developer for Klarity Law and did his GsoC 2017 with Systers.</p>
<p><strong>Athitya</strong> - To the outside world, he’s a Mechie at IIT,Kharagpur. But, with the help of his friends at IITKGP, he codes. He’s a wizard with Ruby and did his GSoC 2017 at Ruby Foundation. He is interning at Intuit this summer.</p>
<p><strong>Gaurav</strong> - Gaurav is their super senior at college who interned at Microsoft this summer. He is a coding enthusiast and a proficient web developer. He works on how Machine Perception can help us reach from Artificial Narrow Intelligence to Artificial General Intelligence. He did his GSoC 2017 at Berkman Centre.</p>
<p><strong>Raounaq</strong> - Raounaq is a passionate software developer who uses Ruby to express in code what defines him. Apart from coding he played for a football club from Delhi, India. He also likes to travel.</p>
<p><strong>Brihi</strong> - Atibhi’s childhood friend, RGSoC 2017 scholar and a person who loves Code, Coffee and Music. Brihi can work with anything that is associated with Data, Machine Learning, and AI. Even though she isn’t their official coach, RGSoC 2018 wouldn’t have been possible without her. From reviewing their application to jumping with joy when they got selected, she has been their biggest supporter throughout the process !</p>
<h3 id="choosing-a-project-and-interacting-with-the-mentors-"><strong>Choosing a project and interacting with the mentors !</strong></h3>
<p>They had chosen their project even before the list of official projects had been announced. They were thrilled when their primary choice “if-me” got selected for RGSoC’18.
They could relate to “if-me” and wanted to contribute to the mental health community. Here is their first contact with Julia, their mentor way before the official list was announced.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-FirstContact.png" alt="FirstContact" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our first mail to Julia!(Credit: Gmail-Atibhi)</b></div>
<p>After this, Julia added them to slack. The slack community was amazing. They had previously worked with Ruby on Rails and wanted to start with ReactJS components in if-me. If-me community helped them learn Javascript and then React. By February,they had submitted their first PR. Yes ! It was in React !
Apart from the community being so helpful, their mentor Julia had a unique ritual. She would do weekly shout-outs where she would thank people who worked on an issue or helped if-me in any way.
To know that their contributions were valuable motivated them further.
Here is how the weekly shout-out looked like !</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-WeeklyShoutouts.png" alt="WeeklyShout-Out" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Weekly Shout-Out (Credit: Slack-Julia)</b></div>
<p>Moreover, Julia mailed them if-me stickers and a handwritten card !</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-StickersAndCard.jpeg" alt="StickersCard" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Stickers and Card (Credit: Atibhi's Phone)</b></div>
<p>They had fallen in love with the community and were thankful to be a part of it. Being RGSoC scholars to work for “if-me” was just the cherry on top !</p>
<h3 id="best-surprise-of-their-lives-"><strong>Best surprise of their lives !</strong></h3>
<p>On 5th April, they got a mail for the first round of interview.This was their first ever interview and they had butterflies in their stomach!
After the interview, they had their fingers crossed and were eagerly waiting for the results.</p>
<p>Soon it was the time for results! 17th April was finally here! Both of them were anxious and were continuously checking their mails. At 12:30 AM they received a mail saying that there was another round of interview. :sweat_smile:</p>
<p>They thought that their first interview wasn’t good enough and this was the final chance for them to redeem themselves.
By 19th April they had gone through their proposal multiple times and brushed up their technical knowledge. The interview was scheduled to start at 9 PM and they sat nervously in front of their laptops at 8:30 PM. At 9 PM the interview started. Little did they know that this is what RGSoC meant by “interview”.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-HappyUs.jpeg" alt="HappyUs" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Accepted to RGSoC 2018!!(Credit: appear.in-Screenshot)</b></div>
<p>… a dream that they had been chasing for over 4 months had finally come true. It was no interview, it was the final results. The RGSoC team told them via live call that they were selected.</p>
<h3 id="the-team"><strong>The Team</strong></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-30-TeamRubies-TheTeam.jpeg" alt="TheTeam" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>The Team, Left to Right and Top to Bottom: Julia, Srishti, Camille, Prateksha, Atibhi, Aditya, Gaurav, Nishiki, Alvaro, Athitya, Raounaq (Credits: Slack - Julia, Srishti, Nishiki, Alvaro; GitHub - Camille, Athitya; Google Hangouts - Raounaq )</b></div>
<h4 id="mentors"><strong><em>Mentors</em></strong></h4>
<p><strong>Julia</strong></p>
<p>She is the founder of the “if-me”, she started it in 2014 as an undergraduate student. She is a developer and storyteller who loves to be creative in web and mobile development, art, writing, and speaking.</p>
<p><strong>Camille</strong></p>
<p>Incorrigible humanist and full-stack web developer excited about interdisciplinary collaboration, open source software, and facilitating supportive team environments. She is helping us with Ruby on Rails.</p>
<p><strong>Alvaro</strong></p>
<p>He is currently a 4th year CS undergrad at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, specifically the branch of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. He has experience in web development, virtual and augmented reality and 3D printing. He is also helping us with Ruby on Rails.</p>
<p><strong>Nishiki</strong></p>
<p>He’s a web developer aiming to build products that deliver value for good causes. He is helping us with ReactJs.</p>
<h4 id="supervisor"><strong><em>Supervisor</em></strong></h4>
<p><strong>Srishti</strong></p>
<p>An RGSoC’16 alumni, she’s a Product Security Engineer at Citrix. She is also a Graphic Designer,Pianist, Multilingual programmer and an avid book reader. She wants to use her knowledge to make a change.</p>
<h3 id="their-goals-for-the-summer-"><strong>Their goals for the summer !</strong></h3>
<p>They want make friends from all over the world. They also want to discuss new programming paradigms, gain new insights and knowledge from the open source community.</p>
The BeginningPaavinihttp://twitter.com/paavininanda2018-07-27T00:00:00+00:002018-07-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team101DaysOfSummerIntroduction<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-27-101Daysgif1.gif" alt="Hurray" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy.com</div>
<p>The summer has begun and the moment for which we had been waiting since the past so many days has come. It is time to get started with RGSoC this year. Let’s familiarise you with our team -</p>
<p><b>Students - <a href="https://twitter.com/nupur_baghel"><strong>Nupur Baghel</strong></a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/paavininanda"><strong>Paavini Nanda</strong></a> </b></p>
<p>Both of us are undergraduate students at NSIT, Delhi, majoring in Computer Engineering. We are best friends and buddies since day 1 of college. We have been sharing our rooms and memories since then, and obviously being partners in crime! 😈 (just kidding) , in coding and in the wonderful program which we are all a part of -> ‘RGSoC’.</p>
<p><b>Mentor - Josh Matthews </b></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/lastontheboat"><strong>Josh</strong></a> is the most experienced person in our team. He has been working with Servo since almost the beginning and considers Servo like his own child. Are we right Josh 😛? Needless to say he is the most helpful person without whom we couldn’t have started with Servo and reached our current state. We really value your efforts.</p>
<p><b>Supervisor - Rakhi </b></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/atbrakhi"><strong>Rakhi</strong></a> is a previous RGSoC student with Servo. She is the best person to know what our current level of understanding of the project must be, as she herself has been through the same phase. She is responsible for catching hold of us all and making sure we are doing things on time. Happy to have you with us! 😁</p>
<p><b>Coaches - Manraj Singh & Gauri Kholkar</b></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/manrajsgrover"><strong>Manraj</strong></a> is our super senior in college who works as a Software Engineer at Practo. He is a community leader at DuckDuckGo and has a lot of knowledge and experience in Open Source. Since he started the open source community in our college, we were sure he would be as excited as we are, to work with him. It is not of much surprise that he happily agreed to coach us! 💃</p>
<p>Gauri is an experienced Rust programmer who did her internship with Mozilla under the prestigious Outreachy programme. We came to know about her from the RGSoC page itself, where she had mentioned that she wanted to coach a team for Servo. She is a happy and cheerful person indeed. We plan to trouble her with lots of doubts this summer 😜</p>
<p><b>The journey till now - </b></p>
<p>We got to know about RGSoC when seniors from our college Prachi and Ipshita got selected for it last year. After that fine day, we wanted to be a part of such a program which could help us contribute to such a large community under the mentorship of talented and experienced people.</p>
<p>So we made sure that we started looking for organisations on time. By mid-January, even before the organisations were finalized, we started making our mind on which project to apply for. We started understanding and making small contributions to our first project. But after few days came the shortlist of projects…….A small set back for us, the project that we wanted to apply for didn’t get selected :(</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-27-101Daysgif2.gif" alt="Sad" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy.com</div>
<p>But nevermind, we began looking for some other projects.
We took one more week, installing new code bases and getting in touch with mentors and the community, figuring out which project was the perfect match for us. We finally narrowed down on Servo, Mozilla. It was something scary and challenging for us:</p>
<p>It offered us Rust, a completely different programming language. We had worked with C++ and Python before, but Rust was different. It had features from more than 10 different languages. Primarily it was safe, fast and concurrent! 😎
It had a really large code base with more than 2000 live issues. Also, we had never ever got the unique opportunity of working with browser engines.</p>
<p>So we decided to get our hands dirty. We implemented our very first API <code class="highlighter-rouge">DOM Doge</code> Api in Servo. We were able to do it only because of the blog post written by one of the past RGSoC scholar who gave insights into how a basic API can be built and how the workflow of the whole API should be. This task was something that we were able to complete within a day (But it was literally a lot of effort, solving the small errors that came up each time we tried to compile the code.)</p>
<p>Ahh, we were so happy :P</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-27-101Daysgif3.gif" alt="HappyAgain" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy.com</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-27-101Daysgif4.gif" alt="MissionCompleted" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Giphy.com</div>
<p><br />
Then we started implementing our own functions in that API. It was interesting to see the code we wrote working in a browser.
By this time we had started feeling a bit confident about writing some code in Rust. We then pinged our mentor Josh to ask for his feedback and we asked him to suggest us some already existing beginner friendly issues in Servo. He was really helpful and guided our baby steps to start with our work. He also made us aware of the type of issues which would help us with our work in RGSoC. We wouldn’t have been able to solve our first issue if we would not have received the help from the community members through the IRC channel of Servo. The people in open source are awesome. We still remember, how we were stuck on a very simple thing and asked silly questions but there were patient people who helped us with all the doubts.</p>
<p>For the rest of the month of February, we kept working on some more issues, taking help from our coaches and mentor and celebrating after every PR getting merged 💥 We liked the project so much that we decided to invest all of our time and energy into one project only despite the fact that selecting two projects increases the chances of selection. We were motivated to make some substantial contributions for such an awesome community.</p>
<p>Simultaneously we also started working on our application which is extremely crucial for being selected. We would like to specially thank Aishwarya and Prachi, who helped us by reviewing our application and making sure it’s perfect!
Finally, we would like to thank each other. It was our strong bond of friendship and support which lead us to applying for RGSoC together as a team.</p>
<p>We hope we have awesome <b> 101 Days of Summer </b> 😉 with Servo.</p>
Team GirlsCode MK - The 4 Ps of GirlsCode MKEva and Georginahttp://twitter.com/GirlsCodeMK2018-07-25T00:00:00+00:002018-07-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/4Ps-of-GirlsCode-MK<h1 id="the-4-ps-of-girlscode-mk">The 4 Ps of GirlsCode MK</h1>
<h2 id="the-people">1. The People</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-25-4ps-of-girlscode-mk-GirlsCodeMK01.jpg" alt="teamGirlsCodeMK" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Team GirlsCode MK: Eva and Georgina (Photo taken by Eva)</div>
<h3 id="georgina">Georgina:</h3>
<p>My dad is an electrical engineer who loves gadgets and was always buying new technologies that we got to play with at home. I have been using technology for a long time and have a lifelong love of all the great innovations in my lifetime. I am an IT Trainer, qualified teacher, which evolved into developing in visual basic to create solutions for document production. I studied for my degree with the Open University and achieved my BSC (Hons) in IT and Computing to complement my MCSE and other technical qualifications whilst raising my family.</p>
<p>With a young family the demands of teaching were not flexible so I started my own business, training and working short term contracts for a variety of companies, and developing software. I joined Girls Code MK to gain new skills in a friendly supportive environment where we share tips on coding, this is where I met Eva.</p>
<h5 id="hobbies">Hobbies?</h5>
<p>I have had a lot of hobbies and like to experience lots of things at least once. I now love badminton which I am part of a milton keynes club, watching films except horror, reading self development books, socialising and networking and of course solving problems with tech.</p>
<h5 id="favourite-dish">Favourite dish?</h5>
<p>I love cooking but favourite is most chinese stir fries.</p>
<h5 id="morning-person-or-night-owl">Morning person or night owl?</h5>
<p>I can be both but not at the same time! If I am inspired or socialising I can stay awake much too late!</p>
<h5 id="which-country-is-at-the-top-of-your-must-see-countries">Which country is at the top of your must-see countries?</h5>
<p>I would love to see all the ancient wonders of the world.</p>
<h5 id="favourite-programming-language">Favourite programming language?</h5>
<p>I don’t think I have a favourite, but easiest to start again is Javascript.</p>
<h5 id="favourite-productivity-hack">Favourite productivity hack?</h5>
<p>I like to make the most of my time so my favourite to avoid overload is GOOP. Standing for Goal - what is one goal to focus on, Outcome - what does it look like, Obstacles - what obstacles can stand in the way of your goal and Plan - what plan do you have for overcoming those Obstacles.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h3 id="eva">Eva:</h3>
<p>Originally from Slovenia, Eva moved to Milton Keynes after living in China for a number of years. After working as a teacher, translator, podcast host, project manager and ecommerce manager (not all at the same time!), she has recently found her calling in programming. Since September 2017, Eva has been dedicating most of her waking hours to learning how to program and inspiring other women to do so as well. She founded and hosts GirlsCode MK, beginner friendly meetups and workshops where women of any age, background and skill can come and learn how to code in a welcoming environment.</p>
<p><em>Eva and Georgina met at a GirlsCode MK meetup.</em></p>
<h5 id="hobbies-1">Hobbies?</h5>
<p>Indoor climbing, singing in a choir, playing table tennis, juggling, watching basketball (NBA!) and spending time outside with my dog.</p>
<h5 id="favourite-dish-1">Favourite dish?</h5>
<p>Pizza!</p>
<h5 id="morning-person-or-night-owl-1">Morning person or night owl?</h5>
<p>Morning person. I go to bed at 10pm (at the latest!).</p>
<h5 id="which-country-is-at-the-top-of-your-must-see-countries-1">Which country is at the top of your must-see countries?</h5>
<p>Costa Rica.</p>
<h5 id="favourite-programming-language-1">Favourite programming language?</h5>
<p>Javascript.</p>
<h5 id="favourite-productivity-hack-1">Favourite productivity hack?</h5>
<p>Getting at least 8 hours of sleep. Also coffee. Lots of coffee.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-25-4ps-of-girlscode-mk-GirlsCodeMK02.jpg" alt="teamGirlsCodeMK" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> GirlsCode MK meetups (Photo taken by Eva)</div>
<h3 id="coaches-and-supervisors">Coaches and supervisors</h3>
<p>On our exciting coding journey, we’ll be joined by a team of enthusiastic, supportive and hopefully (extremely) patient people! <br /></p>
<h5 id="coaches">Coaches:</h5>
<p>Rob, Neil, Kalan and PJ</p>
<h5 id="bahmni-mentors">Bahmni mentors:</h5>
<p>Ivo and Wolf</p>
<h5 id="rgsoc-supervisor">RGSoC supervisor</h5>
<p>Ramón</p>
<h2 id="the-place">2. The Place</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-25-4ps-of-girlscode-mk-GirlsCodeMK03.jpg" alt="teamGirlsCodeMK" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Bletchley Park Mansion - the headquarters for British codebreakers during World War II. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)</div>
<p>Our office space couldn’t have been more inspiring! We are based at the heart of Bletchley Park home of the codebreakers.</p>
<p>For one of her earlier projects, Georgina built a tribute page for women codebreakers in Bletchley Park (<a href="https://codepen.io/gtl90/pen/opOVvP">Codepen link</a>)</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="the-project">3. The Project</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-25-4ps-of-girlscode-mk-GirlsCodeMK04.png" alt="teamGirlsCodeMK" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Bahmni (Source: Bahmni.org)</div>
<p>The project will be working on during the summer is Bahmni, a low-resource hospital management tool based on OpenMRS - an open source, medical record system. Bahmni was started in 2012 and is currently being used in 29 countries around the world!
It’s a live and working app with a huge code base and while it will definitely be challenging, we’re very excited at the opportunity of making Bahmi better and even more effective.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="the-plan">4. The Plan</h2>
<p>Our primary task is to add a person module to Bahmni. Currently it’s only possible to register people as patients in Bahmni, but we would like to add the functionality of adding persons - for example to register people for pre-screening appointments.
<strong>Technologies used:</strong> React.js, Node.js, RESTful APIs, PWA</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h4 id="you-can-follow-our-journey-here">You can follow our journey here:</h4>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/GirlsCodeMK">Eva</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/gthodgkinson">Georgina</a></strong></p>
Meet Team PopcornArati and Jessicahttp://twitter.com/TeamPopcornBer2018-07-23T00:00:00+00:002018-07-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/welcome-to-team-popcorn<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-07-23-welcome-teampopcorn.jpg" alt="The warm welcome we recieved from our coaching company [Absolventa]" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Photo credit: Jessica</em></div>
<p><strong>Team Popcorn</strong></p>
<p>We are Team Popcorn based in Berlin, Germany. We met through the Women Techmakers community where we were both looking for opportunities to learn programming. Though our backgrounds are different and we don’t always get each other’s jokes, we share a passion for programming. Having both gotten into tech a little later in life and collected many different experiences along the way, we knew RGSoC would be a blast together!</p>
<p><em>“You can start late, look different, be uncertain and still succeed.” - <a href="https://twitter.com/mistyonpointe">Misty Copeland</a></em></p>
<p>As soon as we decided to apply for the program, we had to start hunting for coaches and a project. We were particularly keen to find other women to mentor us. After looking through the Nextcloud website we found Camila’s profile. We reached out and were delighted when she invited us to a Nextcloud meetup happening that very evening.</p>
<p>As it turns out, this would be a fateful evening for our team because Camila didn’t come alone to the meetup. With her was a little black dog with a big personality. An adorable rescue dog, Popcorn was our mascot during the sometimes frustrating process of setting up our development environments and we had no other choice than to honour her with our team name!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-07-23-popcorn-mascot-teampopcorn.jpg" alt="Popcorn, our mascot" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Photo credit: Camila</em></div>
<p><strong><a href="">Arati</a></strong></p>
<p>Some of the best days I had in 2017 were the ones when I got to program from morning to evening. I found my way into programming quite by accident. I did an online Ruby tutorial for fun and was hooked. Next, I scoured the Meetup pages and within days of enrolling in the Women Techmaker’s JavaScript Crash Course here in Berlin, I knew I wanted to do this full time. Through every bug and even the time my code broke just minutes before I was due to present my graduation project, I have been excited by programming. I had heard it was possible for work to feel like play, but I had never actually experienced it myself. And this is why 2018 has been a monumental year for me. I am delighted to say that I am now working as a professional web developer.</p>
<p><strong><a href="">Jessica</a> <em><a href="https://twitter.com/sleepypioneer">(@sleepypioneer)</a></em></strong></p>
<p>Originally from the UK, I moved to Berlin, Germany in 2010 to live with my partner. Programming will be my third career, as I have already worked in the film and television industry and speciality coffee industry. In both, I started in entry-level positions and worked my way up. Each has led me to where I am now and while neither field directly involved programming, I have gained many transferable skills. Since school, programming has interested me, but until now it has just been a hobby. Last year, I quit my job as a coffee roaster to make the change into tech. I have been studying online, attending meetups and workshops and completed a few courses in web development.
I have learned a range of languages including Python, Go, JavaScript and PHP. In 2018, I hope to find my first job in tech and RGSoC is proving to be an excellent start to this journey!</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://github.com/kajatiger">Kaja</a> & <a href="https://github.com/elalemanyo">Victor</a></strong>
At our coaching company we have two coaches. Kaja is a Ruby on Rails developer and RGSoC alumni who also had Absolventa as her coaching company. Victor is from Spain and he joined Absolventa as a web developer earlier this year.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://github.com/axlwaii">Markus</a></strong>
Markus was a RGSoC coach last year for Kaja when he also worked at Absolventa. He is now working at Nolte & Lauth as a web developer.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://github.com/lorabv">Lora</a></strong>
“Lora Vardarova is a Software Engineer at Zalando. Passionate About Front-End Development, User Experience, and Agile Software Development.” (<a href="https://www.meetup.com/Women-Techmakers-Berlin/events/246814497/">WTMB Meetup</a>)</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://github.com/camilasan">Camila</a></strong>
“Camila is from Brazil and has worked as front-end developer, with C#, Java and even Delphi. She got into open source doing C++/Qt development in the KDE community. After moving to Germany she worked with PHP, Ruby on Rails, AngluarJS, Go and Drupal 7. She’s now a desktop client developer at Nextcloud but just might do other things than C++ sometimes.” (<a href="https://nextcloud.com/">Nextcloud website</a>)</p>
<p>We also are happy to have <a href="https://github.com/jancborchardt">Jan</a> and <a href="https://github.com/jonatoni">Jona</a> as our mentors and Neta as our supervisor.</p>
<p><strong>Project: Nextcloud</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://nextcloud.com/">Nextcloud’s website</a> says it best. “Nextcloud offers industry-leading on-premises file sync and online collaboration technology. Our expertise is in combining the convenience and ease of use of consumer-grade solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive with the security, privacy and control business needs.
Our self-hosted solutions ensure you know where data is, who has access, and that even meta-data does not leak.”</p>
<p>We chose this project because we both felt it was important to work on a larger project and familiarise ourselves with the architecture, communication style and organisation this would required. We also liked that within the project, there are separate apps which we could focus on. Additionally, we felt strongly about working on a project that has a local community, which would enable us to connect with other members in person.</p>
<p>Since reaching out to Camila and Jan at the start of our application process for RGSoC we have been overwhelmed by the community’s support. We were even invited to join them in Stuttgart for their hackweek!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/rgsoc-2018-07-23-nextcloud-hackweek-teampopcorn.jpeg" alt="Nextcloud Hackweek" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><em>Photo credit: Nextcloud</em></div>
<p><strong>Roadmap for RGSoC</strong></p>
<p>We will be working on the contacts app, an address book application that links to the calendar and mail apps. Currently written in Angular.js, it is being migrated to Vue.js over the course of the next three months. We will be involved in this process which is a fantastic opportunity to learn Vue and to directly experience how a migration of this scale is achieved.
After the app has been migrated, we will begin to work on enhancements and have been encouraged to come up with suggestions of our own :)</p>
<p>You can follow our progress here, on the <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">updates page</a> and also on our <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamPopcornBer">Twitter</a>!</p>
<p>Arati & Jessica</p>
Introducing Team Barcelona DuoLori and Amaliahttp://twitter.com/HarlemExpat2018-07-19T00:00:00+00:002018-07-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-TeamBarcelonaDuo<p>Hello everyone, we are Lori and Amalia, two amazing ex-sociologist turned programmers. We are Team BarcelonaDuo. We met at <a href="https://codebar.io/">codebar</a> and are currently organizers there.</p>
<p>Codebar is a non-profit organization that runs workshops for underrepresented groups in tech. The aim is to increase interest and diversity in programming.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-19-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo1.png" alt="Lori and Amalia!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Lori and Amalia at Thoughtworks (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<h3 id="lori">Lori</h3>
<p>I’ve been working as an EFL teacher in Spain for several years now. In fact, my first experience
with coding came from looking for a way to motivate my students. I figured I could teach them
Scratch and from there they could make interactive stories or games. What I didn’t know at the time
was that programming involves research, problem solving, and learning – a type of mental stimulation
that I hadn’t felt in years – and I was hooked.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-19-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo5.jpg" alt="Lori studying code!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Lori studying code (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p>I got a bit more serious about coding a few years latter. I moved to Barcelona, in part for an opportunity to meet other programming hobbyist. I started attending codebar and met an amazing group of people who inspired and motivated me to take my coding to a new level.</p>
<p>Since then, I have become one of the organizers. I am really passionate about coding, and I want to share this love with others. Through codebar, I help with the organizing and I am currently working with other coaches to improve the python track to make it more project based.</p>
<p>I love programming and I would like to use this summer to build my skills. After this summer I intend to transition into tech as a developer.</p>
<h3 id="amalia">Amalia</h3>
<p>I was born in Mexico, but I moved to California when I was 5 years old. I met my partner while living in San Francisco and moved to Barcelona in 2008. I am based in Barcelona but spend part of the year in California and in Greece.</p>
<p>Prior to programming, my background was in research in the media studies/ sociology field. I conducted research on <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/aftermath-9780199658411?cc=ru&lang=en&"> alternative economic practices in Catalunya</a>, the Indignado and Occupy Wallstreet movement, <a href="http://in3-working-paper-series.uoc.edu/in3/en/index.php/in3-working-paper-series/article/view/1943.html">the banking crisis in Spain and Iceland</a>, and I also researched how <a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/events/phd-symposium/Brochure-with-abstracts-PhD-Symposium-2014.pdf">trust is built online</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Why I decided to learn to program</strong></p>
<p>While in graduate school, through my research I started to see how the criteria that decide if somebody is seen as trustworthy online are decided by a few programmers. I became concerned to realize that in the era of big data and the increasing use of algorithms to sort, calculate and make decisions for us, the concerns of people that are already marginalized offline are not taken into account because of the lack of diversity among those creating the technology. I decided that in order to help change this imbalance I myself should learn to program.</p>
<p>Even though I am not the next Mark Zuckerberg, I want to increase diversity in the tech space and this is why I want to become a better programmer and be part of the programming community. In my spare time, I help organize the codebar Barcelona chapter. Codebar is a non-profit initiative that runs regular programming workshops for underrepresented people in tech.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-19-rgsoc-BarcelonaDuo6.jpg" alt="Amalia coaching at codebar!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Amalia coaching at codebar (image by Amalia Cardenas)</b></div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>This summer is very important for me. I know that programming takes a lot of hard work to learn, but it is something that now I can see myself doing. I know that as I get better, I will inspire others that they can get better too. I look forward to seeing where this summer will take me. :)</p>
<h3 id="what-we-will-be-working-on-this-summer">What we will be working on this summer</h3>
<p>Exercism.io is a platform that helps people achieve fluency in a programming language through individual practice and mentor feedback. Students can choose over 45 different languages to master.</p>
<p>Lori and I will be focusing on mentors, mentor resources, and tooling for mentors. We hope to develop resources that can make the process of giving feedback smoother for mentors and increase the quality of feedback across all of the exercises available on the platform.</p>
<p><strong>Follow us on Twitter:</strong> <a href="https://twitter.com/HarlemExpat">Lori King</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/anybodycancode1">Amalia Cardenas</a></p>
<p><strong>Get to know us better on our blogs:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://loriking.github.io">Lori’s Blog</a> <br />
<a href="http://www.anybodycancode.com/">Amalia’s blog</a></p>
Brazilian Housewives Coding Team IntroductionCamila and Stefannihttp://twitter.com/milasouzaaraujo2018-07-17T00:00:00+00:002018-07-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/brazilian-team<h3 id="about-us">About us</h3>
<p>Hello! We are <a href="https://twitter.com/steff_br">Stefanni</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/milasouzaaraujo">Camila</a>, two junior software developers from Brazil based in Vancouver, Canada. We didn’t know each other before the RGSoC and we are more than happy to introduce our team!</p>
<h4 id="stefannihttpstefannibrasilme"><a href="http://stefannibrasil.me/">Stefanni</a></h4>
<p>I am a millennial that likes how to cook, loves coding, cats, playing sports and chocolate. I moved to Vancouver in January because my husband received a job offer to work here and we brought our two cats with us.
My history with Rails Girls began in 2015. Actually, Rails Girls is the reason I decided to start Computer Science college in 2015 ( I only did 1 year and half, now I am studying by myself). I went as a student in the Rails Girls Sao Paulo 2015 workshop and since then I wanted to join the RGSoC, but I never applied.
I was also a coach on the 2017th edition and it was an amazing experience. The other coach of my group introduced me to the CTO of a Brazilian fintech where later I did a brief software internship before moving to Vancouver. So imagine how happy I was when Ana and Vaishali surprised us announcing that we were selected, Rails Girls has been playing an important role in my tech career!</p>
<h4 id="camila">Camila</h4>
<p>Hello everybody, my name is Camila! I’m a Brazilian living in Vancouver with my husband. After finishing our master’s degree in Computer Science last year we came to Canada with our two cats - the flight was a great adventure!</p>
<p>During graduation I worked with Recommender Systems, characterizing the consumption over time in recommendation domains, and in social network analysis. In my master I was interested in understanding how sociological aspects are reflected in current technologies, such as the existence of racial bias/stereotypes in search engines, and what is the role of the algorithms on the propagation of these bias/stereotypes. I’ve been working with academic research since my first year as a undergrad student. And my plan was to finish my master’s degree and then apply for a PhD. But for now I feel the need to apply my knowledge to something that is really going to be used by several people and not only in the academic environment.</p>
<p>I learned to code in my early years of graduation and I have a good experience with algorithms. I have good knowledge in Python, C, R… But I have almost no experience in software development, software engineering, testing, etc. So I think the Rail Girls program will be a great opportunity to be part of the Open Source community and learn a lot!</p>
<h3 id="how-did-we-meet">How did we meet?</h3>
<p>Because we are both relatively new to Vancouver, it was difficult to find a teammate here. So we used the RGSoC google groups to search for teammates and there was where we met each other. We went to a coffee shop and discussed about our application and we soon got along, especially because we both have cats =).</p>
<p>Thanks, RGSoC organizers for providing these mediums for us to find a teammate :)</p>
<h3 id="how-is-work-going">How is work going?</h3>
<p>This week has been great! We are reading and collecting information from the Public Lab codebase and the API docs/tests. Also we focused on learning more about Git, RESTful API’s, and how to document code changes.</p>
<p>We also want to thank the <a href="https://predictablerevenue.com/">Predictable Revenue</a> for letting us use their space to work. Thiago, one of our coaches, works there and we asked if we could work there. The office is great and it’s located at the historical site of Vancouver, a central location in the city.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-09-brazilian-housewives-coding-team.jpg" alt="Brazilian Housewives Coding Team" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Camila, Julio, Stefanni and Thiago on our first day! picture taken by Stefanni Brasil</b></div>
<h3 id="meet-our-amazing-team">Meet our Amazing Team</h3>
<p><strong>Coaches:</strong></p>
<p>Thiago Araujo and Julio Albinati. Thanks for being our coaches, we couldn’t be part of this amazing program without your help.</p>
<p><strong>Mentor:</strong></p>
<p>One of the reasons we applied to work on Public Lab is because it’s a very inclusive and supportive community. Jeff Warren is always helping us and we are happy to be part of it.</p>
<p><strong>Supervisor:</strong></p>
<p>Mayar is our RGSoC’s Buddy and we want to thank you for all your support and advices for us to have a great summer of code.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone for helping us and for being part of our team, you are amazing! :)</p>
<h3 id="about-our-summer-project">About our Summer Project</h3>
<p>We are working as a part-time team on the <a href="https://publiclab.org/dashboard">Public Lab app</a>, more specific on the API feature. We have a <a href="https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/2755">Planning Issue</a> here with the Timeline and a <a href="https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/projects/5">Github Project page</a> if you want to check out and/or give some help and tips :) We don’t have much experience working with API’s so we are really excited to learn everything that we can this summer.</p>
<h3 id="so-why-brazilian-housewives-coding">So, why Brazilian housewives coding?</h3>
<p>We are junior developers and have only been living in Vancouver for a few months. We were both beginning our career in Brazil when our husbands got a job offer to move to Vancouver so we were having a hard time finding opportunities for juniors here. We thought it would be a good name to play with our status here! :P</p>
<h2 id="what-do-we-expect-for-the-rgsoc-2018">What do we expect for the RGSoC 2018?</h2>
<ul>
<li>Understand more about modeling an API</li>
<li>Become familiar with SQL queries</li>
<li>Be experts on Ruby on Rails</li>
<li>Learn more about JavaScript and Tests</li>
<li>Improve our documentation skills</li>
<li>Be just the beginning of this amazing Open Source adventure</li>
<li>Have a great Summer!</li>
</ul>
OSS Project Spotlight - Part 3Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-07-16T00:00:00+00:002018-07-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/oss-project-spotlight-part3<p>Welcome to part 3 of our RGSoC OSS Project Spotlights (previous posts here: <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-06-11-oss-project-spotlight-part1">part 1</a> and <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-06-22-oss-project-spotlight-part2">part 2</a>)! We’re excited to present another 3 awesome projects today:</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redservospan"><span class="color-red">Servo</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://servo.org/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/ServoDev">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-05-oss-projects-spotlight-part3-servo.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Servo" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Servo (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbahmnispan"><span class="color-red">Bahmni</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://www.bahmni.org/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/BahmniOrg">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-05-oss-projects-spotlight-part3-bahmni.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Bahmni" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Bahmni (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbabelspan"><span class="color-red">Babel</span></h4>
<p><a href="http://babeljs.io/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/babeljs">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-07-05-oss-projects-spotlight-part3-babel.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Babel" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Babel (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
Let's get RGSoC started!Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-06-28T00:00:00+00:002018-06-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/lets-get-rgsoc-started<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-06-28-lets-get-rgsoc-started.png" alt="Let's get RGSoC started!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Let's get RGSoC started! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code is about to begin! All these months of preparation, from submitting the OSS Projects, to finding the coaches and applying to the program; fundraising and selecting the teams; a “You are Accepted to RGSoC” surprise video and an extra 5 teams that we managed to welcome… We could be tired of listing all of these things, but we are over the moon — or shall we say “over the sun”, — to kick off another year of our summer of code. We hope you are as thrilled as we are!</p>
<p><br />
<span class="color-red">Organize a kick off event in your location</span></p>
<p>This year, as we usually do, we would like to invite you to organize a kick off event in your location. You can organize something low key with your friends or your RGSoC team (teammate, coaches, mentors, etc.), or something open to your whole local community — it’s up to you.
The Kick Off events list is in <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/announcements/issues">this GitHub repository</a>, so feel free to add an issue with all the info of your event there.</p>
<p><br />
<span class="color-red">And there is going to be a live stream!</span></p>
<p>Actually, two livestreams! Next Monday, July 2nd, to celebrate the first day of the program, we will be hosting two worldwide livestreams. Everyone who is part of RGSoC 2018 is invited to join and say hi. The goal is to give us an opportunity to meet each other, beyond slack messages and GitHub comments. If you want to join, please check your inbox for the invites.</p>
<p>IMPORTANT NOTE: We will be filming some bits of the call, if you don’t want to be filmed, but you still want to say hi, please send us an email to contact@rgsoc.org to let us know and we’ll figure something out. :)</p>
<p>Happy summer of code!</p>
<p>P.S.: If you tweet, please tag us and/or use the #RGSoC hashtag!</p>
OSS Project Spotlight - Part 2Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-06-22T00:00:00+00:002018-06-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/oss-project-spotlight-part2<p>As promised, we’re back with another OSS Project Spotlight, where we present the projects taking part in this year’s RGSoC! If you want to check the other projects, part 1 is <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-06-11-oss-project-spotlight-part1">here</a>.
Without further ado, here are the OSS Projects of our second instalment:</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redprobotspan"><span class="color-red">Probot</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://probot.github.io/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/ProbotTheRobot">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-06-22-oss-project-spotlight-part2-probot.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Probot" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Probot (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redchapelspan"><span class="color-red">Chapel</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://chapel-lang.org/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/ChapelLanguage">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-06-22-oss-project-spotlight-part2-chapel.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Chapel" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Chapel (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-rednextcloudspan"><span class="color-red">Nextcloud</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://nextcloud.com/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/Nextclouders">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-06-22-oss-project-spotlight-part2-nextcloud.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Nextcloud" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Nextcloud (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
OSS Project Spotlight - Part 1Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-06-11T00:00:00+00:002018-06-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/oss-project-spotlight-part1<p>A few weeks ago we launched <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/status/989527276646694913">a small poll on twitter</a> to see if you were interested in knowing more about Open Source projects, diversity-and-inclusion-related initiatives and best practices on how to contribute to Open Source. The response was overwhelmingly positive and today we are marking the beginning of a new series of content dedicated to OSS projects. And what better way to start this than to celebrate the projects that are participating in RGSoC 2018?<br />
<strong>We would like to introduce you to the OSS Project Spotlight</strong>: a short summary of the projects to give you a glimpse of what each project is about. We hope you enjoy it and find this information useful!</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redtesselspan"><span class="color-red">Tessel</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://www.tessel.io/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/tesselproject">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-06-11-oss-project-spotlight-part1-tessel.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Tessel" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Tessel (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redebwikispan"><span class="color-red">EBWiki</span></h4>
<p><a href="http://ebwiki.org">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/EndBiasWiki">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-06-11-oss-project-spotlight-part1-ebwiki.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Tessel" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: EBWiki (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redstretchlyspan"><span class="color-red">Stretchly</span></h4>
<p><a href="https://hovancik.net/stretchly/">Website</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/stretchly?src=hash">Twitter</a><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-06-11-oss-project-spotlight-part1-stretchly.png" alt="OSS Project Spotlight: Tessel" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>OSS Project Spotlight: Stretchly (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
Meet RGSoC 2018's TeamsAna Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-05-17T00:00:00+00:002018-05-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-2018-teams-part2<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-05-18-rgsoc-2018-teams-announcement-illustration.png" alt="And the RGSoC's 2018 teams are... (illustration by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>And the RGSoC's 2018 teams are... (illustration by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>And that’s a wrap! The crowdfunding campaign is officially closed — this means that any money we receive from now on will be used to sponsor next year’s teams — and we are now ready to announce the all of the teams that will be part of RGSoC 2018!</p>
<p>Before we dive into any details regarding this year’s teams, we want to give a heartfelt <strong>thank you to all the individual donors</strong> (some of you even donated more than once!) <strong>and the new sponsors that joined us in the past few weeks</strong>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-05-18-rgsoc-2018-teams-announcement_new-teams-800x640.jpg" alt="The new teams sponsored: Popcorn, DV Team, Sectumsempra and GirlsCode MK (image by multiple people)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>The new teams sponsored: Popcorn, DV Team, Sectumsempra and GirlsCode MK (image by multiple people)</b></div>
<p>As you know, <a href="http://bit.ly/rgsoc-2018-teams-part-1">we have already announced a cool batch of teams</a> some time ago and last week we revealed that we were able to <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/status/992490357723189248">add Team Popcorn as well</a>. The great news is that during the past few days we raised enough funds to sponsor another 3 teams: GirlsCode MK, DV Team and Sectumsempra. This means that <strong>RGSoC 2018 will sponsor 13 teams (7 full-time and 6 part-time) from 9 locations</strong>.</p>
<p>Thank you again for all your support. Now let’s start the countdown for the Summer of Code!</p>
<h3 id="rgsoc-2018-teams---final-list">RGSoC 2018 Teams - Final List</h3>
<h4 id="full-time-sponsored-teams">Full-time Sponsored Teams</h4>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-red101-days-of-summer-nupur-and-paavinispan"><span class="color-red">101 Days of Summer (Nupur and Paavini)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Servo</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redwe-init-akshita-and-rahmeenspan"><span class="color-red">$we init (Akshita and Rahmeen)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Probot</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redakaringula-stellamaris-and-rachaelspan"><span class="color-red">Akaringula (StellaMaris and Rachael)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Nairobi, Kenya<br />
<em>Project</em>: EBWiki</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbarcelona-duo-amalia-and-lorispan"><span class="color-red">Barcelona Duo (Amalia and Lori)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Barcelona, Spain<br />
<em>Project</em>: Exercism</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redgirlscode-mk-eva-and-georgina-new-team-span"><span class="color-red">GirlsCode MK (Eva and Georgina) [new team] </span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Milton Keynes, UK<br />
<em>Project</em>: Bahmi</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redsectumsempra-rupal-and-avneet-new-team-span"><span class="color-red">Sectumsempra (Rupal and Avneet) [new team] </span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Chapel</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redteam-rubies-atibhi-and-pratekshaspan"><span class="color-red">Team Rubies (Atibhi and Prateksha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Bangalore, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: ifme.org</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h4 id="part-time-sponsored-teams">Part-time Sponsored Teams</h4>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbrazilian-housewives-coding-camila-and-stefannispan"><span class="color-red">Brazilian Housewives Coding (Camila and Stefanni)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Vancouver, BC, Canada<br />
<em>Project</em>: PublicLab</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reddelsquared-arushi-and-sharmisthaspan"><span class="color-red">DelSquared (Arushi and Sharmistha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Tessel</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reddv-team-diana-and-violeta-new-teamspan"><span class="color-red">DV Team (Diana and Violeta) [new team]</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Barcelona, Spain<br />
<em>Project</em>: LivingStyleGuide</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redpopcorn-arati-and-jessica-new-teamspan"><span class="color-red">Popcorn (Arati and Jessica) [new team]</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: Nextcloud</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redpotatocode-alina-and-sabinespan"><span class="color-red">potatoCode (Alina and Sabine)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Amsterdam, Netherlands<br />
<em>Project</em>: Stretchly</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redsunshine-sujin-and-gyujinspan"><span class="color-red">Sunshine (Sujin and Gyujin)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Seoul, South Korea<br />
<em>Project</em>: Babel</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h3 id="you-did-this">You did this!</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-05-18-rgsoc-2018-teams-announcement-sponsors_all-900x1150.png" alt="Thanks to all of the sponsors and individual donors! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Thanks to all of the sponsors and individual donors! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
And the RGSoC 2018's Teams Are...Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-04-21T00:00:00+00:002018-04-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-2018-teams-part1<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/265904630" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/265904630">You Are Accepted To RGSoC 2018!</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user51331690">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>Every year, as we send the acceptance emails to the teams who get into the program, we try to imagine how the applicants reacted when they read the news. For RGSoC 2018 we decided to do things differently: instead of sending an email, we scheduled a call with them and told them ourselves!</p>
<p>At the beginning, we felt as nervous as our applicants, but after the initial nervousness had faded, we had a blast “playing Oprah”. We just knew we had to share this joy with you, so here is a video of their reactions.</p>
<h3 id="the-9-selected-teams-for-now">The 9 selected teams… For now!</h3>
<h4 id="full-time-sponsored-teams">Full-time Sponsored Teams</h4>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-red101-days-of-summer-nupur-and-paavinispan"><span class="color-red">101 Days of Summer (Nupur and Paavini)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Servo</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redwe-init-akshita-and-rahmeenspan"><span class="color-red">$we init (Akshita and Rahmeen)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Probot</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redakaringula-stellamaris-and-rachaelspan"><span class="color-red">Akaringula (StellaMaris and Rachael)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Nairobi, Kenya<br />
<em>Project</em>: EBWiki</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbarcelona-duo-amalia-and-lorispan"><span class="color-red">Barcelona Duo (Amalia and Lori)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Barcelona, Spain<br />
<em>Project</em>: Exercism</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redteam-rubies-atibhi-and-pratekshaspan"><span class="color-red">Team Rubies (Atibhi and Prateksha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Bangalore, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: ifme.org</p>
<h4 id="part-time-sponsored-teams">Part-time Sponsored Teams</h4>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbrazilian-housewives-coding-camila-and-stefannispan"><span class="color-red">Brazilian Housewives Coding (Camila and Stefanni)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Vancouver, BC, Canada<br />
<em>Project</em>: PublicLab</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reddelsquared-arushi-and-sharmisthaspan"><span class="color-red">DelSquared (Arushi and Sharmistha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Tessel</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redpotatocode-alina-and-sabinespan"><span class="color-red">potatoCode (Alina and Sabine)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Amsterdam, Netherlands<br />
<em>Project</em>: Stretchly</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redsunshine-sujin-and-gyujinspan"><span class="color-red">Sunshine (Sujin and Gyujin)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Seoul, South Korea<br />
<em>Project</em>: Babel</p>
<h3 id="yes-you-read-that-right-for-now">Yes, you read that right: “For now”!</h3>
<p>By taking on board these 9 teams, <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-04-06-rgsoc-2018-crowdfunding-countdown">we have officially passed the 200 RGSoC scholars mark</a>! However, after receiving 195 applications in 2018 and training 20 teams each edition for the past 3 years, we couldn’t close the crowdfunding campaign just yet. <strong>We want to change more lives!</strong></p>
<p><span class="color-red"><strong>This means we will be extending our campaign until the 15th of May, and the spots will be given to a batch of teams we have on a waiting list.</strong></span> As we raise more money, we will secure those teams one by one and share this publicly. We really hope to sponsor all of the teams on the waiting list — what can we say? We are believers!</p>
<h3 id="lets-get-these-teams-sponsored">Let’s get these teams sponsored!</h3>
<p>How can you help us make the dreams of these candidates come true by participating at RGSoC? Besides <a href="http://bit.ly/rgsoc-donate">donating to our crowdfunding campaign</a> (if you can, of course), it would be great if you helped us with the following:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Talk with your friends and people at work about our program.</strong> Share our <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/status/987757077614514177">twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/620914904656191/videos/1734881533259517/">facebook</a> posts or even <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-02-15-rgsoc-2018-crowdfunding-campaign">this video</a> about what we have accomplished in the past 5 editions. Let’s reach as many people as possible!</li>
<li><strong>Do you know any companies who might be interested in sponsoring?</strong> Please get in touch with us via email campaign@rgsoc.org.</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="a-special-message-to-the-teams-who-didnt-get-into-this-years-program">A special message to the teams who didn’t get into this year’s program</h3>
<p>First and foremost, thank you for applying to RGSoC. We wish we could have everyone on board but unfortunately it is not possible. We are honoured that you believe in us and in our program, but please do not give up; your journey in tech and Open Source has just begun!</p>
<h3 id="and-a-huge-thank-you-to-everyone-who-made-this-possible">And a huge thank you to everyone who made this possible!</h3>
<p>Yes, <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/#donors">all of our incredible donors</a> too!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-04-21-rgsoc-2018-sponsors.png" alt="RGSoC 2018 Sponsors (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Thankful for RGSoC 2018 Sponsors (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
Crowdfunding Campaign Countdown Just StartedAna Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-04-06T00:00:00+00:002018-04-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-2018-crowdfunding-countdown<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-04-06-rgsoc-teams-2013-2017_rainbow-948x455px.png" alt="5 Years of RGSoC Teams (image by multiple people)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>4 teams sponsored with the help of our sponsors and individual donors (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>Back in 2013, when we received 18 applicants for the first Rails Girls Summer of Code, we couldn’t imagine that these 18 people would turn into 188 a few editions later. What makes these numbers even more thrilling is the fact that 90% of them are still working in tech, 55% are still contributing to Open Source Software (OSS) and 8% have founded their own company — as per a survey we did with our students in 2015.</p>
<p>Side by side with these impressive stats, from the number of coaches to the OSS Projects we have worked on, are the inspiring stories of our participants, coaches, mentors, supervisors and organisers. RGSoC is made of all of our stories together and the impact each of us has in our communities — you can read some of these stories on our #ThankfulForRGSoC series here.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-04-06-rgsoc-teams-2013-2017_thankfulforrgsoc-stories.png" alt="#ThankfulForRGSoC Stories (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>#ThankfulForRGSoC Stories (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>Edition after edition, together we have been changing the world, slowly but surely, creating new communities — some of them in remote places — and encouraging these role models who, just by being themselves and pursuing their career in tech, have been inspiring even more people from underrepresented minorities to follow their dreams in this field.</p>
<h2 id="days-until-the-crowdfunding-campaign-closes">15 days until the crowdfunding campaign closes</h2>
<p>The selection process is currently underway and we hope to send the acceptance letters on the 17th of April. This means that in the next few weeks we need to know how much funding we have in order to select the teams.
Considering that we have raised 43255 USD, we have enough money to sponsor 4,5 teams. We don’t want to diminish this accomplishment by any means, as we are profoundly grateful for all the support we have received so far, but as you might have noticed, we are 7,5 teams from our initial goal of sponsoring 12 teams. This means that we are far from the funding goals of previous years at this time of the year.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-04-06-rgsoc-teams-2013-2017_donations-bar-sponsors.png" alt="4 teams sponsored with the help of our sponsors and individual donors (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>4 teams sponsored with the help of our sponsors and individual donors (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h2 id="help-us-beat-the-200-scholars-mark">Help us beat the 200 scholars mark!</h2>
<p>We still have time! We are 1,5 teams away from beating the 200 scholars mark and 7,5 teams away from sponsoring the 12 teams that we usually do, so let’s roll up our sleeves and push our campaign! So how can you help?</p>
<p>If your company or a company you know might be interested to support our program, please feel free to send us an email to contact@rgsoc.org. We will happily follow up on any leads or intros. Additionally, if you need any resources or info about RGSoC you can check our <a href="https://speakerdeck.com/alicetragedy/rgsoc-2018-sponsor-pitch">sponsor deck</a> and <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/packages/">sponsor packages</a>.</p>
<p>Another way to help is to talk with your friends in-person and share our crowdfunding campaign posts or any other information that you find important on social media. A little can go a long way, so let’s do our best to fund as many teams as possible for 2018!</p>
<p>Thank you — you’re awesome!</p>
RGSoC 2018's Crowdfunding Campaign is Now OpenAna Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:002018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-2018-crowdfunding-campaign<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/255837439" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/255837439">RGSoC 2018's Crowdfunding Campaign is now Open!</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user51331690">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>One, two, three, four, five and onto the sixth edition of RGSoC!</strong> It seems like it was yesterday when a cool bunch of people in Berlin decided to get together and launch the first edition of our summer of code.</p>
<p>Since then and in <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2017-02-16-anniversary-campaign">#5YearsOfRGSoC</a> with your help we have:</p>
<ul>
<li>Trained <strong>185 participants</strong> — that’s 68 sponsored teams and 28 volunteering teams</li>
<li>Reached people from <strong>55 locations</strong> out of 29 countries</li>
<li>Contributed to <strong>67 Open Source Projects</strong></li>
<li>Raised over <strong>500.000 USD</strong> with the help of 115 sponsors and hundreds of individual donors</li>
<li>Participated in <strong>63 conferences</strong></li>
<li>Received a <strong>Ruby Hero Award</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>We couldn’t be happier about what we have accomplished together and we’re extremely grateful to everyone who has been part of our collective journey — yes, you too!</p>
<h3 id="the-best-part-of-rgsoc-is-you">The best part of RGSoC… Is you!</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-15-rgsoc-moments.gif" alt="#ThankfulForRGSoC (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>RGSoC moments that we are thankful for (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>We’re happiest when a former participant sends us an email saying they got their dream job as a software developer. Or when one of our participants creates their own Open Source project. Or when someone decided to face their imposter syndrome and tried programming for the first time. Or when we inspire people to be Diversity and Inclusion advocates. Or when we have the incredible opportunity to meet in person the mentor with whom we’ve been talking over video calls during the summer.</p>
<p><strong>These are the things, big and tiny, that make everything magical and fulfilling. The things that make us feel even more #ThankfulForRGSoC</strong>.</p>
<p>When we started RGSoC all those years ago, all we wanted to do was to give something to the OSS and tech communities, and still we ended up receiving way more. We know you can relate to this, right? :)</p>
<h3 id="lets-make-rgsoc-2018-happen">Let’s make RGSoC 2018 happen!</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-15-loading-bar.gif" alt="Sponsor RGSoC 2018's Teams ans share with us why you are #ThankfulForRGSoC (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Sponsor RGSoC 2018's Teams ans share with us why you are #ThankfulForRGSoC (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>We’re here to stay and to keep creating real change, by welcoming and training women and non-binary individuals to code and advocate for a diverse and inclusive Open Source community.</p>
<p>Please, join us once again and let’s keep diversifying tech <em>together</em>!</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://bit.ly/rgsoc-campaign">Help us fund RGSoC 2018</a> and share with us why you are <a href="http://bit.ly/thankfulforrgsoc">#ThankfulForRGSoC</a>!</strong>
<strong>We would love to hear your story!</strong></p>
RGSoC 2018's Applications are openAna Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2018-02-02T00:00:00+00:002018-02-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-2018-applications-are-open<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-02-rgsoc-applications-are-open.gif" alt="RGSoC 2018 Applications are open! (illustration by Rebecca Conrad and Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>RGSoC 2018 Applications are open! (illustration by Rebecca Conrad and gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>Yes, RGSoC applications for 2018 are officially open! If you want to jumpstart your career as a software developer, or transition to a different language or framework, RGSoC is for you. From July 1st to September 30th, you’ll be working on an Open Source Project with the help of the project maintainer (referred to as mentor), coaches and supervisors. During this time and in order to help you focus on coding and learning, you’ll receive a full-time scholarship.</p>
<p>What follows is an overview of what you need to apply, but make sure you also read our <a href="http://bit.ly/rgsoc-application-guide">guides</a> carefully, as more detailed information can be found there!</p>
<h3 id="additional-support-for-your-application">Additional support for your application</h3>
<p>In order to make this process easier for you, during the month of February we’ll be publishing videos and organizing twitter chats to explain a bit more about the application process and reply to your frequently asked questions.</p>
<p><strong>We will be sharing all this information on social media, so we advise you to follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Rails-Girls-Summer-of-Code-620914904656191/">Facebook</a>!</strong></p>
<h3 id="who-can-apply">Who can apply?</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-02-rgsoc-applications-are-open-you.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
We welcome all people with non-binary gender identities or who identify as women (transgender or cisgender). <br />
RGSoC participants need to be available to work full-time for 3 months (from July 1st to September 30th). Additionally, this year we’ve introduced a few slots for <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-01-23-rgsoc-2018-announcements">part-time teams</a>.</p>
<p>It’s really important for us that the participants have been learning to code continuously for one year and are involved in the community (through meetups, workshops or conferences).
Participants should also be proficient in English so that they can be better accompanied by everyone in the team.</p>
<h3 id="find-a-teammate">Find a teammate</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-02-rgsoc-applications-are-open-team.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
In order for you to apply, you need to do so with another person — as a team. Your teammate should be living in the same location or area so that you can meet up every day to work. Please make sure that the person you are working with is a person you get along with, because you’ll be working together on a daily basis during the program.</p>
<p>Want to find a teammate, but don’t know where to start? Check this <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/">“Finding your team”</a> guide.</p>
<h3 id="find-coaches">Find coaches</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-02-rgsoc-applications-are-open-coaches.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
Coaches are software developers that will work with you on a regular basis — 4 to 8 hours a week. Finding coaches, though sometimes difficult, is one of the most important tasks you’ll have in preparation for your application, as they’ll be your main support and will guide you throughout the program. You need to have a minimum of two and a maximum of four coaches.
Coaches can be remote, however we strongly advise that you try to find local coaches before looking for remote coaches.</p>
<p>Additionally this year, <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2018-01-23-rgsoc-2018-announcements">project maintainers can add project coaches</a>. These coaches will not count towards your “allocated” amount of coaches.</p>
<p>Tips on how to find coaches are in <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/">this guide</a>; if you want to send information to a potential coach, you can direct them to <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching/">our guide for coaches</a>.</p>
<h3 id="find-a-coaching-company--workspace">Find a coaching company / workspace</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-02-rgsoc-applications-are-open-workspace.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
We recommend you find a good place to work with your team, and coaching companies can be a great asset for your RGSoC journey. In case you’re trying to reach out to a specific company, we have gathered the necessary information on — yes, you guessed it — our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">coaching company guide</a>.</p>
<p>If you’re not able to find a coaching company, coworking spaces and universities can be a good option too.</p>
<h3 id="choose-a-project">Choose a project</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-02-rgsoc-applications-are-open-project.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
Now that you’ve gathered your team, it’s time to pick a primary and a secondary project. The secondary project will count as backup in case your primary project is not available or chosen by another selected team.</p>
<p>Start by taking a look at our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects">list of Open Source projects</a> in our RGSoC teams app. Please talk with your coaches about which projects to choose, and consider the level of difficulty of the tasks you’ll be working on, how familiar you are with the project, and the knowledge you and your coaches have of the languages and frameworks used.</p>
<h3 id="apply">Apply</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-02-02-rgsoc-applications-are-open-apply.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
It’s time to apply! All the applications are processed through <a href="http://bit.ly/rgsoc-teams-app">RGSoC’s Teams App</a> and you need to login using GitHub. You can find more detailed information about filling out the form in our <a href="http://bit.ly/rgsoc-application-guide">Application Guide</a>.</p>
<p>We advise you to start filling the application form early on — it can be saved as a draft, so you can always come back to it later. Remember that the application process closes on February 28th at 17:00 UTC, so all applications received after that time won’t be considered.</p>
<p>We wish you the best of luck with your application!</p>
Announcing part-time scholarships, project coaches and conference collaborationVaishali Thakkarhttp://twitter.com/kernel_girl2018-01-23T00:00:00+00:002018-01-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-2018-announcements<p>One of the goals of RGSoC is to increase the number of diverse contributors in open source projects and make the open source communities more inclusive. To achieve this goal we have been providing paid, 3-month, full-time scholarships to teams of participants to work on open source projects.</p>
<h3 id="supporting-a-wide-range-of-applicants">Supporting a wide range of applicants</h3>
<p>From our experience over the last 5 years, some great applicants are not able to work on the projects full-time because they are in primary caregiver roles, are unable to quit a part-time job on such short notice in order to participate, are students, or have other commitments. For many of these applicants, it’s also not always possible to take part in the program without remuneration. After talking about the goals of our program (creating role models and making the Open Source communities more diverse), we collectively realised that as an organisation, we want to be able to support as many different lifestyles and needs of our applicants as possible. For this reason, we are excited to announce that <b>in 2018, RGSoC will have a limited number of part-time scholarship slots.</b></p>
<p>With this change we would also like to encourage project mentors/maintainers who may have limited availability during our program period. We’ve extended our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2017-12-18-rgsoc-2018-project-submissions-open">project submission deadline</a> to <b>January 28, 2018.</b></p>
<h3 id="faqs">FAQs</h3>
<p>To help you get an idea of how this will affect the rest of the program, we’ve collected answers to potential questions here:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Will you continue to provide full-time scholarships?</p>
<p>Yes, we will have both full-time and part-time scholarship slots in RGSoC 2018.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Will there be volunteering teams as well?</p>
<p>No, there won’t be any volunteering teams in RGSoC 2018.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>How many part-time scholarship slots will be available?</p>
<p>As this is our first time doing part-time sponsored teams, we want to limit the number of part-time scholarship slots. We
plan to offer up to 5 slots this year. As this is something we’re trying for the first time, it will also depend on the
type of applications we receive. Let’s see where this takes us for next year!</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2018/2018-01-23-teams-paid-part-time-scholarship.gif" alt="RGSoC 2018 Announcements (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Part time paid scholarships (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<h3 id="other-changes">Other changes</h3>
<p>Along with introducing part-time scholarships, we also want to announce that in this edition, project mentors will be able to add project coaches from their open source communities who can help participants with their project work; this can be done directly in their project submission. We’ve also decided to limit the maximum amount of coaches applicants can add to their application to 4.</p>
<p>(If you’re curious about what it means to become a Rails Girls Summer Of Code coach, read <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching/">here</a>)</p>
<p>Since the beginning of RGSoC, we have been collaborating with conferences to provide diversity tickets to our participants and give them the chance to attend various conferences. We are proud to keep this tradition going: we’ll continue to offer diversity tickets to our participants.
On this note: If you’re a conference that supports diversity and are interested in providing diversity tickets to our participants, drop us a line at contact@rgsoc.org.</p>
Team Bundledore at dotJS and dotCSS 2017Amritahttp://twitter.com/TeamBundledore2017-12-26T00:00:00+00:002017-12-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-bundledore-at-dotjs-and-dotcss<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bundledore-dotconferences.jpeg" alt="Team Bundledore at dotJS and dotCSS 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>dotconferences (Image: www.dotconferences.com)</b></div>
<p>According to their website, dotconferences started with a simple idea, “What if we organized a developer conference with the format and the quality standards of TED?”
And indeed, they did ! Attending dotjs and dotcss conference and also giving a lightning talk there was a very enriching experience for me. Anagha, unfortunately, couldn’t attend due to some personal issues.</p>
<p>When I left India, I did not expect to be giving a presentation and the overflow lightning talks was a pleasant opportunity. It was my first talk ever and I hope I did a good job :)</p>
<h2 id="dotcss-conference">dotCSS Conference</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bundledore-dotCSS.jpg" alt="Team Bundledore at dotCSS 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>dotconferences (Image: Flickr account of dotconference)</b></div>
<p>I had with me a small notebook to jot down important points about the talks during the two days. It helped me to be more attentive and now I have a set of mini projects to work on.</p>
<p>The general attitude in the conference was very upbeat and friendly. The extremely wonderful organizers made it so easy for all of us to interact. There were many talks including one on Compilers in styling Web UI. The talk started with the basics like the main uses of compilers and went on to include more complex stuff. I enjoyed the talk by one of the speakers on how we can use CSS to make a search engine. He started by explaining the limitations of CSS and how they can be overcome to do way more than just styling. Definitely, something I’ll do when I get a chance! There was a talk titled Schrodinger’s Website which was basically on the Adobe portfolio and the challenges faced while implementing it. The title was interesting, the talk even more so.</p>
<p>The event included a section on lightning talks. My favourite was one where the speaker demonstrated the making of a “Christmas ball” using HTML, CSS and math.
Another talk that was particularly interesting was on Media queries- Level4. It started with describing the features of the previous levels followed by the future, media queries 4 and 5.</p>
<h2 id="dotjs-conference">dotJS Conference</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bundledore-dotJS.jpeg" alt="Team Bundledore at dotJS 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>dotJS (Image: Amrita's phone)</b></div>
<p>dotJS was way bigger than dotCSS in the sense that there were more people and a lot more companies had their stalls in the venue. I spent some time going around to the companies stall and finding out about what they do. <a href="https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/">Lighthouse</a> had also put up a stall and I had a fun time analyzing the performance of a small static website that I had put up around a year back. The analysis was on the basis of how progressive the app was, on how the app performed and its accessibility.</p>
<p>There were talks on State management in GraphQL, on Server Side Rendering and on module bundlers. There was even a talk on being evil with JS, which I really enjoyed :) During the talk, the speaker live coded three pop-ups chase each other across the screen!</p>
<p>My favourite by far was by Marcy Sutton, an accessibility advocate. Her talk was on Enabling Users in Client-Rendered Applications.She talked very passionately about how developers generally don’t consider differently abled users while designing an app. The talk was on diagnosing accessibility issues in an app and also elaborated on different tools.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bundledore-Amrita-talk.jpeg" alt="Team Bundledore at dotJS and dotCSS 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Amrita's presentation (Image: Flickr account of dotconferences)</b></div>
<p>My presentation was a part of the overflow lightning talks. I started off by explaining about RGSoC, about how it works.I talked about the issues we, as a team, solved and the features implemented. The slot as only for about 4 minutes so I had to squeeze everything in. I am hoping that I could get my point across!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bundledore-dotconferences-presentation.jpeg" alt="Team Bundledore at dotJS and dotCSS 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Amrita's presentation (Image: Amrita's phone)</b></div>
<p>I think the array of talks, the food, the venue and the awesome organizers made the conferences a success. A big thank you to all of the organizers who made me feel really welcome :) Thank You RGSoC and thank you dotConferences !</p>
Thanks for diversifying tech with us!Inês Coelhohttp://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:002017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/thanks-for-diversifying-tech-with-us<p>For the past five years, every (Northern Hemisphere) summer, RGSoC has been offering the opportunity for all women and non-binary people from all over the world to work on an Open Source project. This wouldn’t be possible without the help and love of our wonderful community.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-12-12-change-the-world.jpg" alt="Together we are changing the world!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our 20 teams — the lives we touched on the 2017 edition of RGSoC (Image: Inês Coelho)</div>
<h3 id="our-sponsors-and-donors">Our sponsors and donors</h3>
<p>Our program is based on a crowdfunding and sponsorship campaign, whose money is used to finance our teams. This year we were able to financially support 16 out of our 20 participating teams of two!</p>
<p>We can’t thank enough all the companies that <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">sponsored</a> RGSoC: we wouldn’t be here without you! A special thank you goes to our amazing partners, <a href="https://travis-ci.com/">Travis CI</a> and <a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a>, our platinum sponsor <a href="https://www.nokia.com">Nokia</a> and our gold sponsors, <a href="https://opensource.google.com/">Google Open Source</a> and <a href="https://www.malwarebytes.com/">Malwarebytes</a>.</p>
<p>We are also extremely grateful to the 161 individuals who donated to our campaign. You are the best!</p>
<p>And, of course, a huge thank you to all the <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/conferences/#conferences">conferences</a> that welcomed our participants and donated tickets to our teams — you are awesome!</p>
<h3 id="our-supporting-elements">Our supporting elements</h3>
<p>Participating teams are supported throughout the summer by <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/team">dedicated volunteers</a>.</p>
<p>There are no words to express our gratitude towards them all: the mentors who guided the work of our teams, the coaches that offered their time and expertise to help our teams, the coaching companies who hosted our teams during the summer, the supervisors who made sure that everything was running smoothly, the <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/code-of-conduct/#contact">trust committee</a> who offered a safe haven to whoever needed it.</p>
<p>You are the people who made RGSoC a reality! Thank you.</p>
<h3 id="our-organizers">Our organizers</h3>
<p>Under the hood of RGSoC, there is a melting pot of people from different countries, cultures, backgrounds, beliefs and religions, united with the same purpose: to diversify tech! All year round, these volunteers are here preparing, planning, developing and working on the backend of RGSoC.</p>
<p>A huge shout-out to our 2017 team: Ana Sofia, Anika, Anna, Carsten, Inês, Laura, Lucas, Maria, Max, Ramon, Ulrike and Vaishali!</p>
<p>Your love and dedication are what makes RGSoC possible year after year.</p>
<h3 id="thank-you-all">Thank you all!</h3>
<p>From the bottom of our hearts: thank you! ♡</p>
<p>(click on the image for a surprise!)
<a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/thank-you-2017"><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-12-12-thankyou.gif" alt="Thank you all" /></a></p>
<div class="image-credits">Shout-out to everyone that made RGSoC 2017 possible (Image: Inês Coelho)</div>
Open Source Project Submissions for 2018 are now open!Vaishali Thakkarhttp://twitter.com/kernel_girl2017-12-18T00:00:00+00:002017-12-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-2018-project-submissions-open<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-12-18-rgsoc-2018-project-submissions-open.gif" alt="RGSoC 2018 OSS Project Submissions (in ALL languages) are open! (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>RGSoC 2018 OSS Project Submissions (in ALL languages) are open! (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)</b></div>
<p>Hello awesome mentors!</p>
<p>We are back with RGSoC 2018. It gives us immense pleasure to announce that <b>our call for open source project submissions is now open, YAY!</b></p>
<p>You might have questions about the project submissions, so we have it all covered for you here:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>What does it mean to be a mentor for RGSoC 2018?</p>
<p>Usually a mentor is a maintainer of the proposed project (or a core contributor) and is the project’s dedicated contact person for the
team throughout the program. Checkout our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">mentors guide</a> for more information.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Our project doesn’t use Rails. Can we still apply to RGSoC?</p>
<p>Yes. Even though our name use ‘Rails’ in our program, we are a language agnostic program, and we’ve had projects in the past using a
variety of languages like Python, Rust, and Javascript. Projects in all programming languages and using all technologies are welcome!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>When will we be informed about whether our project has been selected for RGSoC 2018?</p>
<p>You have until <b>January 24, 2018</b> to submit your project; this year, we will be looking through all the submissions after the
deadline, so you will be informed at the end of January.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>So, what are you waiting for? Start right now and submit your project <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">here</a>. Use our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">mentors guide</a> and feel free to send us an email to <b>contact@rgsoc.org</b> if you have specific questions.</p>
<p>Also, don’t forget to share it on social media to help us make RGSoC 2018 the year with the most diverse selection of projects. May the force be with you!</p>
<p><img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/l1J9KJE8BKO09QTzW/giphy.gif" alt="Image source: giphy.com" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Image source: giphy.com</b></div>
Team Fusion at DEV DAY 2017Janakshi and Kalpanihttp://twitter.com/TeamFusionJK2017-12-15T00:00:00+00:002017-12-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-fusion-at-dev-day-2017<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-11-18-dev-day-2017-logo.png" alt="Team Fusion at Dev Day 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Dev Day 2017 Logo (Image : Dev Day Facebook Page)</b></div>
<p>Participating in RGSoC 2017 not only gave a us the opportunity to work on an open source project, but also gave us lots of other opportunities so we can grow as techies. One of the most amazing opportunities we got from RGSoC 2017 was the conference offers. We got two conference offers, one for Dev Day 2017 and another for Ruby Conf AU 2018. And recently we participated in DEV DAY 2017, which was held at Cinnamon Grand Hotel, Colombo in Sri Lanka. Let’s see how interesting it was..😇</p>
<p>On 9th November 2017 early morning (8:00 am) we arrived at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel, Colombo in Sri Lanka. Both of us were very excited about DEV DAY and the first thing we saw when we were entering the hall, was a huge group of techies having breakfast; let’s say networking. After the registration, wearing our name tags, we also joined the groups to have breakfast together.🥪☕ And we were so glad that we joined them, because we met new friends who enjoyed listening to what we did during RGSoC and we also learned a lot about them.</p>
<p>After the breakfast, then arrived the most awaited sessions.🎉 Altogether DEV DAY 2017 had around 24 sessions, where two of them are opening keynotes, one is a closing keynote and the others are parallel sessions where we had to split up according to our interests.</p>
<p>Sessions started with <strong>Marcus Devold Soknes</strong> opening his keynote where he shared his experiences in Sri Lanka. One thing he tried to emphasize was looking at our products as a shop when we are measuring their growth. And he also talked about concepts like, design thinking, design driven culture, the lean start-up and etc. He shared that he adopts lean startup structure while making sure that the customer is always first. And he concluded his keynote sharing the words, <strong>“Keep it Simple”</strong>☝.</p>
<p>The second keynote was done by <strong>Satyajeet Singh</strong> , who is currently the Head of Platform Partnership in India at Facebook. During his session he talked about Facebook’s vision, which is to bring the world together. He also explained about the multiplier effect using the examples like Baby Chakra and Rappler. And to conclude his talk, he shared about Facebook’s services such as FbStart and Facebook Analytics.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-11-18-dev-day-speakers.jpg" alt="Team Fusion at Dev Day 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Dev Day 2017 Speakers (Image : ReadMe)</b></div>
<p>Then there was a short tea break with snacks ☕ and next came the parallel sessions. Just like the hall was split in to two for the parallel sessions, we (team fusion) also had to split in to two, so we can attend the sessions , according to our preference. There were 20 parallel sessions in three different tracks namely, DISC (DevOps, IOT, Security, Cloud), ACLA (Architecture, Coding, Lean, Agile), and IDEU (Innovation, Disruptive, Entrepreneurship, UI/UX). And we could attend six parallel sessions altogether. For some of the sessions we attended together, for some, we attended separately. But it was fun , because we could share the interesting points we learned from each of these sessions with each other during our evening tea break, which made
the evening tea, tastier. ☕😁</p>
<p>And following are the parallel sessions we attended. 👇</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Handling Uncertainty in Data ware housing by <strong>Dinesh Asanka</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Demystifying Service Based Architecture – Journey towards micro services and ahead by <strong>Thurupathan Vijayakumar</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The Electricity Between Us: Humans and Information by <strong>Ben Taylor</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Exploring Narrative techniques for delivering UX Design by <strong>Nivedita Kamat</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>An introduction to the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs by <strong>Ben Sadeghi</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Give your app the ability to think, using Azure machine learning, Cognitive Services, and neural networks by <strong>Haritha Thilakarathne</strong></p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>During each of these interesting session we learned something new. Some topics were totally new to us, yet, were interesting. We learned about Big data, concepts like fuzzy categorization and Box plot method, the importance of using design patterns, data embodiment, how products like Google Home and Cortana are being a part of digitizing the world, the importance of mastering the storytelling for UX design, how important is the user in product development, cognitive services, Microsoft AI, cognitive computing, concepts in Machine Learning and many more. Most of these sessions were not just interesting sessions that gave us lot to learn, but also eye openers for us. 👀</p>
<p>And we should also mention about the amazing closing keynote done by <strong>Torgier Andrew Waterhouse</strong>, who is currently the Director of Internet & New Media at ICT Norway. He started his keynote explaining us about the possibilities of the technology. Then he raised the question, <strong>“How can we empower each other to be superheroes with technology?”</strong> , which made us think for a while, because why not? 💪🚀 Throughout his talk, he talked about the history of Internet, how it is being an effect on improving the societies, and how important it is for us. And he also said, <strong>“You don’t need permission to put something on the Internet”</strong> meaning we don’t need permission to innovate and launch it on the internet, which triggered us to think about our innovative skills. However he also emphasized the fact that we should use internet <strong>correctly</strong>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-11-18-dev-day-moments.jpg" alt="Team Fusion at Dev Day 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our Dev Day 2017 moments (Image : ReadMe and Janakshi's Phone)</b></div>
<p>Apart from these wonderful sessions and tea breaks, we also got the chance to enjoy a wonderful lunch which was full of flavours. 😁 During the lunch break, apart from eating all the good food 🍝🍨🍰, we got the chance to network with lots of new faces for us, yet not so new to the IT Industry. One of them was <strong>Dr. Raomal Perera</strong>, who was also a Dev Day 2017 speaker. It was really nice to talk to him and the other new friends about our experiences and also about their experiences.</p>
<p>So this is how interesting was our experience at Dev Day 2017. It was indeed a great day for the both of us. And we still have one more conference to experience as a team, well, as Team Fusion. And that’s RubyConf Australia 2018. We are so excited!..😇 And we would like to thank our lovely RGSoC team for giving us these amazing opportunities. It really means a lot for us. You are the <strong>BEST</strong>.👍</p>
Team Alexa at Web SummitSasha @religofsilhttp://twitter.com/linguistsare2017-11-27T00:00:00+00:002017-11-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team- Alexa-at-Web-Summit<p>Well, a part of team Alexa. Unfortunately, Sasha @melanoya couldn’t go. :(
But she was in my heart the whole time!</p>
<p>A couple of weeks ago I attended Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. It is said to be the largest tech conference in the world – this year there were more than 60 thousand attendees, according to the <a href="https://websummit.com/">conference website</a>. I’ve been at meetups and tech conferences before, but never outside Russia, and I definitely have never been at a tech event of this scale.</p>
<h2 id="opening-night">Opening night</h2>
<p>First night of the conference, there was an opening ceremony for the Web Summit, where CEOs of large tech companies and government officials were discussing the need to build relationships between tech and non-tech organisations. There were also talks about the challenges that the industry will face in the next years. I particularly liked Bryan Johnson’s talk about the need to develop some tools to improve our own brain, instead of relying on artificial intelligence.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Alexa-opening.JPG" alt="Opening Night" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Opening night. Photo taken by me. </div>
<h2 id="first-day">First day</h2>
<p>First day of the conference was very busy and tiresome for me, because I wanted to attend all the talks at the same time, and the venue was truly gigantic: there was a stadium full of people, and there were four huge pavilions. It took me about 20 minutes each time just to get from one side of the venue to another, but I did attend the talks I wanted to hear the most. I liked the talk of comma.ai’s founder George Hotz about self-driving cars and the future of open source. He believes that the only way car companies will be able to stay in the market is for them to open their source code and let other programmers review it and contribute.</p>
<p>After the main program, there was a Sunset Summit without talks, but with good music, food and interesting people to meet. I met a startup from Romania, some programmers from Georgia, and many other people from different countries. And I made myself a pin at Google lounge!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Alexa-pin.jpg" alt="Android pin" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> A customized Android pin! I tried to make it look like me, but didn't succeed. :( Photo taken by me. </div>
<h2 id="second-day">Second day</h2>
<p>Second day was less tiresome for me, mostly because all the talks I attended were at one place: binate.io, a conference about data science and machine learning. I’ve listened to talks on psychohistory – a way to learn about people’s emotions during some historical events, on security of users’ data, and many other interesting things.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Alexa-straight-outta-context.jpg" alt="binate.io conference" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Random slide from one of the talks. Photo taken by me. </div>
<p>This day I also met team Gemini!</p>
<p>In the evening, I attended an afterparty for women in tech, where I met some incredible data scientists, programmers, and tech writers.</p>
<h2 id="last-day">Last day</h2>
<p>I decided not to attend too many talks at the last day of the conference, so I went networking instead. I met some incredible startups from all around the globe, focused mostly on education and building inclusive environment. The most fascinating for me was to meet a company from South Korea that developed devices for people who use Braille.</p>
<p>In the evening, there was a closing ceremony, after which I went home. I didn’t want Web Summit to end, and I wish I took some more time to get to know Lisbon. Anyway, it was a great summit, and I’m thankful to RGSoC for giving me the opportunity to attend the conference.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Alexa-Lisbon.JPG" alt="Lisbon" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> The first thing I saw when I arrived to Lisbon. Photo taken by me. </div>
The RGSoC 2017' bluesInês Coelhohttp://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho2017-11-24T00:00:00+00:002017-11-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/the-rgsoc-2017-blues<p>Almost two months have passed since the end of Rails Girls Summer of Code 2017, and we can’t shake off this blue feeling. After 3 fantastic months working with extraordinary people from all over the world - we miss it badly!</p>
<p>To help us cope, let’s take a little trip down memory lane!</p>
<h3 id="our-fifth-year-in-numbers">Our fifth year in numbers</h3>
<p>This year marked the <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2017-04-10-5yearsofrgsoc">fifth anniversary of RGSoC</a> and the summer went on with a blast! If you don’t believe us, just look at the numbers:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-11-22-infographic.png" alt="2017 RGSoC infographic" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">RGSoC 2017 in numbers (Image: Inês Coelho)</div>
<p>We are so proud of our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2017-05-22-teams-2017">20 teams</a>, the goals they achieved this summer, how they have overcome the obstacles in their paths and how much they have grown! Some of our participants are already working in tech and we couldn’t be happier!</p>
<p>We couldn’t have achieved this without your help! You that donated to our campaign and sponsored these teams, you that mentored them during the summer, you that offered volunteer technical support and you that helped us organize and support RGSoC - you all contributed to make this summer a reality! Thank you!</p>
<h3 id="end-of-summer-celebrations">End of Summer celebrations</h3>
<p>The end of summer was commemorated all over the world, with public celebrations in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Tirana and Pristina. Some unofficial parties are still going on, as members of our ever-growing community keep bumping on each other at conferences and events!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-11-22-end-of-summer-celebration.png" alt="End of Summer celebration 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">End of summer celebration in Berlin, at Mozilla's headquarters (Image: Anika Lindtner)</div>
<h3 id="after-rgsoc-is-before-rgsoc">After RGSoC is before RGSoC</h3>
<p>This October, some of us got together in Vienna, while others joined up remotely, to wrap-up this edition of Rails Girls Summer of Code and to kick-off the 2018 edition!!! Yes, we are already working hard on that! And we will be back soon with news, so stay tuned!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-11-22-offsite.png" alt="RGSoC offsite 2017" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Wrapping-up RGSoC 2017 (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</div>
<p>We are growing our team! If you are interested in helping us diversify tech, just <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">send us a message</a> - we’ll be happy to meet you!</p>
The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit 🇪🇺Kara de la Marckhttp://twitter.com/KaraMarck2017-11-20T00:00:00+00:002017-11-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/KaradelaMarck-Linux-Foundation-OSSummit-Europe<p>Top resources discovered at the Open Source Summit that RGSoC alumni should consider applying to: <a href="https://www.outreachy.org/">Outreachy</a> and the <a href="https://training.linuxfoundation.org/free-linux-training/linux-training-scholarship-program">Linux Foundation’s LiFT scholarship programme</a>! 🎉</p>
<p>This year the <a href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/archive/2017/open-source-summit-europe">Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit Europe</a> took place in beautiful Prague. Fortunately, thanks to RGSoC, I was able to attend this incredible summit.</p>
<p>The Open Source Summit is <a href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/archive/2017/open-source-summit-europe-/program/schedule">massive</a>, with over a dozen different tracks. In fact, it is a conglomeration of at least <a href="http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/archive/2017/open-source-summit-europe-/program/about">four conferences</a>: LinuxCon, ContainerCon, CloudOpen and the Open Community Conference. In addition, it is run in conjunction with the Embedded Linux Conference. More than 2,000 technologists attend to share information and learn about the latest in open technologies such as Linux, containers, and cloud computing. On the first day, there was a Women in Open Source lunch, which was a pleasant way to be welcomed and also to network. All members of the RGSoC community who were attending the summit found each other at the lunch:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/rgsoc-ossummit-eu-vaishali-ines-jona-kara.jpg" alt="Vaishali, Inês, Jona, and Kara" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Vaishali Thakkar, Inês Coelho, Jona Azizaj, and Kara de la Marck (Image Credit: official OSSummit photographer)</div>
<p>There were talks on the community aspect of open source woven throughout the main three days of the summit. On the third day, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6pISWAq-1cXP4_UZAyRtesk">Linus Torvalds spoke in conversation with Dirk Hohndel</a>. A theme of this conversation was the process the Linux community engages in when working on the kernel. It was interesting to hear Linus Torvalds emphasise the importance of the work done by kernel maintainers: “The people who do the work and are reliable are the most important in the community. We’re looking for more.” I also appreciated that Linus considered increasing diversity in open source intrinsically good: that it is vital to enable all people who are interested in open source to engage and contribute.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/linus-torvalds-on-stage-ossummit.jpg" alt="Linus Torvalds on stage OSSummit EU" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Dirk Hohndel in conversation with Linus Torvalds (Image Credit: official OSSummit photographer)</div>
<p>On the fourth day, there was an optional Diversity Summit which I happily attended. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo from that event, so here is a photo of all the attendees at the Women in Open Source lunch!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/women-oss-lunch-linux-oss-summit.jpg" alt="Women in Open Source lunch OSSummit EU" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Women in Open Source lunch attendees (Image Credit: official OSSummit photographer)</div>
<p>During the summit, I attended both technical talks and talks focused on community and diversity in open source. I found both to be highly beneficial for my work as a developer and also as an organiser of <a href="https://codebar.io/">codebar</a>.</p>
<p>Although I learned a ton throughout the conference, the information that had the most immediate impact on my life was finding out about the <a href="https://www.outreachy.org/">Outreachy</a> programme. Outreachy was discussed during the Kernel Internship presentations and at <a href="https://twitter.com/kernel_girl">Vaishali Thakkar’s</a> talk on mentoring kernel newbies and then again at the Diversity Summit. Knowing that a programme exists is the essential first step to applying, so I am very grateful that I found out about Outreachy at the Open Source Summit. I messaged the organisers to see if I was eligible to apply (they have a clause that Google Summer of Code alumni are not eligible) and they assured me that RGSoC alumni were eligible for the Outreachy programme. What’s more, they said I should apply in the next few days, as the window for applications was about to close. Examining the projects to apply to, I was very interested in <a href="http://opentracing.io/outreachy">OpenTracing</a>, specifically the task of splitting the Jaeger JavaScript OpenTracing library.</p>
<p>Happily, I was already signed up to attend the optional Tracing Summit the next day. As you can imagine, I listened to the Tracing Summit talks with rapt attention. Then it was time to fly home and work very hard on the application. Fortunately, I was accepted onto the Outreachy programme and will be contributing to the Jaeger JavaScript OpenTracing library!</p>
<p>Being at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit was an incredible experience, and it has led to opportunities that I had not previously imagined. I had a wonderful time, learned an enormous amount, made new friends, and got to spend more time with my super RGSoC supervisor, <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho">Inês Coelho</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ines-vaishali-kara-ossummit-prague.jpg" alt="Inês, Vaishali, and Kara" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credit: Inês Coelho, Vaishali Thakkar, and Kara de la Marck</div>
Giving your first technical talkPrachi & Ipshitahttp://twitter.com/Team200OK2017-10-30T00:00:00+00:002017-10-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/giving-your-first-technical-talk<h2 id="overcoming-imposter-syndrome-to-rock-thestage">Overcoming Imposter Syndrome to rock the stage</h2>
<p>Last week, I alongside my RGSoC teammate, Ipshita Chatterjee were invited to speak at <a href="http://berlin2017.codemotionworld.com/">Codemotion Berlin</a> about our project during the summer, <a href="https://coala.io/">coala</a> which is a static code analysis tool and about the program itself. While it wasn’t the first technical conference we were attending, it was the first time we were going to be giving a technical talk and hence, we were quite nervous. We also had a very strong imposter syndrome as many speakers came from stalwarts such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce and we were just college students. Needless to say, our worries were totally unfounded and we ended up having a blast at the conference! Here is what we learned :)</p>
<h3 id="know-youraudience">Know your audience</h3>
<p>As our first step towards preparing for the talk, we researched about our target audience and the conference itself. Codemotion guidelines stated that the attendees usually came from strong technical backgrounds and most of them were already pursuing careers in technology so talks were expected to be of intermediate/advanced level than beginner. This gave us an indicator that we could comfortably use technical terms in our talk and would not necessarily have to simplify the content.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codemotionbln (2).jpg" alt="telling our story at coala.io" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Telling our story at coala.io, Image Credits: Ines</div>
<h3 id="tell-yourstory">Tell your story</h3>
<p>One of the earliest advice that we had received from the people who had given technical talks was to structure it in the most engaging way possible. We began by talking about how we had a very strong impostor syndrome before RGSoC and how we felt empowered enough to talk about it now, we talked about our process of choosing our project and interspersed the dialogue with anecdotes of why it is was awesome. Most importantly, we told our ‘RGSoC and coala’ story.</p>
<h3 id="practice-practice-practice-andengage">Practice, practice, practice (and engage)</h3>
<p>One of the best things we learnt while preparing for this was that we were supposed to give a ‘talk’ not a speech. We were supposed to keep the material engaging, ask questions rather than just provide answers. And it helped us immensely. We didn’t rehearse the talk much, except being thorough with what came next and that helped us in having a really really successful first talk!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codemotionbln (3).jpg" alt="group photo" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(L-R) Prachi and Ipshita from Team 200 OK, Marie and Ines from team NK42, Image Credits: Codemotion attendee</div>
<h3 id="berlin-and-codemotion">Berlin and Codemotion</h3>
<p>It was our first time travelling to Europe, so we had a lot of fun in the city. We met up with other teams from the current and past editions (we also met a few people who applied and didn’t get in — so we encouraged them to apply again). Codemotion, in itself, was a very satisfying and enriching experience. Some of the talks, especially the keynotes, were very relevant to us as minorities in tech, and as new graduates looking to join the industry. We met with a lot of interesting people, networked, spoke to recruiters and in general, had a blast!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codemotionbln (1).jpg" alt="venue" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(L-R) Codemotion Berlin venue, Image Credits: Prachi</div>
<p>Codemotion and the entire experience of speaking at our first technical conference is something we will never forget! A huge huge shout out to the RGSoC organising team for giving us this opportunity!</p>
GOTO Copenhagen 🇩🇰Kara de la Marckhttp://twitter.com/KaraMarck2017-10-28T00:00:00+00:002017-10-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/goto-copenhagen-conference<p>GOTO conferences, “for developers by developers”, are incredible. I had watched <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences">GOTO talks on YouTube</a> and was familiar with the quality of the conferences, so when I was offered a ticket to <a href="https://gotocph.com/">GOTO Copenhagen</a> by Rails Girls Summer of Code, I jumped at the chance to attend!</p>
<p>What made this opportunity extra enjoyable was that my wonderful RGSoC supervisor, <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho">Inês Coelho</a>, was also attending the conference, and we were able to finally meet in person! It was so much fun to spend time together exploring Copenhagen and at the conference.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/kara-ines-copenhagen.jpg" alt="Inês and Kara in Copenhagen" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credit: Inês and Kara</div>
<p>GOTO Copenhagen was a three day conference with each day organised into tracks.</p>
<h2 id="day-1">Day 1</h2>
<p>On the first day, I followed the <a href="https://gotocph.com/2017/tracks/33">360 Degree Developer</a> track. The opening keynote of the day, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LzzuMTqjs&feature=youtu.be&list=PLEx5khR4g7PLcjLdaugk3GndelpTGbYDS">Engineering You</a>, by <a href="https://twitter.com/mjpt777">Martin Thompson</a> was a thought-provoking discussion of what it means to be an engineer, including best practices for becoming a better software engineer. <a href="https://twitter.com/tastapod">Dan North’s</a> talk, <a href="https://gotocph.com/2017/sessions/187">Beyond Developer</a>, focused on the importance of continuous learning and growth as a developer beyond programming into areas such as understanding the business domain, building user interfaces, and automating testing and deployment.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ploeh">Mark Seemann’s</a> talk on Functional Architecture was extremely pertinent to my current concerns: I’m trying to learn object-oriented design patterns and best practices. Mark’s argument was that many of these ‘best practices’ must be explicitly taught, and laboriously learned, because they don’t evolve naturally from object-oriented programming. However, many of these best practices fall naturally into place with functional programming. Fascinating!</p>
<h2 id="day-2">Day 2</h2>
<p>During the second day, I followed the <a href="https://gotocph.com/2017/tracks/38">Microservices</a> track. I really enjoyed the process of watching a series of talks on the same subject, with each having its own specific take on the topic. The talks focused on microservices, serverless, and reactive design. A number of the speakers spoke on architecting a system using reactive principles and event driven design. Others spoke with great enthusiasm about serverless and AWS lambdas.</p>
<p>In contrast, <a href="https://github.com/jlouis">Jesper Anderson</a> compared microservices to what has been available in Erlang for 30 years and gave a more critical take on modern architecture design.</p>
<h2 id="day-3">Day 3</h2>
<p>The microservices talks formed the perfect context to the third day’s opening keynote by <a href="https://twitter.com/adrianco">Adrian Cockcroft</a> on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDZBYbEwhm8&feature=youtu.be&list=PLEx5khR4g7PLcjLdaugk3GndelpTGbYDS">Cloud Trends</a>, seen from the vantage point of AWS. He emphasised the likelihood of the future being serverless and the continued growth of tooling to build, monitor, and operate serverless applications.</p>
<p>The third and final day, I mainly concentrated on <a href="https://gotocph.com/2017/sessions/284">Machine Learning</a> and AI talks and really enjoyed <a href="https://twitter.com/DrPhilWinder">Phil Winder’s</a> academically grounded introduction to AI.</p>
<p>I’m very glad I jumped tracks to watch <a href="https://twitter.com/@lauralindal">Laura Laugwitz’s</a> engaging <a href="https://gotocph.com/2017/sessions/235">talk</a> examining and broadening the concept of diversity as it is usually applied to tech.</p>
<p><strong>Pop quiz!</strong> How many of the women in the slide below can you name?</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/laura-laugwitz-talk-goto-copenhagen.jpg" alt="Laura Laugwitz speaking at GOTO Copenhagen" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Laura Laugwitz speaking at GOTO Copenhagen (Image Credit: Dajana Guenther)</div>
<p><em>(Answers to the quiz are given at the end of the blog.)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/RisingLinda">Linda Rising</a> presented the closing keynote of the conference on <a href="https://gotocph.com/2017/sessions/184">Experiments</a>, encouraging us all be more methodical in our decision-making and to test our assumptions! Wise advice to ponder as we made our way home.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="closing-thoughts">Closing Thoughts</h2>
<p>I feel very grateful to have had the opportunity to attend GOTO Copenhagen thanks to Rails Girls Summer of Code. All the more so as the conference commenced the weekend directly following the end of the RGSoC programme. I so loved my experience on RGSoC: three dedicated months to work on <a href="https://babeljs.io/">Babel</a>, with tons of support from our host company <a href="https://pivotal.io/">Pivotal</a>, RGSoC, and the Babel community, especially phenomenal lead maintainer <a href="https://twitter.com/left_pad">Henry Zhu</a>.</p>
<p>Here is Team Pivotal London presenting our work on the final day of the programme – and detailing how much we love RGSoC!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team-pivotal-london.jpg" alt="Team Pivotal London loves RGSoC" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Team Pivotal London ❤️ 's RGSoC (Image Credit: Denise Yu)</div>
<p>Attending GOTO Copenhagen with my RGSoC supervisor, <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho">Inês</a>, and meeting other RGSoC organisers there such as <a href="https://twitter.com/@lauralindal">Laura Laugwitz</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/nynnest">Nynne Christoffersen</a>, and <a href="https://github.com/berlintam">Tam Eastley</a> was a wonderful way to celebrate the summer’s achievements and join the wider RGSoC community!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/rgsoc-organisers-goto-copenhagen.jpg" alt="Rails Girls Summer of Code meeting at GOTO Copenhagen" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Three generations of Rails Girls Summer of Code participants! (Image Credit: stranger at a pub)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><em>Answers to quiz: Ada Lovelace. Grace Hopper. Dorothy Vaughan. Evelyn Boyd Granville. Audrey Tang.</em></p>
Team Impact Devs - What a Whirlwind!Team ImpactDevshttp://twitter.com/teamImpactdevs2017-10-18T00:00:00+00:002017-10-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/_posts/what-a-whirlwind<p>After a hectic three months, it’s hard to believe that our Rails Girls Summer of Code experience is coming to an end. This past week we celebrated with a few milestones. The first was giving a presentation to our host company, <a href="https://www.info.nl/">info.nl</a> sharing all of our learnings and a project demo. We also threw an End of Summer Celebration for all of our coaches and friends in typical Dutch fashion - with bier and borrel by the canal.</p>
<p>Preparing for the presentation and bringing together our RGSoC community gave us a great chance to reflect on everything we have learned and accomplished over the past few months:</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="what-did-we-build">What did we build?</h2>
<p>Our project requirements had two components:</p>
<p>1) A notification center where website admins can create and save notification messages to Worldbrain’s 4,000 users. Notifications can consist of anything from product updates, security alerts and new features. Notifications are then saved to a mongo db, and made available as an API.</p>
<p>A react app that renders both a form and list of notifications previously created and sent.</p>
<p>2) An addition to the chrome extension that shows users there are new notifications via a badge on the extension icon, and list that shows all the notifications, all in React. All unread notifications are bolded, and when it has been read it then becomes un-bolded. Each user’s read & unread notifications are saved and updated locally in the browser using PouchDB.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Worldbrain Project.png" alt="teamImpactdevs" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> What we built this summer (Diagram created by Jess and Vanessa)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="how-did-we-build-it">How did we build it?</h2>
<p>From the beginning, we tried to stay organized and clearly communicate our goals for what we wanted to build and how to build it.</p>
<p>Before the project began, we created a mockup and a project milestone plan with agreed-upon weekly and monthly goals and objectives with Oliver, our Worldbrain mentor.</p>
<p>Once the project started, we made a <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17InyrgQ1hkn8HB1uiYWIFWdKyPvT98qEaR2rn5tB6rQ/edit?usp=sharing">daily log</a> with what we did that day, and anything interested we learned with links. It’s really interesting to refer back to it now! Each day we had at least one sit-down where we’d ask about each other’s progress and maybe even teach each other what we learned or how to build something. For example, I taught Jess how to build a node server, and she taught me how PouchDb works.</p>
<p>After two months of research, tutorials, building and deploying, we finally built the minimum viable product of our project. For the last month, we refactored, tested and added new features to each component.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="lessons-and-challenges">Lessons and Challenges</h2>
<p>One of the best and worst parts of our project is that we were given free reign to build using whatever stack we wanted. It was very freeing and made us feel like our mentor really trusted us with making the right decision. However, as newbie developers sometimes we would spend days or even weeks researching different technologies, not knowing if we could overcome the steep learning curve for using React.</p>
<p>Anticipating time to build - this was probably the trickiest aspect. It’s really hard to predict and allocate time for building a new page or feature - because a lot can go wrong, and can totally derail the project. For us deploying via Heroku was a huge challenge and took over a week to understand why it wouldn’t work. But while discussing this with our colleagues, we found out that this is a normal problem even for senior developers, which made us feel slightly better.</p>
<p>It sounds cheesy, but we also learned that we really love coding! Spending three months day in and day out, peppered with agonizing failures and small victories, we loved every minute of it! Which is the best lesson of all from working on the RGSoC project this summer.</p>
<h2 id="whats-next">What’s next?</h2>
<p>For now, we have an idea of what we want to put our skills towards next - Jess and a front end developer working with React and Vanessa as backend developer using Node.js. We’ve made a great impression on our host company and they’ve even asked us to work with them after the project - which is incredible and we feel so lucky.</p>
<p>We also want to continue building the Rails Girls Summer of Code community - we’ve started a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/851393618371358/">RGSoC Alumni Facebook</a> group to keep in touch and updated on events, conferences, life changes after this summer. So please feel free to join and spread the word :)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/impact-devs-stickers.jpg" alt="teamImpactdevs" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> How to be an Ally in Tech stickers - let us know if you want some! (Photo taken by Jessica)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="you-can-find-us-here">You can find us here</h2>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/TeamImpactdevs">@TeamImpactdevs</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/vanny_ho">@vanny_ho</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/jessicaleach6">@Jessicaleach6</a></strong></p>
Happy Ending, yet not the end!Akarsha and Ramyahttp://twitter.com/team_Gemini_2017-10-07T00:00:00+00:002017-10-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/TeamGemini-Happy-ending-yet-not-the-end<h1 id="rgsoc-and-us">Rgsoc and Us</h1>
<p>What a roller coaster ride it has been! It is disheartening to realize how soon it has ended. RGSoC is one of the most beautiful communities we could ever be a part of at this stage. We really learnt so much from our fellows and the community members. The best thing we learnt was giving back; giving back to the community which taught you multiple things, giving back to the society by helping out and supporting more people to get into tech.</p>
<h2 id="what-rgsoc-taught-us">What RGSoC taught us</h2>
<p>We would not be able to thank RGSoC enough for all we learned through this summer. Let alone be the fact that we are now comfortable reading huge codebases (Yes, we got the opportunity to work with two amazing Projects :D). RGSoC gave us the visibility in college and other communities in our city. It opened so many new doors for us to explore and learn. Besides contributing to opensource, we learned new tools and technologies and improved our skill-set. It gave us motivation to be a part of the open-source communities and boosted our confidence of giving talks in their meetups.</p>
<p>At one such opensource meetup, <a href="https://twitter.com/akarsha98">Akarsha</a> also met the co-founder of her early-stage startup ‘<a href="invadex.in">Invadex</a>’ which she is going to represent in the Alpha program of <a href="www.websummit.com">Web-summit</a> this November which is regarded as <strong>“The Largest Tech Conference in the World”</strong>. And because of our exposure with Scikit-Image, <a href="https://twitter.com/notrandomatalll">Ramya</a> decided to pursue research with the Image Analysis and Biometrics lab of our college. This is how Rgsoc helped us kickstart our careers and grow a lot as individuals.</p>
<iframe src="https://giphy.com/embed/l3q2u6MXJJEKiTZIY" width="700" height="480" style="float:initial" frameborder="0" class="giphy-embed" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits">Gif by <a href="https://giphy.com">Giphy</a></div>
<p>A big big thanks to Rgsoc for giving us the opportunity and for their constant support.</p>
<h2 id="our-journey">Our journey</h2>
<p>Well, in short, the most amazing summer till date ! We spent nights working on a problem, had arguments, submitted proposals, shifted projects, volunteered at conference, met siraj raval, learned new UI libraries, gave talks, stalked data-science people together and what not. These were a small fraction of the awesome memories this summer gave us.</p>
<p>Initially starting with Susi AI server as our project, we were happy to work on artificial intelligence for chatbots, though rule based. With no timeline in hand, we worked on random issues and created skills for susi. One month gone, we lost the excitement without the inputs from the mentors and looking at the situation, orga team changed the project for us. It was a blessing in disguise since we got to work with Scikit-image. It is a python library for Image analysis. We were so lucky to get such amazing mentors. They assigned us the task of analysing the performance of fast_histogram wrt numpy histogram and benchmarking them for all instances in the entire repo which we successfully completed.</p>
<p>Things we learnt in these 3 months:</p>
<ul>
<li>Proficiency with git</li>
<li>Jupyter notebook</li>
<li>Virtualisation</li>
<li>Image analysis in Python</li>
<li>Data extraction using API’s</li>
<li>Working of AI chatbots</li>
<li>React JS</li>
<li>Using Docker and Heroku</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="our-journey-ahead">Our journey ahead</h2>
<p>This is not the end, this is definitely not the end!! We are planning to continue to contribute to Scikit-Image. Apart from that, we are super excited to attend <a href="https://websummit.com">Websummit</a> this November.
And we are <em>Organizing <a href="https://djangogirls.org/lisbon">Django Girls Lisbon</a> on 5th November</em> to let more girls fall in love with programming and open-source..</p>
<iframe src="https://giphy.com/embed/10UeedrT5MIfPG" width="700" height="480" frameborder="0" style="float:initial" class="giphy-embed" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits">Gif by <a href="https://giphy.com">Giphy</a></div>
<p>See, how happy we are. :D</p>
<p>If you are there in Lisbon during that time, come join us!! :). Also, next, we’ll organize Django Girls, Delhi in December/January. And next to this, we’ll be going for Rubyconf in February’18. Also, we are now active members of the local communities and we will continue to learn and grow; and keep promoting RGSoC wherever we go !!</p>
So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish! :DprodyoGEEKYhttp://twitter.com/prodyogeeky2017-10-04T00:00:00+00:002017-10-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish<p>The summer’s over already? We had to pinch ourselves to let the reality sink in! However, looking back at the last three months, we are amazed to see how far we have come. Though we have previously interned at a few other places, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the <strong>Rails Girls Summer of Code experience was one of a kind</strong>! Apart from giving us memories to cherish, it also marked the beginning of our Open Source journey. We were collaborating from three different timezones with our mentors <em>Brandon, Nick, and team</em> present in the USA, our supervisor <em>Linda</em> in Berlin and we here in India! This was something really unique. This was also the first time we were working in such a diverse setting and we got to experience that <strong>it does not matter what gender, country or race we belong to. It’s what we do that defines us and that is all that matters.</strong> Working with people from a diverse set of places is also very interesting as there is so much to share and know about people living outside the realms of one’s country. It was also great to learn about the experiences other teams were having and each story was so inspiring!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/prodyogeeky_image_0.png" alt="RGSoC OpenLMIS" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Thank you Rails Girls Summer of Code and OpenLMIS for having us this summer! (Logo courtesy: Google.com)</div>
<p>This summer we worked with OpenLMIS. We introduced OpenLMIS and the team in our introductory blog. Have a look at it <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2017-08-07-two-geeks-and-a-summer-of-code">here</a> in case you missed it! When we jumped on the wagon, we wanted to make sure that we learn as much as possible through this program and with this aim in mind, we got our hands dirty both in backend services and frontend UI. The three major features we worked on are -</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>SMS Service</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>The idea was to notify users for any updates related to their accounts. OpenLMIS had an email notification service but there wasn’t one for SMS notifications. Since users check mobile phones much more frequently than emails, this feature was very essential.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Cordova Application</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>One of the essential requirements for OpenLMIS is to shift their web application to handheld devices. This was one of the major aspects we worked on during the summer. Cordova provides us with mobile development framework to build cross platform apps using Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, etc.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Mobile UI Prototypes</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>We enjoyed the most while doing this! The UI of OpenLMIS web application is more suited for desktop than for mobile devices. Over the past one month, we worked with Nick towards understanding user needs and coming up with lo-fi mockups to modify the present UI to fit in small screens.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>What we learnt?</strong></p>
<p>Some of our key learnings this summer -</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Working and collaborating across different time zones!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Got introduced to RESTful Service and Spring BOOT.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Developing multi-platform mobile application through Cordova (which was something that we never tried before)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Playing around with the Docker Toolbox</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>UI Prototyping, understanding user needs, iterating over proposed models based on feedback and patience!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Much much more!</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Thank you Mentors, Team and RGSoC!</strong></p>
<p>We would like to thank our mentors <strong>Nick</strong> and <strong>Brandon</strong> from the core of our hearts. We haven’t met mentors as patient and awesome as them. We pestered Nick throughout the summer for minutest of troubles and he was always ready to help us out. Thanks Nick for actually caring about our learning and sharing very useful advice. Though we could not cover all the resources you shared with us, we will make sure to continue even after RGSoC. Thanks Brandon for giving us this amazing opportunity and connecting us with the awesome OpenLMIS community. We will always cherish this experience.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/prodyogeeky_image_1.png" alt="Mentors!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our awesome mentors Brandon (Left) and Nick (Right)! (Collage courtesy: Protichi)</div>
<p>We would also like to thank the entire <strong>OpenLMIS community</strong>. We are grateful that we got to present the work in the Showcase meeting and the Product Committee. It was really fun and we got some really cool feedback. We were amazed by the diverse set of people working at OpenLMIS and we are sure this experience will take us really far. We hope our little contribution was of some help. We would especially like to thank <strong>Mary, Tenly, and Josh</strong> for their support!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/prodyogeeky_image_2.png" alt="Team OpenLMIS" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">From left to right: Mary (Product Manager), Tenly (Community Manager) and Josh (Developer). (Collage courtesy: Protichi)</div>
<p>A big thanks to our supervisor <strong>Linda</strong> for checking on us on weekly basis to know if things were going smoothly and if we were in need of anything. Be it providing information regarding conferences, blogs, or finding extra coaches, you were always a great help! Also, we are grateful for your reminders to make sure we don’t slack while putting up daily logs!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/prodyogeeky_image_3.png" alt="Team OpenLMIS" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our super cool team supervisor Linda! (Image courtesy: Linda herself)</div>
<p><strong>Thank you Thank you Thank you RGSoC!</strong> For coming up with such a great community including developers, coaches, mentors, supervisors and participants and it keeps growing each year! This gave birth to a culture of collaborative learning and growing where easy and free exchange of ideas, skills and knowledge has been made possible! Thanks to each and every person making RGSoC possible! We also feel it wouldn’t be wrong to say -</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/prodyogeeky_image_4.jpg" alt="Word of Wisdom" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image courtesy - google.com and Nikita for minor modifications :P</div>
<p>We are also thankful to GOTO Berlin and RGSoC for giving us free tickets to attend the GOTO conference taking place on 16th and 17th November in Berlin. If things go as planned, we will soon share our experience at GOTO in another blog. Fingers crossed!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/prodyogeeky_image_5.jpg" alt="prodyoGEEKY" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">This is us, Protichi (Left) and Nikita (Right), bidding our final goodbye! Tata!</div>
<p>With a heavy heart we bid our final Goodbye! And we being hardcore <em>Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy</em> fans would like to say it in style - <strong><em>So long, and thanks for all the Fish RGSoC! ;)</em></strong></p>
RGSoC - the grand finaleBundledorehttp://twitter.com/TeamBundledore2017-10-03T00:00:00+00:002017-10-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/RGSoC- the grand finale<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/logo_bundledore.jpg" alt="Our logo" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our Logo (created by Amrita Nair and Anagha R)</div>
<p>It’s September, the long journey which started off on July 1st is about to touch the finish line. We can’t believe that we have reached the final phase. Time flies so quick.</p>
<p>So here, we the Bundledorian’s summarise our wonderful working experience with the RGSoC project.</p>
<p>The whole journey was super awesome. Starting from day 1 of the event kickoff to this moment, we have learned a lot. Working with our amazing panel of coaches, mentor and supervisor and interacting with the RGSoC community has been a thoroughly enriching experience.</p>
<p>We have been working on <a href="https://leagues.afdc.com/">AFDC</a> ( Atlanta Flying Disc Club League Management System), which is a Ruby on Rails application used by the Atlanta Flying Disc Club to manage league registrations, rosters, schedules, and result tracking. The application runs on docker platform.</p>
<h2 id="workspace">Workspace:</h2>
<p>We had a super cool workplace, the <a href="http://foss.amrita.ac.in/">FOSS</a> lab in our college where we settle down in the evening (soon after our classes) and continue working till late night. And of course, the coding continues until midnight. We are really grateful to our whole FOSS team and to our friends, who supported us all these days.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/workspace.jpg" alt="Our workspace" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our Workspace - the FOSS lab (img credits: Anagha's phone)</div>
<h2 id="tools">Tools:</h2>
<p>The collaborative platform ‘Git’, the task manager ‘ Trello ‘ and our regular team meetings on Hangouts and the most important one, our day-to-day discussion space, Slack. These kept us well connected throughout the journey.</p>
<h2 id="things-learnt">Things learnt:</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Learnt to work with docker.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Learnt Git basics and a lot more.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Worked on more features in Ruby on Rails.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Got a good grip in Ruby.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Learnt a lot of new terms and concepts.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Time management.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Patience.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Being regular with updates.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="issues-worked-on">Issues worked on:</h2>
<p>This summer taught us a lot about the workflow of a project and how priorities change. We started with three issues in the beginning of the summer and now, towards the end, our plan has more or less changed. We integrated the site with it’s MailChimp account. This feature interested us a lot because we experimented around with MailChimp and actually sent out a few promotional e-mails(from a dummy account). Now we know how all the popular websites send out all those emails :)
Implementing it took a lot of time because with every single line of code we wrote we learnt so much.</p>
<p>We also took up the job of porting the project to Bootstrap 3 and making the pages mobile-responsive. That helped us go through the whole project page-by-page giving us a lot of insight into how a Rails application works.</p>
<p>In the midst of this, we solved many minor issues in the repo.
We lodged a few issues, cleaned up the documentation by relating to the minor difficulties we had in setting up the project on our systems.</p>
<p>Our next major feature is to implement an Attendance system. Still in the process and loving every moment of it.</p>
<h2 id="problems-faced">Problems faced:</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/confused.gif" alt="Thankyou" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">credits: giphy.com</div>
<p>In the initial weeks, we were troubled a lot by Docker issues. We were completely new to the platform and faced difficulty in setting it up. Fixing the issues one by one helped us learn in-depth about Docker. We went through the documentation of Docker a lot of times to figure out the problems we were facing. It really made us appreciate the usefulness of Docker in production.</p>
<p>In the middle of the SoC, both of our laptops(simultaneously !) crashed due to a kernel version error and hardware issues(keyboard stopped responding). Then came up another error, due to which our console stopped working. Googling about the issue brought us nowhere, everything got messed up. At last with the help of our coaches, we were able to fix the error. The funniest thing is that it was just the matter of changing 2-3 lines of code.</p>
<h2 id="whats-next">What’s next?</h2>
<p>We would be continuing our work pattern, working on our skills, exploring new areas, mentoring our juniors. We are planning to attend the <a href="https://ghcindia.anitaborg.org/">GHCI</a>, <a href="https://www.dotcss.io/">dotCSS</a> and <a href="https://www.dotjs.io/">dotJS</a>, attend regular meetups of our local community, encouraging more people to take up the work. We are in the process of organising a Rails Girls workshop in our city and we have a lot of support from it by various organizations.</p>
<h2 id="a-final-note">A final note:</h2>
<p>We are really thankful to the whole team of RGSoC for giving us this opportunity to work on the AFDC project. This is a great learning experience for us. Our wholehearted thanks to our panel of coaches, <strong>Alfie</strong> and <strong>Mukesh</strong>, who have supported us in each and every step, our mentor, <strong>Pete</strong> who is always available to help us with our doubts, our supervisor, <strong>Rafal</strong>, who has coordinated the work of the team and always ready with the answers to our queries. Kudos to <strong>Team Bundledore</strong>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team_bundledore.jpg" alt="Our team" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">credits: Collage created by Anagha</div>
<h5 id="follow-us-on">Follow us on:</h5>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/TeamBundledore">Twitter</a></p>
<p><a href="http://teambundledore.wordpress.com">Blog</a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Anagha_RK">Anagha R</a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/amrtanair">Amrita H Nair</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/thankyou.gif" alt="Thankyou" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">credits: giphy.com</div>
Banshee Bandits Wrap UpShelby & Lillianhttp://twitter.com/bansheebandits2017-10-01T00:00:00+00:002017-10-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/banshee-bandits-wrap-up<h2 id="its-the-end-of-the-linetime-to-wrap-up">It’s the end of the line…time to wrap up!</h2>
<h3 id="what-weve-learned">What We’ve Learned</h3>
<h4 id="how-to-read-a-giant-websites-repo"><em>How to Read a Giant Website’s Repo</em></h4>
<p>Public Lab has a large and complex website. For pretty much the entire first week of this project, we couldn’t even begin coding because we just had no idea where to start. It was really overwhelming at first, but after a week of Ruby tutorials and help from our mentors and coaches we were finally able to start working. It was a steep learning curve, but we now feel confident in our ability to navigate a large repo to find what we need.</p>
<h4 id="github-push-pull-merge"><em>Github: Push, Pull, Merge</em></h4>
<p>After finding where to start our work, another hurdle awaited us: GitHub. It’s an indispensible tool for developers, but for beginners it’s the looming threat of pushing something to the wrong branch and ruining the entire project. But we followed Public Lab’s contribution instructions and, with some more help from our mentor Jeff and other Public Lab team members, managed to submit our very first pull request (and we didn’t even ruin the entire project). We’re really glad that we had the opportunity to learn how GitHub is used in a professional setting, so that when we (hopefully) get real jobs we have some experience and won’t feel as intimidated as we did when starting this project.</p>
<h4 id="reading-ruby-partials---breaking-apart-elements-that-are-not-just-html"><em>Reading Ruby Partials– Breaking Apart Elements that are not just HTML</em></h4>
<p>On a technical level, one of the major things that we learned was how to integrate HTML into a website that is mostly written in Ruby, i.e. ruby partials. Partials are really cool because it allows you to break down your HTML code into very specific snippets that can then be called by the overarching code. It also allows you to break down the code into manageable chunks, so that you don’t have a massive file with 300 lines of code and can actually find what you’re looking for.</p>
<h4 id="working-remotely-is-difficult"><em>Working Remotely is Difficult</em></h4>
<p>There were many periods during the project when our respective schedules forced us to be in separate locations. Additionally, often times we had to work with our coaches remotely. As a result, we learned so many different ways to video call!</p>
<h3 id="experiences-weve-gained">Experiences We’ve Gained</h3>
<h4 id="we-witnessed-a-virtual-community-versus-an-actual-community"><em>We witnessed a “virtual community” versus an “actual community”</em></h4>
<p>Public Lab is a community where you can learn to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, Public Lab seeks to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms. Online, Public Lab hosts a variety of Wikis and research notes for people to collaborate– exchanging and updating environmental data in an open-source environment. In person, Public Lab hosts a variety of community events organized by administrators whose office is in a factory-turned-office building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. One of Public Lab’s central missions is collaboration– through social media, through the website, through events. It was incredibly interesting to witness that as online contributors who lived just down the street from PL’s headquarters in New York City.</p>
<h4 id="we-learned-how-difficult-it-is-to-balance-a-part-time-job-an-open-source-internship-and-classes"><em>We learned how difficult it is to balance a part-time job, an open-source internship, and classes</em></h4>
<p>“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” A lesson the two of us learned oh-so-well during the past couple of months. It was often difficult to dedicate time to solely learning “how to code.” In the future, we hope to plan our time more sensibly in order to benefit as much as possible from the learning experiences open source projects can offer.</p>
<h4 id="the-catch-22-open-sources-technical-gap"><em>The Catch 22: Open Source’s “Technical Gap”</em></h4>
<p>Open source is meant for collaboration. The problem: it is often difficult for “newbies” to comfortably navigate the demands of an open source project (ie. Github, how to read a project’s repository, etc.). Both of us gained a better understanding of the “technical gap,” and how it can limit diversity initiatives in tech.</p>
RailsGyn come back to reality.Amanda & Julianahttp://twitter.com/RailsGyn2017-09-28T00:00:00+00:002017-09-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/RailsGyn-come-back-to-reality<h2 id="all-good-things-come-to-an-end-oh-god-why">All good things come to an end… OH GOD WHY!??!</h2>
<p>We are just shocked! We still cannot believe how fast these three months passed!
We do not want this summer to finish!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/cry.gif" alt="crying" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">That is exactly how we are now!</div>
<p>RGSoC was by far the best place ever that we already worked on. The environment was pure learning and assistance, we could implement a lot of cool features, we could meet a lot of nice people, we could discuss our ideas and we were heard. Certainly, we will keep contributing with the RGSoC team’s app, because this program deserves the best management app that could exist and we want to work on it!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/icons.png" alt="rgsoc" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Design by Juliana</div>
<h2 id="what-were-our-main-achievements-in-this-summer">What were our main achievements in this summer?</h2>
<p>We started the summer of code working on beginner friendly issues, however, on the very first days, one of our friends from TeamsApp asked for help in a milestone to automate the conference process to offer conference tickets to teams. It was a big change, with a lot of issues and a lot of models builds and refactors. She even though that it wasn’t possible to build for this summer, but we did it! We build almost all the related things to this milestone conclusion and when we saw it on production was proud.
It was really surrounding construct such a complex issue in a really new project for us. We had to learn a lot in just some days, but worth every second when we saw everything working.
That is what a challenge does with you, it makes you find out how far you can get.
After finishing the conference milestone, we have decided to start on a community milestone and we still are working on it. Even if we did not finish it until september/30 we will finish it!
We are so happy to have our fingerprints on this project! That is something priceless.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/we.jpg" alt="us" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">By: Juliana's mother</div>
<h2 id="what-will-we-miss">What will we miss?</h2>
<ul>
<li>We will miss all the excellent developers from team’s app who worked closely with us in this summer: Carsten, Max, Maria, Maud…</li>
<li>We will miss Ines :\ our conversations were always the best ones and we don’t want to stop it.</li>
<li>We will miss sharing in all the social media that we work on the RGSoC.</li>
<li>We will miss pair working in nice coffee places in our city.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="what-did-we-learn">What did we learn?</h2>
<p>This summer was all about learning! RGSoC is a great learning experience. We had support all the time, our mentors were fantastic. They suggested a lot of things to improve our code and that taught us a lot. During this summer we could learn more about tests with RSpec, using shared examples, many factories, finite state machine concept, some Ruby methods, code best practices applying DRY, metaprogramming, service objects, work with Continuous Integration, Git workflow and many ruby facts that we happily shared on our <a href="https://medium.com/@railsgirlsgyn">blog</a>.</p>
<h2 id="what-more">What more?</h2>
<p>Besides knowledge, the program brought us a lot of local visibility. Due to the program, one of the local companies has contacted us to offer support for promoting events. Also, this same company has called us for a job interview. We are planning to promote a Rails Girls event in our city, and this company will give us space and some coaches to assist us in the Rails Girls workshop. We are very happy for all the opportunities that the project has given us, we will miss everything.</p>
<h2 id="contact">Contact</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/branquinhoaa"><strong>Amanda</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/branquinhoa.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">By: Juliana Dias</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/juuh42dias"><strong>Juliana</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/juhDias.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">By: Juliana Dias</div>
JSFoo 2017 - Team Serv0101Neha & Rakhi2017-09-27T00:00:00+00:002017-09-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/serv0101-conference-blog<h2 id="team-serv0101-at-jsfoo-2017">Team Serv0101 at JSFoo 2017</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-25-Serv0101-JSfoo2017.png" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Screenshot</div>
<p>JSFoo was launched in 2011 which is India’s first JavaScript conference. The JS community in India has grown phenomenally since then. JavaScript now pervades every aspect of web development – browsers, apps, front-end, backend, mobile and IoT, and there’s always scope to understand new ideas and solutions. The conference explores new ideas, implementing innovative solutions, and learning from experiences, especially negative ones!</p>
<p>JSFoo was two-day conference(15th Sep 2017 - 16th Sep 2017), Bangalore, India.
This year theme was building reliable web apps. Talks happened on these topics and more:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Tooling and best practices for measuring and monitoring on the web</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Modern programming languages like ES6/7 and TypeScript</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Architecture and the practice of programming</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Specific libraries and frameworks</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Browser APIs like WebRTC, ServiceWorkers, Web Components, and Push API</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Accessibility and localization</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Game programming</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Visualisation and animation on the web using JavaScript</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="every-talk-and-workshop-we-attended-there-was-awesome-but-we-found-following-two-very-interesting">Every talk and workshop we attended there was awesome but we found following two very interesting.</h4>
<p><strong>1. Tiny Computers, JavaScript and MIDI by <a href="https://twitter.com/georgemandis">George Mandis</a></strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-25-Serv0101-George.jpeg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Neha</div>
<p>George Mandis is a main developer of Konami.js. Being a konami js lover it was really nice to see his talk and meet him in person.
In his JSFoo talk, we explored why MIDI implementation and prevalence in hardware makes uniquely intriguing and accessible platform for creative coding.</p>
<p>Tiny computers such as the RaspberryPi, Arduino and C.H.I.P. have finally reached a level of performance and affordability that makes hardware experimentation accessible to everyone. At the same time, JavaScript has emerged as the lingua franca of web programming and can be found in many places beyond just the browser.</p>
<p>MIDI — a niche protocol that’s been around since 1983 and was originally designed for musical instruments to communicate with one another.</p>
<p>Tiny Computers + JavaScript + MIDI - create great platform for both education and entertainment purposes.</p>
<p><strong>2. Building Immersive Virtual Reality experiences quickly with WebVR by <a href="https://twitter.com/ram_gurumukhi">Ram Vaishnav</a></strong></p>
<p>Ram Vaishnav says - “I believe that Virtual Reality is going to become a primary platform soon, which will completely change the way we work, play and communicate digitally.”</p>
<h5 id="what-is-webvr">What is WebVR?</h5>
<p>WebVR is an open specification that makes it possible to experience VR in your browser. The goal is to make it easier for everyone to get into VR experiences, no matter what device you have.</p>
<h5 id="how-anyone-can-experience-webvr">How anyone can experience WebVR?</h5>
<p>You need two things to experience WebVR: a headset and a compatible browser.</p>
<h5 id="how-anyone-can-build-virtual-reality-websites">How anyone can build Virtual Reality websites?</h5>
<p>You will find many frameworks on the internet to build VR websites.
The one we used in the workshop is A-Frame. A-Frame is an open-source web framework by Mozilla for easily creating VR experiences using WebVR which work on all platforms. It’s really easy and fun to work with A-Frame to build a VR website, all you need to get started is a basic knowledge of HTML & JS.</p>
<p>In workshop we learned various concepts & APIs of A-Frame and we also build Hello WebVR which look something like this :)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-25-Serv0101-WebVR.jpeg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Neha</div>
<h4 id="enjoyed-playing-game">Enjoyed playing game</h4>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-25-Serv0101-JSfoo2017-Game.jpg-large" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Rakhi</div>
<p>At the end of day we all the women gathered around a table and everyone there shared how they started, what they learned from JSFoo and how we can apply for the talk next year in JSFoo. We also shared our experience of RGSoC internship.
Thanks to Rgsoc for providing us tickets and having us in conference. We really enjoyed being there and had a good experience, we will look forward to attending this conf next year.</p>
Our IntoxiCODED cloudy summerCodeaholicshttp://twitter.com/codeaholics_AL2017-09-26T00:00:00+00:002017-09-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Our-IntoxiCODED-cloudy-summer<p>Time seems to fly by so fast when you are a student of Rails Girls Summer of Code and a contributor of a project you love. We can’t believe these are the last days of RGSoC!</p>
<h3 id="challenges"><strong>Challenges</strong></h3>
<p>Some of the challenges that our team has faced during this period:</p>
<ul>
<li>First of all, installing the <a href="https://nextcloud.com/">Nextcloud</a> server locally was not as easy for us as we first assumed.</li>
<li>Before attending RGSoC we barely had any experience with Git on an important open source project as Nextcloud with a lot of people contributing into it. During our journey we made many mistakes and had to do some researches on different Git commands. Thanks to the friendly community over at Nextcloud, we learned many new Git commands, now it’s just a matter of remembering them :)</li>
<li>We fought a lot with JavaScript and in particular AngularJS. We wanted to work on something new for us and that’s why we chose the Contacts App. We were complete beginners on AngularJS and during the first weeks we were mainly focused on reading and watching tutorials.</li>
<li>Another challenging thing was working remotely together over different time-zones (6 hours difference) as Jona was attending “Flock to Fedora Conference” in Boston.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_angularJS.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Too much AngularJS, not enough coffee. (Photo: Jona & Xheni, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<h3 id="things-we-have-learned"><strong>Things we have learned</strong></h3>
<p>Despite the challenges we had during our summer, we have learned a lot of new things. Here are some of the things we can recall:</p>
<ul>
<li>Pair programming, a very good way to keep each other on task. Brainstorming helps a lot when you work as a team. Don’t forget that two brains are better than one.</li>
<li>AngularJS concepts: we learned about controllers, services, promises, filters and much more.</li>
<li>JavaScript is the world’s most misunderstood programming language but we understand it better now :).</li>
<li>We learned about vCard format specification.</li>
<li>New Git Commands that were really useful for our daily job.</li>
<li>Asking for help because the communication is the key to solve some of the issues! There are always people out there willing to help, especially on the Nextcloud IRC channels.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_pairprogramming.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Pair Programming at Open Labs Hackerspace. (Photo: Jona & Xheni, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<h3 id="nextcloud-contributions"><strong>Nextcloud contributions</strong></h3>
<p>There is an albanian idiom “-Fillimi i mbarë, gjysma e punës” (English equivalent: Well begun, is half done), therefore we created our first PR on our first week and we began contributing on Nextcloud by fixing some starter issues, opening new issues, testing and reviewing etc.</p>
<p>Nowadays we are mainly focused on developing a new feature: “favorite contacts”, allowing users to quickly favourite some of their contacts. We are confident to have this feature finished by the end of the summer.</p>
<p>What will be next? We certainly will continue contributing on other Nextcloud apps, even after the summer ends because we really love the vibe that this community has and the friendly environment.</p>
<h3 id="girl-power-at-the-nextcloud-conference"><strong>Girl Power at the Nextcloud conference!</strong></h3>
<p>One of the best things about working on the open source projects are the conferences. <a href="https://twitter.com/codeaholics_AL">Codeaholics</a> joined the <a href="https://nextcloud.com/conf/">Nextcloud Conference</a> on 22-29 August in Berlin, Germany. We were the early birds who arrived in the morning on the first day, waiting for other contributors to join the conference.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_nextcloud_conference.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Team Codeaholics at Nextcloud Conference. (Photo: Christoph Wurst, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<p>Finally, we had the chance to meet our coaches Morris and Joas in person, our mentor joined us as well. We had four amazing days full of hacking and working on specific tasks on Nextcloud. It’s very helpful when you have your coaches nearby so you can directly ask them and clarify in case of any doubts. In addition to meeting our coaches we also met many other contributors during our stay in Berlin. Fun fact: We knew most of them already by their GitHub usernames, that’s why the first question we asked them was their github username. ;)</p>
<p>We attended some talks related to the collaboration between Red Hat and Nextcloud, Collabora Online, how the Technical University of Berlin uses Nextcloud, Scalability Recommendations, Security etc.</p>
<p>On the weekend, there were some lightning talks and workshops where we also shared <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpMtsE_MICs">our experience</a> as RGSoC students with them (a lot of applauses in the end, yaaay)! It was a wonderful conference and a great opportunity to network with the community behind Nextcloud, which makes you feel more motivated to keep contributing.
And just for the record, coding while drinking Club Mate is one of the best feelings ever. (Try it :P)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_nextcloud.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Nextcloud Conference. (Photo:Raghu Nayyar, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<p>During our stay in Berlin we attended the “Open Source Ladies” event together with Jan, which is an event that aims to help women contribute to open source projects and guide them how to join their communities. It was very nice to meet some new enthusiastic Open Source Ladies from Berlin and share our experiences.</p>
<h3 id="what-will-we-miss-most"><strong>What will we miss most</strong></h3>
<p>Now that RGSoC is ending, we will miss a lot:</p>
<ul>
<li>Our weekly meeting calls with our <a href="https://twitter.com/benediktdeicke">supervisor</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/jancborchardt">mentor</a> and coaches. It has been a pleasure working with all of them. By the way: Even though all of them were German and we have heard stories that Germans are very strict or that is very difficult to work with them we are very happy to admit that it is NOT true! Each wednesday that we have our weekly call, we were very happy to talk with them and hear their feedback because it was really helpful for us, that’s why this is one of the things we will miss most! (Thank you guys :D)</li>
<li>Status updates, because they helped us keep track of what we achieved and to set goals for our team.</li>
<li>Being able to focus full-time on open-source development and community building.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="all-in-all"><strong>All in All…</strong></h3>
<p>It was a never-to-be-forgotten summer - one of those summers that leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going. Is it the end? Definitely NO, our journey does not end here. We are both open source enthusiasts and the gained experience we had this summer has inspired us even more to continue contributing to coding part of open source projects.</p>
<p>Thanks RGSoC for this amazing experience we had during this summer, we are happy to be one of the RGSoC alumni now and share our journey with other people!</p>
Conferences 2017, part 2Mariahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2017-09-24T00:00:00+00:002017-09-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-conferences-part2<p>Do you remember we <a href="/blog/2017-09-10-conferences-part1">announced conferences</a> which support RGSoC 2017 and grant us free tickets? Some more awesome conferences joined the party in the past two weeks. There are two newcomers among them: Dev Day from Sri Lanka and Sheffield Ruby User Group, which is technically not a conference, but nonetheless has a hand in our conference activities this year :)</p>
<p>And even more good news: two RGSoC teams (<a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/632">NK42</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/369">200OK</a>) will give talks at Codemotion Berlin 2017! Honestly, we are very proud of our students <3</p>
<p>Dear organizers, thank you so much for sharing our values and being with us! We are very grateful for this.</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpberlin2017codemotionworldcomcodemotion-berlinaspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://berlin2017.codemotionworld.com/">Codemotion Berlin</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://berlin2017.codemotionworld.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/codemoberlin-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>October 12-13, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Berlin, Germany <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/codemoberlin">@codemoberlin</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting 15% discount promo code.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpwwwdevdaylkdev-day-2017aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://www.devday.lk/">Dev Day 2017</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://www.devday.lk/">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/devday-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>November 9, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Colombo, Sri Lanka <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/devdaysl">@devdaysl</a> <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpeventoslocawebcombrproximos-eventosrubyconf-2017inscrevaseutmcampaigneventoutmsourceblogutmmediumownutmcontentrailgirlsrubyconf-brazilaspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://eventos.locaweb.com.br/proximos-eventos/rubyconf-2017/#inscrevase?utm_campaign=Evento&utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=own&utm_content=RailGirls+">RubyConf Brazil</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://eventos.locaweb.com.br/proximos-eventos/rubyconf-2017/#inscrevase?utm_campaign=Evento&utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=own&utm_content=RailGirls+">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/rubyconf-br-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> November 17-18, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b> São Paulo, Brazil <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting 30% discount promo code.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<p>And our special thanks goes to <a href="https://shrug.org/">Sheffield Ruby User Group</a>, who kindly donated us two tickets to <a href="https://websummit.com/">Web Summit 2017</a>!</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsshrugorgsheffield-ruby-user-groupaspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://shrug.org/">Sheffield Ruby User Group</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://shrug.org/">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/shrug-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Location: </b> Sheffield, UK <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/sheffieldruby">@sheffieldruby</a> <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
Act II - Curtain Call For Team 200 OKPrachi & Ipshitahttp://twitter.com/Team200OK2017-09-23T00:00:00+00:002017-09-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/curtain-call-for-200ok<p>Wow, it’s 23th September already and we just can’t believe that RGSoC is coming to an end. It has been a whirlwind of a summer - with so much learning both in our professional lives and personal. We will sorely miss the daily logs, catching up with each other, the superbly motivating coaching sessions, pair programming, code reviews and weekly sync ups with Mayar, who is the best <del>supervisor</del> team buddy we could have hoped for.</p>
<h3 id="the-star-of-the-moment---our-project-coala">The Star of the moment - our project ‘coala’</h3>
<p>We have already introduced our project, <a href="https://github.com/coala">coala</a>, a code analysis tool, in our first blog post.
Through the course of the summer, we were at complete liberty to choose which aspect of this vast project we wanted to work on. As the bonding period drew to a close and as the summer began, we gradually made small, but steady advances into understanding the codebase. We were ramped up to developers in the coala community.</p>
<h3 id="lights-camera-code">Lights, Camera, Code</h3>
<p>Our project was writing generic bears for coala. Bears are Python scripts which help you check for bad coding practices, styles etc. in different languages.
There are two types of bears :
- Native Bears
- Linter Bears</p>
<p>Linter bears are Python wrappers around existing code linting tools available in other languages, to integrate them into coala, using the coala API. To top it all, the coala docs also provides a comprehensive bear writing guide, which ensured that we could write bears smoothly.</p>
<p>In our second week, we started writing our first linter bears and as the summer draws to a close, we have already worked on several bears including:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>RubyFlogBear</strong> - Flog is a Ruby gem which performs complexity analysis on Ruby code using the ABC metrics. It is one of the most popularly used tools for measuring Ruby code complexity, or a measure of the amount of ‘pain’ the code is in, in an easy to read ‘torture’ report. RubyFlogBear wraps this gem and integrates it into coala.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>HAMLLintBear</strong> which wraps around a tool haml-lint that helps keep HAML files clean and readable. This bear is made super-configurable, implementing all the possible flags and functionalities of haml-lint.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>OclintBear</strong> a static code tool for improving quality and reducing defects by inspecting C, C++ and Objective-C code and looking for potential problems like possible bugs, unused code, code smells and bad practices</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>SpotBugsBear</strong> which statically looks for potential bugs in Java code.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>In addition, we also worked on <strong>five other bear related issues</strong> for different coala projects such as <strong>coala-quickstart</strong>, and <strong>corobo</strong>. Apart from this, as per the common coala community practise, we have persistently performed code reviews and helped out new developers to the community, just like we were helped out by others at the beginning of this summer.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team200oksummer.png" alt="Our Summer in Numbers" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credits: Prachi, with the help of Canva</div>
<h3 id="cue-takeaways">Cue Takeaways</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Pair Programming</strong> RGSoC introduced us to concept of pair programming that works by establishing a mentoring mechanism and spreading knowledge through the team. The constant iterations of writing code and getting it reviewed by the other person ensure that you not only write and send in quality code, but also debug it efficiently. Pair programming, for us, has ensured better designs, higher quality, bug-free code and more functionality per unit time in the long term perspective.</li>
<li><strong>Code Reviews</strong> Our project coala stresses heavily on code reviews. The practice of reading the comments others left on our PRs and reviewing others in exchange has helped us learn so much. Not only, have we learned to debug code written by others, we can also now reason why a certain functionality needs to be designed in a particular way.</li>
<li><strong>Test Driven Development</strong> The best practice is to write tests as you go. The developer who writes the development code is the best person for writing the testing suite. Ensure maximum code coverage. Keep in mind the 80–20 rule of code coverage <em>(20% of time will be spent in achieving 80% code coverage and 80% of time will be spent in achieving the remaining 20%)</em> And lastly, Manual testing of code is important after automated testing is complete. There is no substitute for peer review and feedback.</li>
</ul>
<p>You can learn more about our takeaways at our fortnightly blogs: <a href="https://medium.com/@prachi121096">Prachi</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/@ipshitachatterjee">Ipshita</a></p>
<h3 id="the-final-act">The Final Act</h3>
<p>This might be the final act, but for Team 200 OK, the show will go on. Our talk at <strong>Codemotion Berlin 2017</strong> has been accepted. We’ll be speaking about RGSoC, the program, our experience, our project coala and the work we did during the summer. It’s a dream come true for us!</p>
<p>We plan to continue contributing to coala, finish up our open PRs and take up more challenging issues. We will also explore other open source organizations to work for. We are also extremely motivated to encourage other women to take up open source.</p>
<p>It has been a wonderful summer. But, it isn’t over yet.</p>
<h4 id="fin">Fin.</h4>
We ❤️ Rails Girls Summer of CodeEmma Deacon & Kara de la Marckhttp://twitter.com/emmamdeacon2017-09-22T00:00:00+00:002017-09-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/we-heart-summer-of-code<p><em>This post contains songs we recommend listening to whilst reading - we felt that this incredible summer needed an incredible soundtrack to tell its story</em></p>
<p>We have had an incredible summer: it has been insanely busy and at times overwhelming, but we have both grown enormously as developers and team members. Rails Girls Summer of Code was one of the best decisions we have ever made, and it’s been a pleasure to be part of this superb and inspirational community. Being part of Rails Girls Summer of Code is an incredible opportunity, and it has been a transformative summer for us.</p>
<p>We started the summer enthusiastically, wanting to contribute substantively to Babel. We felt like we needed to take this opportunity to become passionate open source developers.</p>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code taught us a lot about the importance of communication, and perseverance. We have received generous support from the Babel community; nonetheless it was disquieting to be joining an open source community where we couldn’t find any other female members.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VQChkSgPCJ4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits">(Song Credit): Madonna, What It Feels like for a Girl (via YouTube)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>It took us about two months to even approach the non Summer of Code channel in the Babel slack. It’s a nerve-wracking experience jumping in and talking to a community of such impressive developers, but as the saying goes: <em>be the change in the world you want to see</em>.</p>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code has given us the confidence to be present in the Open Source Community. Our superb Babel mentor <a href="https://twitter.com/left_pad">Henry Zhu</a>, has been an incredibly positive, kind, and insightful mentor; we’ve been lucky to have him help us and guide us.</p>
<p>As mentioned in our first blog post, our aims of the summer were to a) learn a heck of a lot, and b) improve our pingpong skills. Whilst the latter took a complete tumble, the former fuelled our summer and our learning took us in directions we had not envisioned. Whilst we may never be Olympic Ping Pong-ers, we feel like we spent our summer in a far more productive and positive manner, and we honestly feel like we’re leaving here knowing that this is only the beginning for us.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MHi9mKq0slA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits">(Song Credit): Queen, Don't Stop Me Now (via YouTube)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>As well as working on Babel, we had the opportunity to learn so much more from the Pivots surrounding us. Our Pivotal mentors taught us Pivotal best practices regarding software development and were generous in answering our questions and in running additional mentoring sessions and talks to share their knowledge. We are so lucky to have had sessions on a range of topics including:</p>
<ul>
<li>Introduction to Operational Semantics (and LaTex)</li>
<li>Compilers</li>
<li>Containers</li>
<li>Testing (TDD, unit testing, and integration testing)</li>
<li>Bash Scripting</li>
<li>Project Management Practices</li>
<li>Debugging Skills</li>
<li>Agile Practices</li>
<li>Networking 101</li>
<li>History of JS and its Frameworks/Libraries</li>
<li>Git</li>
<li>Managing Dependencies</li>
<li>Pairing</li>
</ul>
<p>We had all of these learning experiences thanks to Pivotal, and to our incredible coaches from Pivotal. We have received an immense amount of knowledge. Whilst we gushed about the breakfast in our first blog post (and it IS an incredible breakfast), the one thing we will always remember is how kind and patient our coaches were with us, and how passionate about teaching and mentoring they all were.</p>
<p>We could not have completed this summer without our supportive and friendly supervisor <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho">Ines</a>. Ines has been the biggest supporter we could have hoped for, and she has proven time and time again to be there for us. Our weekly meetings were an absolute joy, and we could not have imagined a nicer person or a better supervisor to communicate our struggles, issues and passions with. She made us realise our goals, and our pitfalls, and helped guide us through moments in the summer where it was incredibly difficult. Ines is the heroine for our Summer. She has been the third musketeer in our group; the third member in our Destiny’s Child.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0lPQZni7I18" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits">(Song Credit): Destiny's Child, Independent Women (via YouTube)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>This summer, we have both grown and evolved and have learnt about being software developers and team members. Our communication skills have improved tenfold, and we have a better understanding of what it means to be involved in technology teams. We have experienced our own pitfalls, and we had our own barriers, which took awhile to get our heads around (we’re looking at you, pair programming), but it was all part of the crucial learning curve. Whilst there were times we felt we would never work through our issues <em>(-cough- Git -cough-)</em>, we have, however, learnt an awful lot about what is needed to try. Rebase. Always rebase when in doubt. And make Bootstrap.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qyclqo_AV2M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits">(Song Credit): The Beatles, We Can Work it Out (via YouTube)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>We admit we did not complete as much work with Babel as we had hoped. But that’s okay. We fulfilled our major goal for the summer - to learn and obtain as much knowledge as we could. Contributing to Babel was always an ambitious program for us, and we always knew it would be something that was hard.</p>
<p>We certainly have had an eventful and memorable summer. One of the biggest (and hardest) achievements of the summer was presenting both Rails Girls Summer of Code and some of our code to the Pivotal Community. We had not expected to be presenting about the program, but it was such a pleasure to promote such a wonderful organisation.</p>
<p>What we learnt, overall, was that there is still so much more that we can do and that is needed to do to get women into Open Source. We both had an incredible summer, and we are so sad to see it come to a close, but we won’t stop working and helping in this community.</p>
<h4 id="thank-you-rails-girls-summer-of-code-pivotal-and-babel---">THANK YOU RAILS GIRLS SUMMER OF CODE, PIVOTAL AND BABEL!! ❤️ 🎊 🎉</h4>
<p>You are the true stars of our summer, and you are continuously changing the world. Thank you for letting us be a part of this narrative for three months :)</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SybgWaQy7_c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits">(Song Credit): Fleetwood Mac, Don't Stop (Thinking about Tomorrow) (via YouTube)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<h1 id="what-is-next-for-us">What is next for us?</h1>
<p>Well, we’re both going to continue to contribute to Open Source. Kara is motivated and inspired to continue contributing to Babel. And we both plan on regularly contributing to other open source projects. We’re hoping to talk about Rails Girls Summer of Code to everyone and anyone that will listen to us, and maybe - just maybe - improve our ping pong skills :)</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="you-can-find-us-here">You can find us here</h2>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/emmamdeacon">@emmamdeacon</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/KaraMarck">@KaraMarck</a></strong></p>
A story of an issueNeta and Retehttp://twitter.com/ruby_bears2017-09-21T00:00:00+00:002017-09-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/story-of-an-issue<p><strong>No matter if the issue is big or small, complicated or simple, a bug or a feature - in our Summer of Code the issues have a similar cycle. Team “Code Bears” has some important lessons to share after two and a half months of working on <a href="https://diasporafoundation.org/">diaspora*</a>.</strong></p>
<h4 id="pick-out-the-issue">Pick out the issue</h4>
<p>What do we want to achieve? What would we like to learn? Do we want to use skills we already learned or learn something new? Would we actually see the results of our work? We try to ask ourselves all those questions when we approach the long <a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues">list of issues</a> of diaspora*. Naturally at first we got a lot of direction from our coaches and mentor on this step, but as the summer progressed we had stronger opinions on those questions ourselves.</p>
<p>For instance, the more back-end the better. We just love our RoR programming! Of course we also love it when we learn and understand front-end code, but it’s very clear that we both are more attracted to the back-end side.</p>
<h4 id="ask-the-diaspora-community">Ask the diaspora* community</h4>
<p>Diaspora* has a very active community and we had to find out for each issue we chose if it was still available. We got great feedback from the community just by asking about it on the issue page. In <a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7471">some cases</a> it even triggered a long discussion about ways to solve the issue or even the very necessity of a solution. The community is very responsive whenever we have questions or require consultation on our solution. You just gotta love the diaspora* community for their involvement and investment.</p>
<h4 id="search-everywhere">Search. Everywhere.</h4>
<p>Like two Alices in diasporaland, with every issue we embark on an ongoing quest through the intricate and entangled maze called the diaspora source code. It is not your typical MVC app (if that even really exists). Finding the related files to the issue and trying to understand the relationship between them is no less than a superpower one needs to develop.</p>
<p>Apart from the familiar models, controllers and views, we have encountered, and thereby learned about, lots of other types of files: mailers, presenters, helpers, services, workers, templates, javascript files, specs, factories and more.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-18-codebears1.gif" style="width: 350px;" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Gif by <a href="http://cinematografo.tumblr.com/">Cineaste</a></div>
<h4 id="tutorials-tutorials-tutorials">Tutorials, Tutorials, Tutorials</h4>
<p>In order to understand all the new terms we learn, we spend quite a lot of time watching and reading tutorials (We find <a href="https://www.lynda.com/">Lynda</a>, among others, to be an excellent source for beginners tutorials). Overwhelmed by all this new theory, our coaches are very helpful with mediating and explaining new and complicated concepts.</p>
<h4 id="get-confused">Get confused</h4>
<p>Connecting theory and practice always resulted in a big confusion. Things on diaspora almost never work according to theory. At first we have an idea of which code to change, which turns out to be wrong and raises an error in some file we don’t know about. This, in turn, leads us back to our diasporaland quest, where we don’t understand the code, or we find a bunch of new terms, or we can’t figure out why this file even exists, and so on.</p>
<p>The most common sentence called out loud during this summer, by students and coaches alike, while looking at the code is: “This is weird”. <br />
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-18-codebears2.gif" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Gif source <a href="https://giphy.com">GIPHY</a></div>
<h4 id="play-with-the-code">Play with the code</h4>
<p>Puzzled, with no other choice, we play with the code and see what happens. It became easier to experiment, once we realized we can’t really ruin anything, as long as we work on our local branch.</p>
<p>This trial and error process, combined with a pinch of the theoretical understanding we acquire and alongside coaching sessions, leads us to write code in one file, change code in another, delete code in a third file and refactor code in a fourth one. We made a habit out of checking things in the terminal, rails console and the browser console, inspecting the page and using a debugger.</p>
<p>This is usually when we make our progress with the issue: typing on our keyboards, while feeling clueless, but seeing stuff happening on our screen - BEST. FEELING. EVER! We are quite sure that after the summer the other engineers in our workspace will really miss the squeaking sounds we make when we get something to work.</p>
<h4 id="the-git-dance">The git dance</h4>
<p>When we think our code is ready, it’s time to open the PR and break out in our git dance. We have a kind of a complicated git setup, with two remote repositories and two local ones, as well as git-flow which requires re-basing and squashing commits. It took us a while to understand what we are doing and dare to push code by ourselves. Common mishaps include, but not limited to, <code class="highlighter-rouge">git reset --hard</code>, mysterious branch diversions, merge conflicts and the occasional “mind f***” moment. It was hard to keep our <code class="highlighter-rouge">HEAD</code> in the right place.</p>
<p>Therefore, during the first half of SoC, we had a very helpful weekly git session with one of the coaches. Although we still sometime struggle with git, we now have our own git dance and can handle it quite independently.
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-18-codebears3.png" style="width: 250px;" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image by <a href="https://github.com/git-dance/mactech2016">@missinformed</a></div>
<h4 id="code-review">Code review</h4>
<p>Obviously every PR resulted with some corrections and suggestions to improve our code. The beauty of the code review is that it always comes with explanations! We learn a lot just from everyone’s comments. Again, you just gotta love the diaspora* community that understands our state (beginners), reviews our code accordingly and helps us with the fixes.</p>
<h4 id="eat-ice-cream">Eat ice cream</h4>
<p>while celebrating merged PR.</p>
<h2 id="what-did-the-story-of-an-issue-teach-us-so-far">What did the story of an issue teach us so far?</h2>
<p>Here are some lessons, big and small, we’ve learned from this roller coaster called SoC:</p>
<p><strong>Know your study materials:</strong> Find your favorite source for study materials: whether you like to watch, read or practice, whether you prefer it on-line or hard-copy, it is very efficient to have a go-to learning sources.</p>
<p><strong>Mix and match:</strong> Using diverse ways of learning, which means a combination of watching, reading, exercising and working on the source code, is the most useful way to tackle new topics. It might seem obvious, but it’s still an important lesson for us.</p>
<p><strong>Master git:</strong> Pretty self explanatory, but we can’t stress enough how helpful it was to understand our git-flow.</p>
<p><strong>Keep a notebook:</strong> Use the traditional pen and paper to keep track of new terms and concepts, which at first glimpse could be quite overwhelming and even intimidating. It’s also a great place to sketch and doodle.</p>
<p><strong>Try not to be afraid</strong> to make mistakes, play with your code, express your opinions and make your own decisions. After 10 weeks of working regularly with 6 coaches, each one with their own way of solving problems, we realized the only thing we have left to do is decide which way works best for us.</p>
<p><strong>Try not to be shy</strong> and ask for help and explanations. Experience shows it often works for the best.</p>
<p><strong>Learn from your code reviews:</strong> See “Code review” above :).</p>
<p><strong>We are in love with diaspora*:</strong> The complexity of the code and the involvement of the community have made this summer very challenging and rewarding. Check the <a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora">project on github</a>, maybe you would want to contribute as well.</p>
<p><strong>Remember to celebrate:</strong> Did you open a PR, did your code get merged, did you just finish refactoring a beautiful piece of code? Great! Celebrate and go eat some ice cream.</p>
<h2 id="thanks">Thanks</h2>
<p>This amazing summer would not be amazing without our team and the help of other supportive people:</p>
<ul>
<li>Our team’s coaches: <strong>Chiara, Dani, David, Glauber, Jano</strong> and <strong>Laura</strong>, thank you so much for all you help, time, energy, patience, white-board sessions, source-code sessions, exercises and so much more.</li>
<li>Other coaches: <strong>Alon, Andrey, Liron</strong> and <strong>Remi</strong> for helping on specific topics and substituting for coaches on vacation.</li>
<li>Our supervisor: <strong>Fanny</strong>, thank you for caring for our well-being throughout the summer and always being there for questions.</li>
<li>Our mentor: <strong>Lisa</strong>, thanks for your availability for questions and tips about diaspora*.</li>
<li>Diaspora community: Thank you for being so responsive and helpful, and for keeping such a pleasant communication with your contributers. Special thanks for members who reviewed patiently and commented on our code- <strong>Flaburgan, SuperTux88</strong> and <strong>svbergerem</strong>.</li>
<li>Our coaching company: thank you <strong>SoundCloud</strong> for hosting us and suppling us with a brilliant learning and working atmosphere, as well as amazing coffee. <br />
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-18-codebears4.png" /></li>
</ul>
<div class="image-credits">Image by <a href="http://www.mycutegraphics.com/">MyCuteGraphics</a></div>
The end of Sasha&Sasha's journeySasha & Sashahttp://twitter.com/linguistsare2017-09-20T00:00:00+00:002017-09-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team-Alexa-update<h2 id="what-a-wonderful-world">What a wonderful world</h2>
<p>Our third month with the RGSoC is already coming to an end, even though it seems like we’ve just started. We are happy to be a part of such an incredible program that attracts people to open source, and gives them an opportunity to work on important projects and to make a difference.</p>
<h2 id="what-tasks-we-had">What tasks we had?</h2>
<p>We worked on a social network for Persian LGBTQI+ community – JoopeA Club. It is a safe space for people of any gender and/or sexual orientation. We were trying to make it a safe space for speakers of any language, because right now JClub is only available in Persian, and we were building support for other languages.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-learned">What we learned</h2>
<ul>
<li>Django</li>
<li>Vcs: Mercurial, some Git</li>
<li>About databases</li>
<li>Time management</li>
<li>To compromise</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="challenges-we-faced">Challenges we faced</h2>
<p>The most difficult part for us was planning our tasks, and then sticking to our plans. It seemed like the obvious thing to take care of, but most of the tasks took more time than we planned for them. We tried to listen to our coach Katya’s advise and to plan 3x more time than seemed right to us for each task, and sometimes it even worked, but sometimes even that amount of time wasn’t enough. But we think we’ve got better with planning by the end of the summer, so we would probably call it a progress.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-did">What we did</h2>
<p>For all this time we have added many features to the site:</p>
<ul>
<li>Add language model</li>
<li>Add language to the language-depended entities: users, pages, posts and communities</li>
<li>Users can choose language on registration form</li>
<li>Users can update their language through settings</li>
<li>Did our own middleware for language dynamically changing</li>
<li>Added many dependencies based on the language status</li>
</ul>
<p>In addition to working on the project, we had a lot of different fun activities.</p>
<p>For example, Sasha’s hair evolution in one month:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Alexa-Sasha-Collage.jpg" alt="melanoya" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Sasha's hair. Photo taken by other Sasha. </div>
<p>We also have attended many meetings of the local Python community (and other programming communities).</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Alexa-meetup-religofsil.jpg" alt="religofsil" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Sasha at the meetup. Photo taken by Mail.ru photographer. </div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Alexa-melanoya-meetup.jpg" alt="melanoya at Google" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Sasha took a picture of the other Sasha while <s>she was eating</s> we were working on our project at @Google. </div>
<h2 id="we-want-to-say-thanks-to-our-dream-team">We want to say thanks to our dream team</h2>
<p>Thank you, our coaches Katya and Ildar, for being there for us whenever we needed help with Django or just moral support. Thanks to Maria, our supervisor, who helped us getting through this summer without troubles of any kind with RGSoC or with our team. And, of course, we would like to thank our mentor Raham for giving us this opportunity to work on the project and for helping us throughout the summer.</p>
<p>And we’d like to thank each other for being awesome teammates and friends to each other. :)</p>
<h2 id="what-next">What next?</h2>
<p>We still have a lot things and features on the site to do, so we would like to continue contributing to the repository after RGSoC ends.</p>
<p>We’re happy and proud of our work this summer, and we feel more confident in programming world now. We’re both convinced that coding will be the right career choice for us, and we’re thankful for the opportunity to prove ourselves as coders.</p>
<h2 id="contacts">Contacts</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/linguistsare"><strong>Team</strong></a></li>
<li>Sasha (<a href="https://github.com/melanoya"><strong>melanoya</strong></a>)</li>
<li>Sasha (<a href="https://github.com/religofsil"><strong>religofsil</strong></a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/Sereni"><strong>Kate</strong></a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/theotheo"><strong>Ildar</strong></a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/RahamRaf"><strong>Raham</strong></a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/mkalininait"><strong>Maria</strong></a></li>
</ul>
🎶 A Song-like Summer 🌞Janakshi & Kalpanihttp://twitter.com/TeamFusionJK2017-09-19T00:00:00+00:002017-09-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/a-song-like-summer<h2 id="spending-a-song-like-summer"><strong>Spending a song-like summer!</strong></h2>
<p>Our summer is like a song, sometimes we don’t know the lyrics, but we still enjoy the song. 🎶😌 And then we sing the song till we are familiar with the lyrics. Just like that, we were struggling with some concepts but we enjoyed learning and using those concepts in the best way possible. Just like some songs introduce you to new styles and make you in love with them, our RGSoC journey was a starting point to many important things that made us more passionate about what we do. And even though our summer song is going to end soon, we will always enjoy its music.😇 So let’s see how interesting our summer song is so far..</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-19-listening-to-music.gif" alt="Listening to song" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Enjoy the song.. (Image : Her.ie)</b></div>
<h2 id="how-challenging-it-is">How challenging it is?</h2>
<p>So far, throughout the RGSoC journey, we’ve faced many challenges.</p>
<p><strong>Finding a place to work</strong> – This was not a challenge at all. We asked from APIIT Sri Lanka, because we always knew, universities will never say “No” to the real need of students, and they did say YES.!! So finding the room was a success!</p>
<p><strong>Finding coaches</strong> – This was also not a problem since we first contacted coach Kasun, and he helped us to find the other coaches. Thank you Coach Kasun.</p>
<p><strong>Time management</strong> – Since one of us has to deal with the lectures and we participate in many tech events, together and as individuals apart from RGSOC, we had to find time to cover the working hours that we are going to miss. Actually we had a great option for that. Working during weekends from home. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t enjoy our weekend. Visiting your friend’s home during weekends, means, Fun!! It is very relaxing and we are enjoying it a lot. And look what we had to deal with.. 😹</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-19-working-from-home.jpg" alt="Team Fusion Kitty" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Working from home be like.. (Image : Janakshi’s Tab)</b></div>
<p><strong>Learning new technologies and contributing to Open Source Projects</strong> – Since we were new to most of the concepts used in this project, sometimes we were stuck having no clue what to do to solve some problems. So we had to learn them from scratch.
This was us when we were stuck, looking miserable..</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-19-stuck-with-coding.jpg" alt="Struggling" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>The struggle was real.. (Image : Google images)</b></div>
<p>To overcome situations like above, we helped each other in our learning curve and got lots of help from our coaches, mentor and our supervisor. We worked on many hands-on tutorials together and helped each other to learn fast. So it was not that difficult to complete our learning curve and head back to the implementations.</p>
<p>This is our first Open Source project contribution and summer project. So we also had to learn the best practices of contributing to open source projects.</p>
<h2 id="learning-was-our-biggest-earning">Learning was our biggest earning!</h2>
<p>At first, we were completely new to Git, since it was our very first summer project and we weren’t familiar with most of the git concepts. So during the first two weeks, we learned a lot through tutorials and our coaching sessions. So here we are now, playing with Git in style.. 😎</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-19-like-a-boss.gif" alt="Like a Boss" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>The Git Bosses.. (Image : giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>We were selected for the project <em><a href="https://github.com/scorelab/OpenDF">OpenDF</a></em> , since both of us were familiar with Java EE and were ready to solve some of the issues with that knowledge. But our mentor had a different plan for us. So we were given the task to develop a file browser using ReactJS. Actually we think it was an opportunity. Because both of us had no clue about developing a react component. Not even a little! But now we can, at least a bit.😅 So our mentor opened a door for us to learn something new.., which we think was a blessing.</p>
<p>Since we were new to the world of ReactJs, we were struggling to figure out how React works, how to work with react boilerplates, how to test react components, what Redux-saga is and etc. So we learned about each of them while working. And we still do. Thanks to our study hours, our mentor and our coaches, now we can work with react components and understand how it works. From each tutorial, each code reviewing session, each coaching session and from each demo session we learned something new and we could improve our work.</p>
<h2 id="achievements-so-far">Achievements so far..</h2>
<p>So far we’ve learned many new things about Git, ReactJS, React boilerplates, Redux-saga, Testing react components, API documentations, Swagger and etc. And the best thing is, we’ve already been able to apply most of these concepts successfully.</p>
<p>We used Trello as a project management tool to manage our tasks while Git as a version control system. And we must mention our cool daily logs 😎. There are 58 <em><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/?kind=&team_id=413">daily logs</a></em> already! 📝✅ They made our work more organized. And so far we’ve developed three react components called SearchView, TreeView and DetailView for our file browser and have got <strong>two</strong> of them <strong>merged</strong> already with the FileBrowser container! 😇🎉</p>
<p>So this is how our project work looks like, at the moment.</p>
<div class="videoWrapper">
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/233787118?autoplay=1&color=ff0179" width="600" height="338" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>
<div class="image-credits"><a href="https://vimeo.com/233787118">Team Fusion Project</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user56833959">Janakshi Dulanga</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>. </div>
<h2 id="bonding-with-the-community">Bonding with the Community</h2>
<p>The motivation you get from RGSoC is remarkable. We used this summer as a great opportunity to network with the tech community in Sri Lanka. As the first step we participated in Business, Law and Technology Conference 2017 – APIIT. And there, Janakshi presented her final year project and was awarded too. Then we participated in few other competitions and achieved some victories too. And these competitions, helped us two, to become a better team. 😇</p>
<p>On our RGSoC day-off, after enjoying our little team time with ice cream sessions, we participated in Colombo Javascript Meetup at WSO2 Colombo and learned lots of new things about JSON Web Tokens, Securing NodeJS Rest APIs with JWT and about NodeJS Security. And it was our first Meetup!🎉</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-19-day-off.jpg" alt="Day-off" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>A well spent day-off. (Image : Meetup app and Kalpani’s phone)</b></div>
<h3 id="next-comes-the-competitions-and-achievements-during-rgsoc">Next comes the competitions and achievements during RGSoC,</h3>
<p><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/janakshidulanga"><strong>Janakshi :</strong></a></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Presented her work at Business, Law Technology conference organized by APIIT and won the best researcher award for the Technology track.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Selected for the final round of 19 th National best quality ICT awards 2017( NBQSA 2017). And now she’s in the winner circle.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/kalpani-bhagya-ranasinghe-256585110"><strong>Kalpani :</strong></a></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Participated in SheCoderess v.1.0, which was a hackathon organized by University of Uwa Wellassa, Sri Lanka. And her team won the first place.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Participated in Hackx competition, which was organized by University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka to seek innovative ideas. Her team got selected for the final round.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Both of us:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Both of us participated in the Hacktitude competition. This was organized by 99x Technologies. The best thing is, both of us got selected for the final round too. 😇</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="helping-hands">Helping hands</h2>
<p>We got a lot of help from our coaches and our mentor to learn these new things very fast while getting the help from our supervisor to manage the project work. And they were always there when we got stuck with issues in our code or any other thing.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Our mentor, <em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/agentmilindu">Milindu Kumarage</a></em>, Thank you, for your boundless patience with our work and for helping us when we were stuck with development issues.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Our supervisor,<em><a href="https://twitter.com/senorhuidobro?lang=en">Ramón Huidobro</a></em>, Thank you, for being so flexible when we got problems with managing the time, for guiding us to do the right thing and for motivating us.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Our lead coach <em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/kasundananjaya">Kasun Delgolla</a></em>, Remote Coach <em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/tharindudananjaya">Tharindu Delgolla</a></em> , Coach <em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/imranhishaam">Imran Hishaam</a></em> , Coach <em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/udanie-gunasena-191b8730">Udani Gunasena</a></em> , Coach <em><a href="https://www.facebook.com/chanakanurad">Anuradh Caldera</a></em> and Coach <em><a href="https://github.com/daminisatya">Damini Satya</a></em> , thank you all for spending your valuable time, on those valuable coaching sessions and helping us to be better at our work, than we used to be.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>And, of course, a big thank you to everyone from the <strong>Rails Girls Summer of Code Team</strong> who made our summer of code experience, a perfect one! Because of you guys we had a great summer which was full of new experiences and awesome memories.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-19-coaching-sessions.jpg" alt="Coaches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our coaching sessions. (Image : Kalpani’s phone, Slack and Google hangouts)</b></div>
<h2 id="after-this-summer">After this summer</h2>
<p>Thanks to RGSoC, this summer is so far the best summer in our lives. And it has opened doors for, new opportunities, new friends, new way of thinking and etc.</p>
<p>We believe, we can do more after this summer. After RGSoC, we would love to continue our contributions to <strong>OpenDF</strong>. And we also have a long-term goal to join RGSoC as coaches to help new teams, once we’ve gathered more experience. See how impressed are we from our first RGSoC experience? 😌 And we’ll be giving our support to the tech community more and more in the future, by joining meetups, conferences, competitions and engaging in many more open source projects.</p>
<p>And we must mention about the Conferences! Because we will be flying to Australia in 2018 to participate in <em><a href="https://www.rubyconf.org.au/2018">RubyConf AU 2018</a></em> 🛫🇦🇺 and will be participating in <em><a href="http://www.devday.lk/">DEV DAY 2017</a></em> 🇱🇰 conference as well. We are so excited! 😁🎉</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-19-when-things-work.gif" alt="Nothing to worry" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>When everything works fine.. (Image : giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>Last but not the least, we would like to say thanks to everyone for supporting us throughout this journey. And <strong>THANK YOU RGSoC</strong> for giving us this awesome opportunity. 😇 Thank you all for letting us have a song-like summer. We will always remember our song of RGSoC.. 😌🎶</p>
<p>Follow us on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamFusionJK">@TeamFusionJK</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/JanakshiDulanga">@JanakshiDulanga</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/KbKalpani">@KbKalpani</a>
Read our <a href="https://rgsocteamfusion.wordpress.com/">blog</a> on WordPress.</p>
Blog- Team Serv0101Rakhi Sharma And Neha Yadavhttp://twitter.com/atbrakhi2017-09-17T00:00:00+00:002017-09-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Blog-Team-Serv0101<p>We have been working on the Servo project. Working on this project has broadened our programming knowledge especially with Rust. We have interacted with Git a lot. At this point, we cannot say that we are masters with Rust, but we are much better than when we started learning it.
We just can’t believe that RGSoC is coming to an end, time flies.</p>
<h3 id="learning-and-challenges">Learning and Challenges</h3>
<p>We were absolutely unfamiliar with Rust, and it has quite a bit of a learning curve. We struggled with Rust. You need a lot of patience when you are learning something new it really takes a lot of time. We faced a lot of problems while understanding the codebase, specification, building environment etc. But yeah, Kudos to our coaches Rahul, Ravi and our Mentor Josh who were always up for the help that was the only thing helped us in keep going. We both believe, we have learned lot of things during last two months and still learning.</p>
<h3 id="project-journey">Project Journey</h3>
<ul>
<li>Initially, setting up the project on our local machines was easy but we faced the problem when it took more than 1 hr 30 minutes to build. Then our mentor came to rescue us by introducing to a tool called Janitor.</li>
<li>Small Intro to Janitor: The janitor is a web app which uses cloud9. Instead of installing, downloading servo in your machine with lots of instruction you can simply go to janitor where complete development environment is provided for Mozilla firefox, servo etc. You can simply go there, choose servo and start editing in cloud9. Thank you, Jan Keromnes for creating this cool stuff.</li>
<li>Everyday we got introduced to some new concepts of Rust programming language. We are glad that we chose this project because we are really loving Rust.</li>
<li>One more challenge was understanding the specification. The language used in the specification was hard at first to understand but with help of our mentor and coaches, it was easy.</li>
<li>During the review of PR, we got to know that there are few bugs in the specification for which Josh opened the issue.</li>
<li>Matching the standard of code in the servo was tough for both of us at the beginning. But with the suggestion of our coaches and mentor we started writing our own code and then refactored it to match the codebase of servo.</li>
<li>So now we came up with this: We wrote more than 50 logs(more to come).</li>
<li>Number of comments on Github: 122(more to come). We discussed most of the things on IRC but still, we are getting lots of comments and suggestions from different developers. It’s really nice to see that other community members are taking an interest in our project and helping us. That’s why people says <code class="highlighter-rouge">open source</code> is filled with cool and awesome people.</li>
<li>Number of Files created + changed: 15.</li>
<li>We both were familiar with Git before starting the project but in last two months believe us, we messed up while rebasing and learned some new things about it. Big thanks to coach Rahul and Ravi(They both were our pillars of strength and support)- you people are awesome.</li>
<li>We Learnt the importance of implementing a peer to peer reviews. Also had lot of meetings with our Supervisor Vaishali. She is awesome and very supportive :)</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-next">What next?</h3>
<p>We are looking forward to contributing more towards the project. Also, we want to thank, RGSOC organizers for facilitating everything and providing us tickets for JSFOO conference. We will look forward to giving back to the community.</p>
💎 D for diamonds are foreverJenhttp://twitter.com/jenlijo2017-09-15T00:00:00+00:002017-09-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/d-for-diamonds<h2 id="d-for-discourse">D for Discourse</h2>
<p>It’s incredible how fast the summer has gone! (literally as well in Berlin). Choosing a project wasn’t easy at first. After researching and consulting our coaches, Discourse seemed the right one to go. In the beginning it was an unknown for us and soon we would discover the immensity of it! A big and beautiful deep ocean of Rails and Ember code hanging around the internet in every discuss corner.</p>
<p>Discourse is great to start to contribute to open source. The community in <a href="http://meta.discourse.org">http://meta.discourse.org</a> is willing to help and answer any question you might have. It comes full of information to get to know the project and a <a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/beginners-guide-to-creating-discourse-plugins-part-1/30515">Beginner’s tutorial</a> to build something locally and get familiar with their particular way to add plugins to the main app.</p>
<p>Kaja has also written <a href="https://berlindiamonds.blogspot.de/">some posts in our blog</a> about what it is to contribute here, and we will try to add up more info to make it a complete guide.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-built">What we built</h2>
<p>Our project was based on creating plugins to let the admins back up the information of the forum in some cloud provider.</p>
<p>We didn’t know how long it would take us to build one plugin. I thought we would have one or two at the end of the summer, but we ended up <a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-plugins-for-backups/68018">enabling 4 possibilities</a> as well as a base class plugin from which all of them inherit (Google Drive, Nextcloud - Jan from Nextcloud left a message in our repo suggesting it, we were super happy to get it and built it right away! - Box, and a new version of the existent backups to Dropbox by <a href="https://github.com/xfalcox">falco</a>). After this, our mentor <a href="https://eviltrout.com/">eviltrout</a> found another cool task to give us: downloading these files directly from Discourse and send an email to the user when it’s done, which we are on the way of building.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-15-berlindiamonds.png" alt="Team berlindiamonds" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Github screenshot</div>
<p>We’ve learnt so many things this summer: inheritance, injecting code through class_eval and then through event listeners, git git git, a lot of interaction with APIs, the power of gems, how they’re built, code structure, the “super” keyword, memoization, triggering Jobs, executing stuff in the console, debugging with puts, byebug, Rails.logger.debug, some testing, drawing routes from the outside, Ember basics and the importance of proper documentation!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-15-berlindiamonds-w-markus.JPG" alt="Team berlindiamonds" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Absolventa - Kaja, Markus and Jen</div>
<p>We also participated in a RG beginners workshop in August, Kaja is part of the organization and proposed me to coach. It was a great feeling to see so many women (around 40) curious to code and many coaches happy to share their skills.</p>
<h2 id="a-huge-thank-you-to">A huge “thank you” to:</h2>
<p>The whole Rails Girls Summer of Code organization and supporters for giving life to this amazing project. This means the world to all newcomers and it fills the so important <a href="https://books.google.de/books?id=tvazDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT83&lpg=PT83&dq=%22tutorial+gap%22+rails&source=bl&ots=zu4r8J1vpx&sig=62dYwycJiCjwiDrNAFAkb6RzD7s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZ4fzs7JzWAhXKUlAKHaRrBOQQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=%22tutorial%20gap%22%20rails&f=false">tutorial/junior gap mentioned by Daniel Kehoe</a>.</p>
<p>Our in and offsite coaches for volunteering in this life-changing project. Robin, Markus and Carsten at Absolventa who’ve answered passionately so many questions the moment we’ve asked them, and took the time to guide us and use the whiteboard to explain the universe of Rails. To Rojo, the most active online coach who’ve challenged us with his answers to find the solution by ourselves, chapeau! To Robert, who’s been there in our team events and found some time to help out online too.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-15-berlindiamonds-team.png" alt="Team berlindiamonds" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">photo by Markus @ Absolventa</div>
<p>To Lucas, our super easy going supervisor who had a very positive attitude and pinged us when we were about to miss some organizational stuff, oops! To the Discourse community, Sam and specially <a href="https://eviltrout.com/">eviltrout</a>), our mentor, who’s very clever at the time of dropping hints about the way to go with the requested features and cheered us up when we got stuck on the way.</p>
<p>We have been assigned our first-choice conference GOTO and are looking forward to it :) !</p>
<h2 id="whats-next">What’s next</h2>
<p>We will both start as junior in different companies and will continue our coding journey. Here’s an all-code-art-creation to not let the inspiration decay after the summer, cheers!</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zeNszro5dQ8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<div class="image-credits">live coding laptop band Benoît and the Mandelbrots with Visuals by cappel:nord</div>
Issue 253Marie and Ineshttp://twitter.com/nk42_2017-09-14T00:00:00+00:002017-09-14T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Issue-253<p>Our Project: <a href="https://foodsaving.world">Foodsaving.world</a> in the Backend <br />
Repository: <a href="https://github.com/yunity/foodsaving-backend">https://github.com/yunity/foodsaving-backend</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/retro_meeting.jpg" alt="Retro-Meeting" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">A part of our great team after our first retro meeting, Photo by Daniel Temme</div>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="the-plan">The Plan:</h2>
<p>Before our Rails Girls Summer of Code started, we made a great plan what we will do:</p>
<ol>
<li>create Feedback field to Food Pickup ( <a href="https://github.com/yunity/foodsaving-backend/issues/253">Issue #235</a> )</li>
<li>make trusted users/group admins</li>
<li>create statistics for pickups that were done by users in kilograms</li>
<li>build a quiz framework</li>
</ol>
<p>Optional: Android App, shared food & other things</p>
<p>Yay!</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="the-reality">The Reality</h2>
<p>We found out that we had no clue how difficult such an Issue can be! I mean like ABSOLUTLEY no clue. Coming from ‘Codecademy’, ‘Learn Python the Hard Way’ and some small pet projects we thought we would solve the first Issue within 1 week.</p>
<p>We needed 9 weeks until our first (notable) Pull request was accepted. So, how was that possible?</p>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="the-first-issue">The First Issue</h2>
<p>Our first task was to create Feedback field to Food Pickups. We spent a lot of our time learning about: Python, Django Framework, Django REST Framework, Swagger, how to troubleshoot our Git merge conflicts and how to solve our Docker complaints.</p>
<h4 id="what-we-have-learnt">What We Have Learnt:</h4>
<ol>
<li>There are no shortcuts - we have to do Django tutorial and Django REST tutorial first</li>
<li>Working both on the same branch at the same time will not speed up our progress! We are going to have many merge conflicts instead and we have to solve them all. This takes many, many hours :)</li>
<li>We know what is server, browser, database, models, migrations, HTTP requests, querysets, filters and all these fancy words around we did not know how they are connected before.</li>
<li>And finally: This Issue is not as small as it looks like!</li>
</ol>
<p>If you want to read more about this, go to the Foodsaving blog and read the <a href="https://blog.foodsaving.world/2017/09/01/railsgirls-fairy-tale.html">Fairy Tale Version</a> of that story.</p>
<p><a href="https://blog.foodsaving.world/2017/09/01/railsgirls-fairy-tale.html"> <img src="/img/blog/2017/Issue253.jpg" /></a></p>
<div class="image-credits">Graphic by Ines D. Guett</div>
<h4 id="what-we-have-built-status-6-september-2017">What We Have Built (Status: 6. September 2017):</h4>
<ul>
<li>a new API endpoint Feedback with HTTP methods GET, POST</li>
<li>integration API tests for Feedback that ensure that the user gets the correct GET/POST output</li>
<li>validation for field <code class="highlighter-rouge">about</code> and set the field <code class="highlighter-rouge">given_by</code> as read-only</li>
<li>unit model tests for model Feedback</li>
</ul>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Our hardest part on the Issue was to fix this test:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>python
def test_list_feedback_works_as_collector(self):
"""
Collector is allowed to see list of feedback.
"""
self.client.force_login(user=self.collector)
response = self.client.get(self.url)
self.assertEqual(response.status_code, status.HTTP_200_OK, response.data)
self.assertEqual(len(response.data), 2)
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>This test should return two instances of our test object and check that there are exactly 2 instances in the test database. There is also a difference between a test database and live database. We discussed this many times until we could fully understand :)</p>
<p><br /></p>
<script id="infogram_0_a09df277-2245-4bca-bec9-922b039710e6" title="Welcome: Your first project" src="https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed.js?yjt" type="text/javascript"></script>
<div style="padding:8px 0;font-family:Arial!important;font-size:13px!important;line-height:15px!important;text-align:center;border-top:1px solid #dadada;margin:0 30px"><a href="https://infogram.com/a09df277-2245-4bca-bec9-922b039710e6" style="color:#989898!important;text-decoration:none!important;" target="_blank">Welcome: Your first project</a><br /><a href="https://infogram.com" style="color:#989898!important;text-decoration:none!important;" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Infogram</a></div>
<p><br /></p>
<h4 id="what-we-still-want-to-do">What We Still Want to Do:</h4>
<ul>
<li>add HTTP method PATCH to Feedback</li>
<li>change field <code class="highlighter-rouge">weight</code> to FloatField</li>
<li>add filters to our Feedback + some other limitations</li>
<li>refacture</li>
<li>write a Foodsaving-backend beginner guide. We have already started <a href="https://github.com/mddemarie/Foodsaving-Documentation/blob/master/foodsaving-backend-code-guide.md">here</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="hackathon--community">Hackathon & Community</h2>
<p>We attended HackDays in ImmobillienScount 11.07.-13.07. and we got very motivated with Stefan: “We can make it!”</p>
<p>Foodsaving founders invited us to their <strong>Hackathon: 14.07.-16.07</strong>. We met here incredibly smart people - Tilmann Becker (@tiltec), Nick Sellen (@nicksellen) and Janina Abels (@djahnie) who put their time & energy into making the saving a food waste possible.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/hack_1.png" alt="Hackathon in Berlin" />
<img src="/img/blog/2017/hack_2.jpeg" alt="Hackathon in Berlin" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Enjoying saved food and coding together at the Hackathon, Photos by Nick Sellen</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>And we want to thank our great coaches and mentor! Most of them already appeared in our <a href="https://github.com/id-gue/summer-of-code/edit/gh-pages/blog/_posts/2017-07-13-print_hello_world.md">first blog post</a> – but <a href="https://github.com/tingled">Derek Tingle</a> (@tingled) is new and we are very grateful that he spent a lot of time explaining many related technical topics we needed a help with. You should see how he navigates through the shell – it’s amazing!!! :D</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/soundcloud">SoundCloud</a> coaching company was incredibly supportive work environment! We would like to thank SoundCloud for providing us a space, working software & hardware, motivational environment and good music! We had very nice time at SoundCloud and SoundCloud people demonstrated their passion for technology that drives them to achieve amazing results. Very enriching experience for us!!!</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/workspace_1.jpg" alt="Soundcloud" />
<img src="/img/blog/2017/workspace_2.jpg" alt="Soundcloud" />
<img src="/img/blog/2017/retro_meeting_marie.JPG" alt="Soundcloud" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">SoundCloud is a really great place to work! Photos by Ines D. Guett</div>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="future">Future</h2>
<p>Our Calls for Papers for <a href="https://berlin2017.codemotionworld.com/">Codemotion Berlin 2017</a> and <a href="https://de.pycon.org/">PyCon Germany 2017</a> were successfully selected! Yay! And we are going to have this talk: “A Summer of Foodsharing – Learn How to Code in an Open Source Project” in October 2017. We are going to talk about RailsGirls community, how to get into Open Source and we will present our project Foodsaving.</p>
<p>@ines will fly to Ghana and Kenya in the autunm and have a look on the tech scene there. Afterwards, she would like to become a Product Manager and help to prioritize coding tasks.</p>
<p>Marie says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Developers will realize how useful it is to sketch ideas to see with Ines if their ideas are totally awesome or totally unrealistic!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>@marie will get an amazing job as Backend Engineer in some country she has never been to.</p>
<p>Ines says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“If you need a talented, very committed Python Developer: Hire Marie! She is great!”</p>
</blockquote>
“Final Blog- Team Victorious Secret”Katyayani Singh and Saumya Balodihttp://twitter.com/VictoriuSecret2017-09-13T00:00:00+00:002017-09-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/final-blog-post-team-victorious-secret<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team_victorious_secret_1.jpeg" alt="Team Victorious Secret" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Picture Credits: Saumya</b></div>
<p>We just can’t believe that RGSoC is coming to an end. But every end, marks a new beginning. And we hope we will take our experiences forward by contributing to the wonderful communities that we were introduced to during our journey.</p>
<h3 id="challenges-we-faced">Challenges we faced</h3>
<ul>
<li>We were absolutely unfamiliar with ReactJS, and it has quite a bit of a learning curve. We struggled with React as well as the intricacies of JavaScript.</li>
<li>Managing RGSoC with college was a difficult task. Even though we took easy courses, the deadlines never seemed to end.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="learning">Learning</h3>
<p>RGSoC was mostly about unlearning what we knew, and building a new foundation for all the knowledge that came our way.</p>
<ul>
<li>We finally started understanding how JavaScript actually works. It is one thing to be able to put together code to make something work, and it is another thing altogether to actually know exactly why it works.</li>
<li>We were introduced to React. This was the most exciting bit of our summer. Working with something as popular and novel as React was an extraordinary experience.</li>
<li>We realized how designers and developers collaborate to build seamless user experiences. Working with the p5.js web editor made us aware of how much work goes into designing the user flow of an application even before the developers start coding. A lot of thinking and rethinking goes into user interactions and the response of the application. A shout out to the brilliant designers and developers of the web editor! Working with you, and learning from your work was truly amazing.</li>
<li>A tiny push in times of need can go a long way. Our mentor Cassie and our supervisor Pilar, have been our pillars of strength and support in this entire journey. It is thanks to their help, that we were able to pull through testing times.</li>
<li>Pair programming is tonnes of fun, and even more so when you do it with your best friend!</li>
<li>Tips and tricks about Git and Github.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="cassieeeeee-3-3-3">Cassieeeeee!!!! <3 <3 <3</h3>
<p>Cassie was our mentor, but she often donned the hat of a coach as well, personally reviewing our work and guiding us throughout. She helped us with problem solving approaches, React implementations and JavaScript issues. Every time we got stuck, she was there, like our Pole Star, directing us forward. Weekly meetings with her, were an absolute joy, giving us much needed energy and optimism to tackle the challenges of the week. Cassie sifted through the plethora of issues on the web editor repo and singled out beginner friendly ones so we could smoothly transition into React development. She also provided us with several resources and tutorials to polish our technical skills.</p>
<h3 id="pilaaaaar-3-3-3">Pilaaaaar!!!! <3 <3 <3</h3>
<p>Pilar was our watchful supervisor, always motivating us to surge ahead, in spite of all obstacles. She was constantly available to talk and always made time for us, whenever we needed. Her experience as a former RGSoCer was invaluable and her insights of working in the tech industry were enlightening. Being from Chile, she could sympathise with us when we mentioned the lack of awareness about workplace burnout in India. She told us that the work culture was similar in Chile. Pilar even got us extra help for React on the helpdesk, because our coaches were unable to devote adequate time.</p>
<h3 id="what-next">What next?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Continue contributing to the web editor because it is a really cool project.</li>
<li>Cassie and Pilar were the two wonderful ladies who helped us sail our boat in RGSoC. We hope to extend their kindness to other young women foraying into tech by assuming roles of mentorship and guidance.</li>
<li>Learn, learn, learn.</li>
<li>We also look forward to sharing our insights and learning with other members of the tech community.</li>
</ul>
Alvida, RGSoC 🙋🏽Brihi and Shravikahttp://twitter.com/276linesofCode2017-09-11T00:00:00+00:002017-09-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/alvida-rgsoc-2017<p>(<em>Alvida = Goodbye</em>)</p>
<p>About two and a half months back, none of us had an idea of what this journey would be like. RGSoC had been the first Summer of Code or any other program as such that we were a part of, and our eagerness to grasp the most from the program had us going all throughout. Not to mention, we have gained so much more than we had even anticipated.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-us.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Shravika and Brihi (Credits : Our dear friend, Saatvik) </b></div>
<h2 id="our-work-this-summer">Our Work this Summer</h2>
<p>As we look back into our two and a half months, RGSoC and Tessel have given us the opportunity to explore and grow in all spheres of an Open Source Project.
We’ve got our hands dirty with things like Documentation, Tutorials, Code, Hardware experiments, Talks, Presentations and even Product Design, to name a few. We started our Summer with exploring version control with GitHub and learning the intricacies of the same. A professional Open Source project has a very different approach to Pull Requests and Contributions. We learnt how to send PRs, how to get them reviewed ( Trust us, Reviews are the real deal in the learning ), how to squash commits, how to write clean code and clean commit messages, branching of cloned repositories, and most importantly, asking doubts on the issues that we don’t understand.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-tessel2.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our shipped Modules (Credits - Brihi's Phone)</b></div>
<p>Our Hardware modules were shipped from the US and we spent some time exploring them. This was the most exciting part - Making circuits, seeing the LEDs shimmer, watching the Accelerometer come back to life, and many more.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-tessel1.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our first module! (Credits - Brihi's Phone) </b></div>
<p>After exploring the different repositories in Tessel, we started exploring issues which were Contribution starters. A lot of them were listed in the Tessel blog called “<a href="https://tessel.io/blog/157835574022/this-week-in-tessel-fun-with-open-source">This Week in Tessel</a>” and we started completing them one at a time.
We made two important tutorial modules for Tessel for their documentation page. This included Fritzing diagrams of the circuits, describing the functionality in layman terms, and writing code which would be easily understood, with the help of the comments.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-pr3.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our first Pull Request for a tutorial! (Credits - Shravika's Laptop) </b></div>
<p>Apart from all the technical work, we learnt about Product Design and how exactly does a product make it’s way to the Open Source domain. We made a draft of something called a Product Requirement Document (PRD) for our proposal of HAP (Humanoid Arm Project) that we had made during our application process.</p>
<h2 id="challenges">Challenges</h2>
<p>Before RGSoC had started, our mentor, Kelsey had sent us a Plan of Work to follow. It included the various things we had suggested we would like to work on during our application process. It was a weekly plan with difficulty level slightly increasing every week. One of the tasks we had to accomplish was to implement One-Wire Communication Protocol for Tessel. We tried our initial few weeks on this issue but we were not able to get much out of it. This was because we were not able to figure out exactly where to start. We tried mapping the coding in Arduino with the one for Tessel but still couldn’t succeed.</p>
<p>Since we were beginners in git, sometimes we weren’t able to figure out how to squash multiple commits into one for clarity, how to sync the forked branches with the master branch and many others. In the beginning we did not even know how to send Pull Requests for different issues by making separate branches for each.
In the second month of RGSoC, during one of our weekly calls with Kelsey, we were introduced to Reach which is a module that the Tessel community is currently working on. It requires the ESP32 hardware module. So, we got one for us and started working on the same but got stuck in between since we were not able to push the python code to the module. Although, in the end, we were able to figure out the error in our approach with the help of one of our seniors at our University.</p>
<p>Tessel was all based on JavaScript. We were both new to this language and hence faced certain challenges while comprehending the code which was already there in Tessel. But, one of our coaches, Divam, helped us in figuring out the keywords used in the code snippets with the help of which we were able to make some tutorial for a few functionalities in Tessel in JavaScript.</p>
<h2 id="a-shoutout-to-the-amazing-tessel-community">A shoutout to the amazing Tessel Community!!</h2>
<p>Our blog couldn’t be complete had we not thanked the awesome Tessel Community that made our descent into Open Source, a smooth fun ride. Every call with Kelsey would begin with her asking us whether we have been achieving whatever we planned for.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-mentor1.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Kelsey, our mentor, tweets about us! (Credits - Twitter) </b></div>
<p>Our weekly calls with Kelsey, our mentor, were the times where we had learnt the most. The timely response of the community members on any of our doubts was commendable. Any PR review would come in a day or a two and the reviews gave us a different perspective on the issues. Nick and Kelsey, both Tessel Steering Committee members would leave comments asking questions about our code, which would force us to research more on the issue.
On our third meeting with Kelsey, she had said that “It is better to over-communicate rather than Under-communicate” and thus, we would ( shamelessly 🙈 ) ping them on slack or on the issues whenever we were stuck and a descriptive solution to our questions would follow. Many a times, Kelsey would explain us our doubts on our call. Despite whatever mistakes we would make, the committee members were always positive and ensured that we were able to rectify our errors and learn from them. Many times, they’ve tagged us in several issues that they thought we should be aware of and sent us links and resources to escalate our learning.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-comment.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>@HipsterBrown, an active Tessel Steering Committee member, responding to us :) (Credits - Slack) </b></div>
<p>Tessel has provided us amazing Mentorship, one that is hard to find. We are so glad that we began our Open source journey with such a welcoming community and we aim to work for Tessel even after RGSoC is over. Tessel, We love you!</p>
<h2 id="extras">Extras</h2>
<p>In these three months, we not only focussed on core development work but we also went on presenting a few lightning talks. We gave two of them - one for Women Who Code, Delhi and another for LinuxChix India. In the WWC-D Meetup, we introduced the participants to Computer Vision in Python. It was a great experience, since, we got to delve deeper into Open CV, explain the concepts involved to the attendees, cleared their doubts. The audience was very responsive and we even got a positive feedback in the end. So, through this we were able to spread our knowledge about Computer Vision to a few enthusiasts beginning their journey in this. We introduced RGSoC in the beginning of our presentation, making the audience aware about what it is and how it really works.
Slides for the same can be found <a href="http://slides.com/brihijoshi/deck#/">here</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-wwcdtalk.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Women Who Code Delhi publishes a review of our talk (Credits - Twitter) </b></div>
<p>The LinuxChix India Meetup was focussed more on Open Source Contributions, RGSoC, and Tessel. Our supervisor Vaishali had introduced us to the community and put us in touch with the organizer of the meetup. We spoke about RGSoC - How to apply, what all do we do, our work, our social media, our blog posts, in and all everything. After that, we went on to demonstrate our project - Tessel. There were several Open Source enthusiasts who had loads of questions about Tessel and we were more than delighted to answer them. One person even wanted to use Tessel in his project that he was thinking of starting!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-linuxchix1.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Poster introducing us for the LinuxChix meetup (Credits - Twitter) </b></div>
<p>It was a great experience for both of us because we were able to pass on our knowledge to an enthusiastic crowd, get rid of our fear of speaking in front of unknown people, and gaining in depth knowledge of the topics involoved for which we had to explore every nook and corner of them in order to make our sessions productive.
Slides for the same can be found <a href="https://github.com/276linesofCode/blog-posts/tree/master/LinuxChix-talk">here</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-linuxchix2.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b> LinuxChix India tweeting about us! (Credits - Twitter) </b></div>
<h2 id="whats-next">What’s next?</h2>
<p>RGSoC provided us with a whole lot of things that we not even imagined of gaining in this interval of three months. As it was a wonderful journey for both of us, we have thought of recommending this program to more and more people by conducting a few related meetups at our University under our Rails Girls Summer of Code, Delhi Chapter. Apart from this, we had discussed way back with our mentor during the application process that we would love to contribute to Tessel even after RGSoC ends. The months might be over, but the memories are here to stay!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-09-08-tessel3.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b> We love you Tessel! (Credits - Twitter) </b></div>
<p>And who would know that two confused, scared and shy humans who had absolutely no idea how they would survive the tech world could complete RGSoC successfully, loaded with experience and confidence!</p>
Conferences 2017Mariahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2017-09-10T00:00:00+00:002017-09-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-conferences-part1<p>A big part of our program is providing RGSoC students with an opportunity to attend a conference of their interest. This year is not an exception. The students set their conference preferences, and we tried to make their wishes come true.</p>
<p>This concept wouldn’t work without conference organizers who share the same diversity values as we do. And we are especially happy that many conferences which supported us last year, decided to stay by our side this year, too.</p>
<p>We would like to say a big THANKS to the conference organizers who grant <strong>free tickets</strong> to our students. This means a lot to us!</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsjsfooin2017jsfoo-2017aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://jsfoo.in/2017/">JSFoo 2017</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://jsfoo.in/2017/">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/jsfoo-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>September 15-16, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Bangalore, India <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/jsfoo">@jsfoo</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsgotocphcomgoto-copenhagen-2017aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://gotocph.com/">GoTo Copenhagen 2017</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://gotocph.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/goto-cph-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> October 1-3, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Copenhagen, Denmark <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/GOTOcph">@GOTOcph</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? Get involved as a <a href="https://gotocph.com/2017/pages/becomecrew">conference volunteer</a> or <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact us</a> for getting 10% off promo code.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsgotobercomgoto-berlin-2017aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://gotober.com/">GoTo Berlin 2017</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://gotober.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/goto-berlin-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>November 16-17, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Berlin, Germany <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/gotober">@gotober</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? Learn more about their <a href="https://gotober.com/2017/pages/inclusivitygrant">inclusivity grant</a>!</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpswwwdotconferencescomdotconferences-2017-2018aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://www.dotconferences.com/">dotConferences 2017-2018</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://www.dotconferences.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/dotconf-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>DotGo date: </b>November 6, 2017 <br />
<b>DotCSS date: </b>November 30, 2017 <br />
<b>DotJS date: </b>December 1, 2017 <br />
<b>DotSwift date: </b>January 29, 2018 <br />
<b>DotAI date: </b>May 31, 2018 <br />
<b>DotScale date: </b>June 1, 2018 <br />
<b>DotSecurity date: </b>TBA <br />
<b>Location: </b>Paris, France <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/dotconferences">@dotconferences</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttprubyconfindiaorgrubyconf-india-2018aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://rubyconfindia.org/">RubyConf India 2018</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://rubyconfindia.org/">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/rubyconf-india-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>February 9-10, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Bangalore, India <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/RubyConfIndia">@RubyConfIndia</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsrubyconforgau2018rubyconf-australia-2018aspan"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://rubyconf.org.au/2018">RubyConf Australia 2018</a></span></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://rubyconf.org.au/2018">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/conferences/rubyconf-au-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> March 8-9, 2018 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Sydney, Australia <br />
<b>Twitter: </b> <a href="https://twitter.com/rubyconf_au">@rubyconf_au</a> <br />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<p>More conferences are coming soon!</p>
Our journey - with rgsoc and Open Source!roselynehttp://twitter.com/code_Hoppers2017-09-09T00:00:00+00:002017-09-09T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team_code_hoppers_blog<p>Being at #rgsoc has been one of the most fruitful yet challenging experiences this year. Every single day was exciting and came with it’s own set of learning curve.</p>
<h4 id="our-accomplishments-so-far">Our accomplishments so far?</h4>
<p>In a nutshell, we learnt about coding, teamwork, collaboration and issue resolution. We even got to learn how to effectively communicate with remote teams across the world, listening and focusing on a common goal, defining tasks and keeping schedules. Well, sometimes not everything went well as we had planned and from that we learnt that nothing is perfect and we always have to keep striving to efficiently communicate and resolve our blockers. <strong>It has been an amazing journey!</strong></p>
<h4 id="our-take-from-the-summer">Our take from the summer!</h4>
<ul>
<li>We learned about <a href="http://rubyonrails.org/">Rails</a> and <a href="http://rubyonrails.org/">Elastic search</a></li>
<li>Keeping and maintaining coding standards specified by an organisation</li>
<li>Learnt the importance of implementing peer to peer reviews</li>
<li>We felt the need of contributing to a shared vision</li>
<li>We revamped the search functionality by designing the UI and backend</li>
<li>We added new features to the new landing page - Cynthia helped alot with this</li>
<li>Simon helped us implement the backend <a href="https://github.com/ankane/searchkick">searchKick</a> functionality</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team_code_hoppers_cynthia.jpg" alt="Cynthia's take!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Rgsoc has been a great experience. I have learnt so much. It has been fun collaborating with my partner, the coaches and our mentor. I hope to continue contributing to open farm (Photo by: Cynthia)</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team_code_hoppers_roselyne.jpg" alt="Roselyne's take!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">This was a fruitful summer and I would love to do it again. The lessons I have carried from this summer will go a long way in accelerating my growth as a software programmer. I have enjoyed the momentum that this summer has brought. (Photo by: Roselyne)</div>
<h4 id="we-wish-to-thank">We wish to thank…</h4>
<ul>
<li>Our supervisor, <a href="https://twitter.com/simonv3">Simon</a> - We got to work with Simon through out the OpenFarm project and we cannot thank him enough for the immense work experience we have gained from him.</li>
<li>OpenFarm designer, <a href="http://www.sophiakc.com/">Sophia</a> - We got to work with Sophia on most designs that were implemented on the OpenFarm project. It felt great to learn about design from a person with a keen eye for design. Thanks Sophia, it was a pleasure to learn from you.</li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/travis_fnd">Travis Foundation</a> - For organising our program for the entire summer. We remain forever grateful, and assure you that we really did feel the impact of the trust and belief you placed upon us. We plan to continue sharing this experience with interested parties.</li>
<li>We also wish to thanks our coaches - Sigu, William and Emmanuel for the guidance and time they dedicated towards the summer. These great guys ensured that we resolved some of the issues we encountered during the program.</li>
<li>We also wish to thank everyone at the <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> community who made this summer be as smooth, pleasant and awesome.</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="so-whats-next">So, what’s next?</h4>
<p>After working on OpenFarm and realizing the potential of the Open Source community, we hope to keep contributing to OpenFarm as well as other OpenSource communities to enrich this ecosystem and be part of this revolution.</p>
<h4 id="welcome-to-nairobi-kenya">Welcome to Nairobi, Kenya</h4>
<p>Incase you pass by Nairobi, we can always have a chat about tech and our experiences. Feel free to reach out to us on our twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/annyanngo">Cynthia</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/roselynemakena">Roselyne</a></p>
Team ifPairElseUnknownifPairElseUnknownhttp://twitter.com/IfPairElse2017-09-08T00:00:00+00:002017-09-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/ifPairElseUnknown-final-month<h1 id="hello-world"><strong>Hello World!</strong></h1>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifPairElse_team.png" alt="Team Banner" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image created by <a href="https://www.if-me.org/">if-me.org</a></div>
<h3 id="update-on-our-project"><strong>Update on our project</strong></h3>
<p>We are in our final month of RGSoC! We can’t believe RGSoC is nearing the end. We have learnt so much since we started and are feeling more confident in pursuing a career in Development.</p>
<p>Working out of the office at our host company Zendesk, has been a great experience. We have met many wonderful and supportive peers.
We spent our first two months hanging out with Adel Smee and her team. For a few weeks we have moved to another floor to sit amongst Zendesk’s Data Scientists and Data Engineers.
During our time here we have participated in a regular Monday morning meditation session, enjoyed many Tech Talks, attended a communication workshop and participated in an ice cream day.</p>
<p>We have been contributing towards <a href="https://www.if-me.org/">if-me.org,</a> an open source project founded by <a href="https://twitter.com/fleurchild">Julia Nguyen</a>. We have been inspired by Julia’s passion towards building a community for sharing mental health experiences and providing support.</p>
<p>We have managed the project using Trello, Github and hosting a global meeting with our team each week.
With the support and guidance of Julia and our coaches we have completed a number of issues assigned to us on Github.</p>
<p>By the end of RGSoC, we will have done:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifPairElse_achievements.png" alt="IfPairElse Achivements" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Created by Sophie McDonald using <a href="https://www.canva.com/">Canva</a></div>
<h4 id="what-we-have-learnt"><strong>What we have learnt</strong></h4>
<p><strong>Pair Programming</strong> - Two brains are better than one and four eyes are better than two! We set up our environment with; 2 monitors, 2 keyboards and 2 mice/trackpads which has helped us write efficiently and keep us engaged while pair programming.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/IfPairElse_setup.jpg" alt="IfPairElse Pair Programming Setup" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Jenny and Sophie</div>
<p><strong>Git</strong> - The world of Git is never ending. Branches and branches and branches are unlimited and then remembering to merge and rebase and reconnect to the main branch. The Git journey has taken us to many places with a rebase back to home.</p>
<p><strong>Ruby</strong> - There are more than one way to solve a problem. Ruby has helped us to do it in a way that is readable!</p>
<p><strong>Rails</strong> - Rails is a framework which has provided structure and simplified repetitive tasks. It’s also pretty magical.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifPairElse_miracle.gif" alt="Miracle" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Sourced from <a href="https://giphy.com">giphy.com</a></div>
<p><strong>Javascript</strong> - Javascript likes its semi-colons ‘;’ and ‘;’! And don’t forget the commas!</p>
<p><strong>TDD</strong> - We regularly wrote tests within our code base. When it comes to building an application, we can’t live without TDD. As we have now a better understanding of TDD, our lives will never be the same.</p>
<p>There is an endless number of applications and developer tools available to us and the more we learn, the more we realise we don’t know enough and learning never stops.</p>
<h4 id="challenges-we-faced"><strong>Challenges we faced</strong></h4>
<p>This has been our first contribution to an open source project. It wasn’t easy diving into an established project. There was a lot to learn and discover. We had to navigate through all the files of existing code.</p>
<p>Getting the hang of Git was a bit of a challenge. We discovered that we could cause a conflict in Git when both working together on the same branch.</p>
<p>Pair programming can be challenging when working remotely. We worked remotely for 9 days and found it challenging because we were both working in different timezones and often had issues with internet connection.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifPairElse_quote.jpg" alt="Passion Led Us Here" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo sourced from <a href="https://stocksnap.io/photo/Y4OWV80EPY">Stocksnap</a></div>
<h4 id="what-we-have-achieved"><strong>What we have achieved</strong></h4>
<ul>
<li>Experienced Pair Programming on an open source project <a href="https://www.if-me.org/">if-me.org</a>.</li>
<li>Worked on a new key feature (Secret Share).</li>
<li>Learnt the fundamentals of <a href="https://github.com/">Git</a>, working from our team fork, on the project together.</li>
<li>Developed our skills in programming; Ruby, Rails and Javascript.</li>
<li>Gained confidence in our ability to write clean and readable code.</li>
<li>Gained an understanding of TDD by writing lots of tests.</li>
<li>Networked with wonderful and supportive developers.</li>
<li>Connected with the amazing <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">RGSoC Community</a> and <a href="https://ruby.org.au/">Ruby Australia</a>.</li>
<li>Shared our experiences on our <a href="https://twitter.com/IfPairElse">Twitter</a> and through our <a href="https://ifpairelseunknown.github.io/">Daily logs.</a></li>
<li>Learnt about many wonderful Developer Tools.</li>
<li>Ate lots of chocolate.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifPairElse_celebrate.gif" alt="Celebrate!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Sourced from <a href="https://giphy.com">giphy.com</a></div>
<h4 id="whats-next"><strong>What’s next?</strong></h4>
<p>Our plans/goals for after RGSoC:</p>
<p>We plan to develop on our existing programming skills, with the aim to become full time developers. We would like to share our experience participating in RGSoC with others, in the hope that this will encourage more diversity within the industry. We look forward to attending the <a href="http://www.rubyconf.org.au/2018">Ruby Australia Conference</a> in 2018.</p>
<h4 id="thank-you"><strong>Thank You!</strong></h4>
<p>Our summer (winter) of code is coming to an end, but it has been a great pleasure working with our amazing team of coaches. They have all provided us with a wealth of knowledge, which we can take away and implement as we continue to learn. <strong>Thank You</strong> to our wonderful coaches; <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/adelsmee">Adel Smee</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/HashNotAdam">Adam Rice</a>, <a href="https://github.com/simonhildebrandt">Simon Hildebrandt</a></strong> and <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/tmoore">Tim Moore</a></strong></p>
<p>A <strong>Thank You</strong> to <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/zamith">Luís Ferreira</a></strong> for providing awesome support remotely.</p>
<p>A <strong>Thank You</strong> to <strong><a href="https://www.zendesk.com/">Zendesk</a></strong> for providing a welcoming and supportive environment for us to work on our project.</p>
<p><strong>Thank You</strong> to our Project mentor <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/fleurchild">Julia Nguyen</a></strong> it has been a pleasure working on your project and we look forward to continuing our work on <a href="https://www.if-me.org/">if-me.org</a>. We also want to thank Julia and Bee, for our personalised RGSoC stickers and the wonderful if-me community for their support.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifPair_ifme_stickers.jpg" alt="ifme stickers" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Jenny and Sophie</div>
<p><strong>Thank You</strong> to our RGSoC Supervisor <strong>Vi Nguyen</strong>, it has been a pleasure getting to know you.</p>
<p>Lastly, we would like to say a <strong>BIG Thank You</strong> to the organisers of <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> and all the sponsors for making this experience possible. This has been such a wonderful experience, we have enjoyed the opportunity to contribute back to the community in a positive way. This is an experience we will never forget!</p>
<h3 id="you-can-find-us-here"><strong>You can find us here</strong></h3>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/ifPairElse">Twitter</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://ifpairelseunknown.github.io/">Blog</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/JennyNamster">Jenny</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/sophierose239">Sophie</a></strong></p>
Clojurian's Update - Working on re-frame's Tracing ToolSaskia and Chrishttp://twitter.com/saskalii2017-09-06T00:00:00+00:002017-09-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/clojurians-update<h1 id="really-great-summer-of-clojure">Really Great Summer of Clojure</h1>
<p>It’s really exciting to see and feel our progress. In the beginning we were grasping at the huge space of ClojureScript tools and libraries and editors, and now as the last month begins our contributions to re-frame’s tracing tool have already made it easier for developers to debug their applications! There’s also a hint of melancholy that the summer of code will be ending in four weeks. Thoughts are starting to take shape about how to address the last third of the project. What do we want to achieve? What would be the ideal outcome? Let’s gather some thoughts!</p>
<h2 id="learning-and-growing">Learning and Growing</h2>
<p>Through a glorious combination of working on re-frame’s tracing tool, reading other peoples’ open source projects, hanging out with our wonderful mentors and coaches, and tinkering with our own side projects, we gathered experience in programming with ClojureScript and re-frame and learned about langugage specific idioms. What we find most valuable though is the great advice we got from our coaches and our mentor. They all have given us so much input for how to become good programmers, not only technically, but especially in terms of finding a good and efficient workflow, addressing problems on a conceptual level and the importance of clear and constructive communication.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/coaching.png" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">coaching with Matt! / Photo by: Chris Sun</div>
<p>We are very thankful to have the opportunity to work together so closely with all of you! A big thank you for all your support!</p>
<h2 id="building-and-collaborating">Building and Collaborating</h2>
<p>We worked on many features for the <a href="https://github.com/Day8/re-frame-trace">tracing tool</a> with the intention to make it more easily usable. The first things we focused on were improving the filter functionality, making resizing of the window smooth and easy and adding some adjustments to the user interface. Another important addition was saving user data like filters to localstorage to ensure persistence. The traces that are being shown in the panel are still a lot and can feel a bit overwhelming. Our focus for the next weeks is to reduce the amount of traces to the ones that are important. For the end of the summer, we want to compare the tracing tool before and after we started working on it.</p>
<h2 id="community-3">Community <3</h2>
<p>In the third week of our project, we went to <strong>EuroClojure</strong>, which took place in Berlin this year.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/euroclojure.png" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">EuroClojure / Photo by: Chris Sun</div>
<p>It was a great opportunity to connect to people from around the globe some of which are using re-frame in their everyday work. Being at conferences always leaves us very inspired and full of ideas for what to look into next. We also got some feedback and ideas for how re-frame’s developer experience could be improved. In general, people were really excited about our project and some of them met us for lunch in the following weeks to talk about the project in more depth. These meetings were super valuable for us, as we were able to focus on very specific parts of development with re-frame. It’s so wonderful to be surrounded by the community in person after chatting over slack and github and twitter!</p>
<p>We also went to the monthly <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Clojure-Berlin">Clojure Berlin</a> meetups, where we chill with and hear about the projects and intellectual musings of local Clojurians. I love how close the Berlin Clojure community feels, and these meetups often feel more like hangouts than tech events. It’s really special.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/clojure-meetup.png" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Clojure Meetup Berlin / Photo by: Chris Sun</div>
<h2 id="rgsummerofchallenges">RGSummerofChallenges</h2>
<p>Open source and learning comes with difficulties along with the good times.</p>
<p>Clojure doesn’t have the best documentation, and it’s widely known within the community that the beginner experience is rough. The ClojureScript tech stack is so big! It took us the first couple of weeks to properly orient around tools of the ecosystem and the language itself: build tools, development tools, ClojureScript compiler, JavaScript interop, frameworks, libraries, fighting and reconciling with our editors. This is all before writing any code, which can feel really frustrating, because that’s what we’re here for, right?</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/cljs-comic.png" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">CLJS Comic / Comic by: Chris Sun</div>
<p>Luckily, the Clojure community is very helpful and social, and sometimes posting in the proper channel of <a href="http://clojurians.net">Clojurians slack</a> would result in solutions, feedback, encouragement, or a push in the right direction. And of course our coaches and mentors were really eager to help!</p>
<p>Organisation was also a challenge. Being self directed is already hard, and there were not only many parties to coordinate with, but it was also not explicitly defined who was supposed to take responsibility/have decision-making power for which things. Being that all the parties consist of kind and considerate humans, it was an odd and sometimes frustrating balancing act for everyone involved between wanting to take action and also not wanting to infringe on others. I imagine this is a common pain-point in open source, so it’s an important experience to learn to navigate. Project organisation was also a challenge because there were so many possibilities, so many ways we could make the developer experience better that it’s hard to pick just a few!</p>
<h2 id="after-the-summer">After the Summer</h2>
<p>The future is uncertain, but the job hunt has begun, and we’ve both begun taking bold steps towards securing full-time Clojuretastic livelihoods. Continuing to work with Clojure and Clojurescript would be a dream, however improbably this might be, but with the momentum from Summer of Code and the support of the Clojure community we have high spirits!</p>
<p>Over the summer we’ve accumulated a huge pile of Clojure, programming, open source, and general life notes and feelings and hope to eventually sculpt these into blog posts. Also we’ve kicked off so many collaborations and personal ClojureScript projects we’re really enthusastic about continuing to work on!</p>
<p>We are both helping organise <a href="http://clojurebridge-berlin.org">ClojureBridge Berlin</a>, which will take place right after RGSoC ends. ClojureBridge is close to our hearts, and is what brought us together as a team in the first place, so it feels like everything is coming full circle, starting and ending with community <3</p>
Open source, here we come!Geminihttp://twitter.com/Team_Gemini_2017-09-04T00:00:00+00:002017-09-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/opensource-here-we-come<h2 id="duo-of-the-moment">Duo of the moment</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/TeamGemini.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Team Gemini(Image Courtesy: Shagun Kapur)</div>
<p><a href="https://github.com/aksh98">Akarsha</a> and <a href="https://github.com/meriki">Ramya</a> are not your regular individuals, a dash of crazy, a drop of weird and a couple of undiscovered unusual ingredients makes them up. They can be found studying in the same college of IIIT Delhi and sharing the same hostel room, adding a whole new meaning to birds of a feather flock together. Their acquaintance started with their mutual interest in coding and fascination for artificial intelligence. Slowly but steadily they started bonding and realized that despite one being from North India and the other from South, one being a die hard Korean fan and the other a Game of Thrones fan, they are eerily similar. Their sun signs (which both are extremely fond of) also matched! While looking for the perfect team name, ‘Gemini’ which literally means ‘The Twins’ made perfect sense. In the short span of two years, they have managed to gather all sorts of memories with each other, reading for tests together, doing assignments together, bickering and laughing the next moment, watching youtube videos, heated discussions on random topics or just not seeing eye to eye with one other. They’ve been through it all and vehemently attest that their bond keeps going strong because of all their experiences together.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts-about-the-team">Fun facts about the team</h2>
<h3 id="akarshahttpsgithubcomaksh98"><a href="https://github.com/aksh98"><strong>Akarsha:</strong></a></h3>
<ul>
<li>Didn’t manage to grow up beyond the age of 14 :p</li>
<li>She is too excited about every new thing that comes her way.</li>
<li>She is a die hard Korean fan (finds them cute for some reason) and her long time dream is to visit South Korea. Though I am pretty sure she would love to visit any place as long as she gets to travel.</li>
<li>She is a confused soul with a 100 things on her plate.</li>
<li>She dreams to be a successful Entrepreneur.</li>
<li>Wants her life to be fun filled and exciting always.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="ramyahttpsgithubcommeriki"><a href="https://github.com/meriki"><strong>Ramya:</strong></a></h3>
<ul>
<li>Keeps her stuff really clean :P</li>
<li>Very lazy at times. Mastered the art of doing more in less</li>
<li>Loves fan-fiction, can’t survive without Harry Potter fanfics at least once a week</li>
<li>Gets her fat from nowhere(she hardly eats anything.. And if she does, she exercises to burn those calories)</li>
<li>Wants to know about anything and everything interesting under the sun and gets very excited every time she manages to do this. Her youtube feed is filled with random explanations about random things</li>
<li>Wants her life to be one of adventure and magic</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="the-crew">The Crew</h2>
<h3 id="coaches">Coaches</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/teamgemini_coaches.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our coaches(Photo: Facebook)</div>
<h4 id="akshay-agarwalhttpswwwfacebookcomakshayagarwal1675275"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/akshay.agarwal.1675275">Akshay Agarwal</a></h4>
<p>He is a doctoral student working in the field of biometrics and machine learning at IIITD. He has completed his Mtech in from IIIT Allahabad. He recently went to West Virginia University for a 9-month Internship program. He also works in other fields like Pattern recognition, Face recognition, face spoofing, Image analysis to name a few.</p>
<h4 id="shiven-mianhttpsgithubcomshivenmian"><a href="https://github.com/shivenmian/">Shiven Mian</a></h4>
<p>He is a junior at IIITD, majoring in Computer science, Polygot Programmer, passionate about Opensource, with a side of research. Shiven is a 2016 GSoC intern with Fossasia and worked in Loklak.</p>
<h4 id="aditay-tripathihttpsgithubcomaditay"><a href="https://github.com/Aditay/">Aditay Tripathi</a></h4>
<p>He has just completed his MTech from our college only and did his BTech from NIT Shrinagar.
He is an AI enthusiast in Research and applications of Machine learning/deep learning in speech recognition and computer vision. He is well versed with various libraries like Kaldi, Tensorflow, Theano and Keras.</p>
<h3 id="our-mentors">Our Mentors</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/Gemini_mentors.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our Mentors(Photo: Github)</div>
<h4 id="stefan-van-der-walthttpsgithubcomstefanv"><a href="https://github.com/stefanv">Stefan van der Walt</a></h4>
<p>He is an assistant researcher at BIDS and a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has been involved in the development of scientific open source software for more than a decade and enjoys teaching Python at workshops and conferences. Stéfan is the founder of scikit-image and a contributor to numpy, scipy, and dipy.</p>
<h4 id="juan-nunez-iglesiashttpsgithubcomjni"><a href="https://github.com/jni">Juan Nunez-Iglesias</a></h4>
<p>He is a research scientist at the University of Melbourne, with interests in neuroscience and biological image analysis. He is also a freelance consultant in scientific Python programming, with a particular interest in renewable energy and the environment.Also, he is the author of the book Elegant SciPy, published by O’Reilly media.</p>
<p>A big thank you to our new mentors for taking us on board at such a short notice!</p>
<h3 id="supervisor">Supervisor</h3>
<h4 id="vaishalihttpsgithubcomnerdyvaishali"><a href="https://github.com/nerdyvaishali">Vaishali</a></h4>
<p>She is an Open Source enthusiast and works as a Linux kernel engineer at Oracle. She is also a blogger and outreachy alumni. She motivates everyone to get started with linux kernel and also takes up workshops for the same.</p>
<h2 id="our-projects">Our Project(s)</h2>
<h2 id="about-susi-ai-server">About Susi-AI Server</h2>
<p><a href="http://chat.susi.ai/overview">Susi AI</a> is an open source artificial Intelligence for chatbots, personal assistants, help desks. Recognising the need to personalise chatbots Susi also provides a platform to personalise skills to a user’s requirements.</p>
<h2 id="about-scikit-image">About Scikit-image</h2>
<p><a href="http://scikit-image.org/">Scikit-image</a> is an open source image processing library for the Python which includes collection of algorithms for segmentation,color space manipulation, analysis, filtering etc. It’s largely written in Python, with some core algorithms written in Cython to achieve performance. Scikit-image is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy.</p>
<h2 id="what-weve-done-so-far-and-some-unexpected-events-o">What we’ve done so far and some unexpected events :O</h2>
<p>Time indeed flies. While working with SusiAI Server, we’ve already sifted through the large code base, understood it, made small PRs here and there, learnt git, understood what a frontend architecture like react does and realized the effort a community puts in maintaining a project.
However, between all this work, we realised that the goals of our mentors and that of RGSOC aren’t aligned. After some deliberation, our supervisor and RGSOC organisors chose to change our project. Thus, we are now assigned Scikit-image, which was infact our first choice of project :p</p>
With love, Team Bundledore, India !Bundledorehttp://twitter.com/TeamBundledore2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:002017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/with-love-team-bundledore-india<h3 id="hello-people">Hello, people!</h3>
<p>A very Happy Independence Day to all my fellow Indians here :) We are Team Bundledore, and our project is <a href="https://leagues.afdc.com/">AFDC League Management System</a></p>
<p>The last one and a half-month has been really hectic with all the learning, connecting and mentoring. We have truly never enjoyed an internship so much before.</p>
<p>We were sort of a ‘Wild-Card’ entry, our selection was confirmed in the middle of May. We were so excited(still are) as this was quite unexpected.</p>
<p>Why ‘Team Bundledore’ you ask ?
We are die-hard Potterheads :) (Bundle+ Dumbledore).</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bundledore.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our Logo (created by Amrita Nair and Anagha R)</div>
<h3 id="about-us">About us:</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/About_us.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Alfie, Anagha, Amrita from left to right. (Photo credits: Alfie's phone)</div>
<p>We are both part of an extremely active <a href="http://foss.amrita.ac.in/">FOSS Club</a> at our college. That’s where we met. Didi(that’s the term we use to refer to our seniors) was a sophomore and I(Amrita) was a fresher. We started our journey there, everyday gathering at 4:30 PM, to help each other learn new technologies, one of them being Rails.</p>
<h3 id="anagha-rhttpsanaghar1996wordpresscomauthors-info"><a href="https://anaghar1996.wordpress.com/authors-info/">Anagha R</a></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/anagha.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(photo credits: Anagha's phone)</div>
<p>Anagha describes herself as a melophile who is passionate about open source. A biology student at her High School and she got interested in FOSS during the start of her first semester of Computer Science Engineering. She joined the FOSS club at our university which helped her improve her technical and personal skills. She loves helping people (especially her juniors), and uses her free time to help them with their academic and non-academic issues.</p>
<h3 id="amrita-nairhttpsamrtanairwordpresscom"><a href="https://amrtanair.wordpress.com/">Amrita Nair</a></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/amrita.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(photo credits: Amrita's phone)</div>
<p>I am a voracious reader(I don’t even leave the cereal boxes unread) and an open source enthusiast. My primary interest is Web Dev and Rails is my favorite right from the time I started working with it. I have always been passionate about contributing to open source because the joy of collaborating with people from all over the globe and creating something for everyone to enjoy, is indescribable. Like others at our club, I help my juniors with Rails, getting them in touch with people in the industry who can guide them.</p>
<p>In my free time, I read some more and try clicking candid photos of my friends.</p>
<h3 id="introducing-team-bundledores-superheroes">Introducing Team Bundledore’s superheroes:</h3>
<p><a href="https://github.com/libreation">Mukesh</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/mukesh.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(photo credits: Mukesh Unnikrishnan)</div>
<p>Mukesh is our super cool coach who also doubles as our counsellor. He is always there to guide us with technical details and also when we feel low. Kudos to him !
PS: One of his most popular sayings: “If you aren’t getting any errors, you are doing it wrong ;)”</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/alfie-max">Alfie</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/alfie.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(photo credits: Alfred Dominic)</div>
<p>Alfie is our no-nonsense coach. Always to the point and on-time.Not the kind to lead us by our hand and tell us the solution! The Git master, he has pulled us out of many Version Control screw-ups. Thanks a lot Alfie :)</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/toomuchpete">Pete</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/pete.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(photo credits: Pete Holiday)</div>
<p>Our awesome awesome mentor.What astonishes us is that he almost always knows the solution to the error. Docker was our nemesis the last month(it’s all okay now) and Pete always came to our rescue. Cheers Pete !</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/ravicious">Rafal</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/rafal.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(photo credits: Rafal Cieślak)</div>
<p>Our Supervisor, always punctual on Supervisor calls and one of the first to answer any of the RGSoC interns queries on Slack. Always online and ready to help. We are glad to have you on our team :)</p>
<p>Go Team Bundledore <3</p>
<h3 id="whats-in-store-after-rgsoc-">What’s in store after RGSoC ?</h3>
<p>We have a three pronged plan on what we can do. Ideas are always welcome.</p>
<ul>
<li>Encourage our juniors and any one we can to contribute to open source. We currently lead a group of very excited girls who plan on making it big in the open source world.</li>
<li>Contribute and give back to the community. We would not be here if not for the support of the members of the Kerala Ruby Users Group. We’d like to help and foster open source culture among the women here because even now, there are very few of them.</li>
<li>Lastly, host a Rails Girls Workshop, here in Kollam ! It’s inline with our future plans and we have started preping up :)</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="you-can-find-us-on-">You can find us on :</h3>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/teambundledore?lang=en">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://teambundledore.wordpress.com/author/teambundledore/">Blog</a></p>
RGSoC Day Off story — My lessons learned from avoiding a burnout, twice.Milan Steskalhttp://twitter.com/milansteskal2017-08-11T00:00:00+00:002017-08-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/lessons-learned-from-avoiding-a-burnout-twice<p><em>TRIGGER WARNING - This article, and pages it links to, contains information about depression, burnout and/or suicide which may be triggering to survivors.</em></p>
<p>When was the last time you saw a blog post or meme embracing and celebrating people that regularly work 60+ hours every week with no weekends or vacation? We, founders and entrepreneurs, are supposed to hustle and play all-in with our time and effort regarding what we are working on. And it’s not only founders, but also their employees, who are often being “incentivized” to adopt this kind of approach.</p>
<p>I’m also a startup founder. However, as a founder of a mental health technology startup, <strong>I consider myself much more mindful of my own mental health</strong> than most of the other founders, entrepreneurs or investors. Our goal with <a href="https://mentegram.com/">Mentegram</a> is to bridge the gap between the clinicians and people suffering from issues like depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses. Our software platform helps clinicians and their patients reduce the paperwork what gives the clinicians an opportunity to provide more efficient care to their patients.</p>
<p>I really like the RGSoC tradition of having the Day Off — a day on which students are meant not to work on their project and instead, do anything they’d like to do. This day is your chance to take care of yourself and to be mindful of your mental health. This year, it’s on August 18th. For some students, the Day Off just means “not coding”; for others, it’s the possibility to try doing something new and exciting or to spend the day outdoors and with friends. If you need some ideas on what to do on your very own day off, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-day-off">here</a> are some of the ideas. The only rule is: no work, no commits, no learning code for that single day. It may be difficult, but very rewarding if you can follow through ;)</p>
<p>While running a company and working for a startup is usually a lot of fun, it’s like riding a rollercoaster. You will get really sick when you don’t take any breaks and if you keep riding anyway, you will never want to ride a rollercoaster again. Or at least not anytime soon.</p>
<p>You never ride a rollercoaster for way too long, because you <em>feel</em> when you start feeling sick. However, <strong>many people don’t realize when their mind starts feeling “sick”</strong>. What I mean by “sick” are the early symptoms of depression, burning out or maybe anxiety. While I’m no clinician and have no clinical background, having worked with therapists as well as going to therapy myself helped me better understand how the mind works.</p>
<p>By all means, <strong>this post doesn’t intend to serve as a clinical advice</strong> and I don’t take responsibility for any actions that you decide to take after reading it. Instead, I’m sharing my story; my goal is to raise awareness and help you realize that you should be aware of your own mental health. By sharing stories like this, I believe that we are fighting the stigma. Many celebrities have done so as well: Whether it was <a href="https://themighty.com/2017/06/katy-perry-livestreams-therapy-session-for-witness-world-wide/?utm_source=milan_steskal">Katy Perry live-streaming her therapy session</a>, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/29/royals-launch-mental-health-campaign-videos-get-britons-talking?utm_source=milan_steskal">British Royal family campaign to get Britons talking about mental health</a>, or <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michelle-obama-mental-health_us_5829ecc2e4b060adb56f60c2/?utm_source=milan_steskal">Michelle Obama standing up for mental health</a>. I’m not exactly sure what started it all, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say it had something to do with the suicide of Robin Williams.</p>
<p><strong>Being aware of your own mental health is important, and being aware of mine helped me avoid burnout or depression at least in the following situations.</strong></p>
<h3 id="unsuccessful-fundraising">1. Unsuccessful fundraising</h3>
<p>The first time it happened, we were trying to raise a second investment round for Mentegram. It didn’t go well, because we were too early for what we wanted to achieve. Even though many investors gave us very positive feedback on what we do and on our elevator pitch, they still ended up backing out from the deal quite early. We learned the lesson the hard way: The positive feedback was giving us very high hopes—and when you fly high, you fall really deep. That’s when I also realized that no-one would most likely give you negative feedback when your goal is to improve mental health of millions of people around the world and you were on the right track. Just too early and without a validated sales strategy.</p>
<p>The positive feedback made me work long hours and very hard. <strong>I remember updating our pitch deck during Christmas to make sure that the investor would get it on time</strong>. I’m not sure why their deadline was Dec 28th. We traveled from Slovakia to Norway to visit my brother and his family. On Christmas Day, I was sitting in the living room in a comfy chair right next to the Christmas tree. My wife, my parents as well as my brother with his family were having fun watching Christmas movies, enjoying the company of each other and eating all the good things that you can imagine. I remember putting my earphones and music on because I needed to focus while I still wanted to be in the same room with them.</p>
<p><strong>Fast forward to June</strong>: We still didn’t have the investment and we started running out of money; I was out of energy and literally unable to focus on anything. Our sales didn’t work well because I spent too much time on fundraising, but the fundraising wasn’t going well either. But most importantly, <strong>I was in some kind of half-operational mode when I wasn’t really able to do much work</strong>. That’s how my summer went and I’m really thankful to my wife who supported me and helped me recover. It was end of summer when we managed to raise the round that we needed to, and all was good again. Not only me, but the whole team felt like re-born.</p>
<p>What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but looking back, it was close. If I didn’t take the summer “half-off”, I can’t imagine how I would have been able to continue even with the new investment. I really learned the lesson the hard way, because I could have done things much better and with lower effort during those eight or nine months. <strong>It almost feels like the completely wasted few months of my life</strong>. The only good thing about them is probably the fact they helped me avoid a similar situation this year.</p>
<h4 id="lesson-learned">Lesson learned:</h4>
<p>It doesn’t have to be a big “project” such as fundraising for my own company. It can be a client project that takes too much time because the client keeps requesting changes, it can be a toxic colleague that makes you feel like you don’t want to get out of bed and get to work or even a bug that you aren’t able to resolve. It happens to all of us; the important thing is not to wait and hope that it will end. It’s much better to take your life into your own hands and do something about it. Even though it’s definitely not easy, and may be way outside of your comfort zone. Take a break, speak up, be confident and fair, definitely not arrogant. Many people don’t do it and in many situations, it works wonders. Time is our most precious resource, let’s not waste it.</p>
<h3 id="fighting-with-time">2. Fighting with time</h3>
<p>As every startup, things are going at times well and at times not so well. However, we changed our approach to business development and things started getting better. <strong>That would make you think that there was no way for me to start feeling depressed when things go well</strong>. But because we changed our sales strategy, seeing the outcome took quite some time. Even though it was exactly as we planned it, it was too long. It got to the point where I felt there was almost nothing I could do to make things happen. The progress was still happening as we planned it; I felt helpless.</p>
<p><strong>I used our software to take depression assessments and I noticed a negative trend</strong>. My wife also noticed that I was losing motivation to do anything, even outside of work. I didn’t even want to go out much or spend time with friends — I just sat on the sofa watching TV on weekends.</p>
<p>Around that time, I met a friend who was seeing a therapist. We talked about it and he said how much she helped him. I asked him to give me her number, <strong>I called the therapist and scheduled an appointment</strong>. It was a few months ago. I told her my story, we started speaking about my emotions, feeling and everything. It took one or two months and I started feeling much better. I felt that I didn’t need to measure my depression, because I was able to handle the triggers much better.</p>
<h4 id="lesson-learned-1">Lesson learned:</h4>
<p>One of the actions that definitely takes most of us outside of our comfort zones is sharing our problems — and feelings — with other people. We are worried and concerned about how the other people would perceive us. However, you would be surprised that close friends and family usually offer help. Of course, I don’t want to false promise anything and it’s likely that you will meet people that will not understand and act arrogant. There is no reason to take it personally though. Speaking with close friends that you trust almost never hurts. And if you are really worried or feel that it may not be enough, reaching out to a therapist is really the best possible thing that you can do. Think of it as your mind having a high fever: You would see your doctor in such case.</p>
<h3 id="what-do-i-want-to-tell-with-these-stories">What do I want to tell with these stories?</h3>
<p><strong>Be mindful of your mental health</strong>. Understand when you are sad for a reason and when you are not. Understand when you feel stressed for a reason and when you are not. <strong>Be aware of the usual symptoms when they keep showing up</strong>, such as losing motivation, losing interest in meeting friends, doing less physical exercise, spending more time binge watching Netflix or TV. If you do spot them, take a break. Get a good night’s sleep. Find someone to talk to about it, ideally a person in a very similar situation to you. For me, it’s other startup founders. And don’t be afraid to ask for help and even reach out to a therapist.</p>
<p>RGSoC has a trust committee to whom you can go if you experience any personal issue you’d like to discuss with someone. While it’s not a replacement for therapy, you should know that the team is there to support you and to make you succeed throughout the summer without having you make compromises on your personal well-being.</p>
<p>As you can see, there is nothing to lose.</p>
<p>If you want to read more about my journey to mental clarity, <a href="http://huffingtonpost.com/entry/a-journey-of-mental-clarity-from-a-mental-health-startup_us_590c964fe4b046ea176aea59?utm_source=milan_steskal">read the story on Huffington Post</a>.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.twitter.com/milansteskal/">Milan Steskal</a> is the founder & CEO at <a href="https://mentegram.com/">Mentegram</a>. They improve productivity of mental health care. He is a startup mentor and <a href="http://ideatofunding.com/">Idea To Funding</a> author in his free time.</em></p>
So, two girls meet in Shanghai…?BansheeBanditshttp://twitter.com/BansheeBandits2017-08-09T00:00:00+00:002017-08-09T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/two-girls-meet-in-shanghai<h2 id="who-are-we-how-did-we-come-together">Who are we? How did we come together?</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bansheebandits-liz.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Shelby and Lillian with Public Lab's Director of Community Development, Liz Barry (Photo via Shelby Firebaugh)</div>
<p><a href="https://github.com/shelbyfirebaugh">Shelby</a> is a rising senior at New York University Tandon School of Engineering working towards a B.S. in Integrated Digital Media. <a href="https://github.com/lilliankorinek">Lillian</a>–originally from Surprise, Arizona–is pursuing a B.S. in Integrated Media Arts with minors in Public Policy and Nonprofit Management at New York University Shanghai. Shelby and Lillian met in the media lab at NYU Shanghai when Shelby was studying away with NYU at the Shanghai campus. They bonded initially when they were partnered together in “Talking Fabrics,” a creative seminar that covered the application of soft circuits through the physical construction of products. They stitched together a vest that responded to physical touch using sensors in the Arduino, and have been bonded ever since.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bansheebandits-publiclab.png" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo via <a href="https://twitter.com/publiclab">Public Lab on Twitter</a></div>
<h2 id="why-did-we-choose-public-lab">Why did we choose Public Lab?</h2>
<p><a href="https://publiclab.org/home">Public Lab</a> promotes a hands-on, do-it-yourself ethos–one that supports the concept of exploration, in which members of specific communities across the globe can participate in the collection of environmental data, through DIY methods explained via the Public Lab website. The monumental idea promoted by Public Lab is that technical development and real-life applications can be derived through data experiments conducted by everyday people.</p>
<p>If government chooses to turn away from solving environmental issues, then it becomes even more important to face these issues in a grassroots fashion. There is power in numbers, and we believe that an organization like Public Lab will be an essential tool in educating and empowering the public, as well as supporting those groups who need help.</p>
<p>Both Lillian and Shelby have an interest in open-source projects, and believe that promoting community participation is not only an efficient way to gather data, but also encourages individuals to become involved regardless of formal experience. We have both spent an extended amount of time in Shanghai, and have witnessed first-hand the damage that industrialization can cause to our environment.</p>
<h2 id="meet-the-team">Meet the team</h2>
<h3 id="katie-adee-coach"><strong>Katie Adee</strong>, <em>Coach</em></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bansheebandits-katie.png" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo via <a href="https://opentrons.com/team">OpenTrons</a></div>
<p>Every week Katie commutes from the North Fork of Long Island into New York City to <em>both</em> teach at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and develop projects at OpenTrons, where she serves as the company’s lead UX/UI designer. Her classroom banter is as hilarious as it is understandable, aiding in our perspective of how dynamic people in technology can be. Katie loves solving problems, and exploring how data representations, games, and emerging web technologies can spark interest in students, children and sceptics. Her interests include bikes, food, the Gowanus Canal, and making beautiful/fun things with math and code.</p>
<h3 id="marcela-godoy-coach"><strong>Marcela Godoy</strong>, <em>Coach</em></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bansheebandits-marcela.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo via <a href="http://godoymarcela.com/about">Marcela Godoy</a></div>
<p>Marcela is a designer and maker. She has worked on interactive art installations, wearables, web design and physical computing projects. She brings interaction design to the physical world by designing 3D models, mockups and renders. She holds a Master’s diploma in Interactive Telecommunications from the New York University and a Bachelor degree in Architecture. Currently she works as part of the team of YesYesNo, a multidisciplinary company that specializes in interactive art installations and commercial interactive projects. In addition, she is working as an design professor through the Interactive Media Arts program at New York University Shanghai.</p>
<h3 id="jeffrey-warren-mentor"><strong>Jeffrey Warren</strong>, <em>Mentor</em></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bansheebandits-jeff.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo via <a href="https://github.com/jywarren">Jeffrey Warren on Github</a></div>
<p>Jeffrey is a co-founder and the Research Director for Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Jeffrey Warren designs mapping and civic science tools and professionally flies balloons and kites. Notable software he has created include the vector-mapping framework Cartagen and orthorectification tool MapKnitter, as well as open spectral database and toolkit Spectral Workbench.</p>
<h3 id="nada-ashraf-supervisor"><strong>Nada Ashraf</strong>, <em>Supervisor</em></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/bansheebandits-nada.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo via <a href="https://github.com/Nada1996">Nada Ashraf on GitHub</a></div>
<p>Nada Ashraf is a past participant in Rails Girls Summer of Code, and has been an integral part of the support system available to Shelby and Lillian throughout this process. Based in Egypt, she is interested in computer science and inclusive programs in the realm of technological information!</p>
<h2 id="whats-up-next">What’s up next?</h2>
<p>For the past couple of weeks, Shelby and Lillian have been becoming accustomed to Github through opensource contributions involving Public Lab’s tagging interface, specifically within the realm of powertags. In essence, powertags are an advanced feature which can add extra functions and layout options to Wiki pages or Research Notes on PublicLab.org.</p>
<p>Moving forward, Shelby and Lillian would like to work on developing the UX/UI design of the powertag system, making article tagging more streamlined and understandable for a first-time user. As novices to coding and Public Lab’s interface, team BansheeBandits believes there might be a more welcoming vocabulary regarding the functionality of powertags. In the next couple of weeks we intend on conducting user testing to identify points where the syntax involving powertags might be confusing for the everyday user.</p>
Two Geeks and a Summer of Code!prodyoGEEKYhttp://twitter.com/prodyogeeky2017-08-07T00:00:00+00:002017-08-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/two-geeks-and-a-summer-of-code<h3 id="who-us"><strong>Who, us?</strong></h3>
<p>Hola! We are <em>Protichi Basak</em> and <em>Nikita Gupta</em>, fresh Computer Science graduates from <em>IIIT-Delhi</em>, India. And if you were to believe our batchmates, we were amongst the nerdiest girls there (something which gives us more pride than embarrassment for some reason). :P Although we have known each other for four years, our friendship feels like decades old already. It brings a smile to our faces every time we remember our first day, where every student was asked to introduce themselves to the entire batch, but Nikita used that opportunity to find her roommate <em>Protichi</em> instead, for she found the name so unique! Being roommates from the very first day of college we have been partners in all craziness ever since. Yet we are poles apart. While Protichi is a trilingual, hardcore fish-lover hailing from the lands of Bengal, Nikita is a strict vegetarian from North India mad about Rajasthani folk and food!</p>
<p>Our passion to learn new technologies and use them to solve real world issues has driven us this far and has brought us together to make a great team! And this is how we came up with our team name <strong>prodyoGEEKY</strong> - inspired from the hindi word <strong>प्रौद्योगिकी</strong> (pronounced as: praudyogikee) meaning Technology!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/prodyogeeky_intro.png" alt="Team prodyoGEEKY" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Just a ‘normal’ day in our dorm room (with Nikita being pranked) at IIIT-Delhi. We miss those times terribly! (Image courtesy: Mohini Verma)</div>
<p>In the past we have worked on a number of projects together. Most recently we worked on <em>Breast Cancer Detection using Deep Learning in Histopathological Images</em>. For our bachelor’s thesis, we both worked in the same research lab (<em>Image Analysis and Biometrics Lab</em> at IIIT-Delhi) where we worked on face and fingerprint recognition.</p>
<p>This summer we are working with <strong><em>OpenLMIS</em></strong>, which is an initiative to support the development of an open-source software for Logistics Management Information Systems (LMIS). The aim of the software is to manage health commodity supply chains in low- and middle-income countries. The end result is a robust and flexible system that provides shared benefit across users and programs. It is currently supported by <em>Rockefeller Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), USAID, JSI, the UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities, PATH</em> to name a few. OpenLMIS envisions shared investment and benefit through an open source community and extensible architecture along with interoperability with other health systems. At present, it is deployed in six countries in Africa.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/openlmis_logo.png" alt="Team prodyoGEEKY" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">OpenLMIS logo (Image courtesy: Google)</div>
<h3 id="why-we-chose-openlmis"><strong>Why we chose OpenLMIS?</strong></h3>
<p>A large part of our country still lives in rural parts where there is dearth of qualified doctors, medicines and advanced facilities to provide medical treatment. Last semester, while working towards automated breast cancer detection as a part of our Machine Learning project, we realised that many deaths occur in such underprivileged areas. This is primarily because of untimely diagnosis and delay in administration of good quality medicines due to unavailability. This affected us deeply and we wanted to improve the present conditions of the health and hygiene. As computer scientists, we believe that technology has the power to provide an automated solution to any real-world problem and affect millions of lives!
So while choosing a project for RGSoC, we wanted to contribute to a project which actually has the ability to impact many lives while at the same time, also helps in improving our development and coding skills. OpenLMIS was exactly what we had been looking for and we had an immediate inclination towards it. :)</p>
<h3 id="so-without-further-ado-meet-our-uber-cool-team"><strong>So without further ado, meet our uber cool team!</strong></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/prodyogeeky_team.jpg" alt="Team prodyoGEEKY" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Meet our team! (Collage Courtesy: Team prodyoGEEKY)</div>
<p>The team of OpenLMIS is so awesome! It wouldn’t be wrong to say that they are the major source of encouragement for us. Our mentors, Brandon and Nick, are always eager to help us out even on smallest of issues! It is for this reason, nothing holds us back from learning as much as we can from them.
A little more background about our mentors and coaches -</p>
<p><strong>Brandon-</strong> With over 20 years of experience in IT, Brandon leads VillageReach’s software innovation as the Software Development Manager. And Brandon is a cycling enthusiast, just like us :)</p>
<p><strong>Nick-</strong> A CSS nerd, as he likes to call himself, Nick is a developer and UX/UI expert at Village Reach. He is excited about tools and capacity building.</p>
<p><strong>Tenly-</strong> She works towards building a vibrant OpenLMIS community interacting with the existing and new OpenLMIS partner. She has over eight years in international development in Africa.</p>
<p><strong>Karan-</strong> A technology enthusiast, Karan loves to get his hands dirty with any new tool he comes across and has won numerous hackathons. One the most creative and sincere guys we know from our college, Karan has been a constant support to us and has helped us incredibly during our application too!</p>
<p><strong>Chhavi-</strong> A Noogler, Chhavi has participated as a mentor in various programs that support women in tech. She has also been facilitated by the Honorable President of India for securing first prize in Code for India.</p>
<p><strong>Jigyasa-</strong> She has recently been awarded Red Hat Women in Open Source Award. Jigyasa has carved her name as an Open Source enthusiast helping her friends as a mentor. She is also the director of Women Who Code, Delhi.</p>
<h3 id="whats-in-store"><strong>What’s in store?</strong></h3>
<p>One month of RGSoC has already gone by and the experience so far has been nothing but simply amazing! We have already taken our toddler steps towards contributing to the open source community together. This summer, we wish to learn a lot, face new challenges every day to keep ourselves on our toes, debug our codes, develop solutions to new issues, be able to critically analyse and design a solution.</p>
<p>After the summers ends, we will be joining the industry as research and development engineers. It is, therefore, one of our major motivations to be able to learn how to write clean reusable code, document well and work harmoniously in a team of people possessing different skill sets and expertise. Apart from that we wish to be creative too so that anyone and everyone will find it useful in the first place and be able to use it conveniently and intuitively. We not only hope to be better developers, but good team workers and passionate open source contributors as well! :)</p>
<p>As an ending note, we are very grateful to be a part of RGSoC this year where we got to contribute to OpenLMIS and interact with people who are diverse in culture, ideas, knowledge, expertise and bond over what we all share a common passion for, i.e., technology!</p>
From Gyn to the world!RailsGynhttp://twitter.com/RailsGyn2017-08-04T00:00:00+00:002017-08-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/railsgyn-from-gyn-to-the-world<h3 id="hello-everyone">Hello, everyone!</h3>
<p>We are the team RailsGyn and we are from Brazil. We had the privilege of being selected for the RailsGirls TeamsApp project.</p>
<p>It has been an amazing, incredible, wonderful experience! The people we work with are extremely helpful and careful. We love working with all of them!</p>
<p>About our team name: why RailsGyn?
We are from a Brazilian city called Goiânia - or GYN. So, both our name and our logo is related to our city.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/railsgyn_logo-rails-gyn.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> The connection of our logo with our city.(Logo: Juliana Dias) </div>
<h3 id="our-team---the-students">Our Team - the students</h3>
<h4 id="amanda-branquinhohttpsgithubcombranquinhoaa"><a href="https://github.com/branquinhoaa">Amanda Branquinho</a></h4>
<ul>
<li>I am a biologist, ecologist, and evolutionist.</li>
<li>I used to believe that software development was not for me (too hard!).</li>
<li>I started to study programming from scratch about one year and 8 months. Since then, I have already built one entire system, worked for a company and starting with big data studies.</li>
<li>Technology makes me believe that I am capable of anything.</li>
<li>I believe that being a programmer made me more concerned about the woman’s role in the society.</li>
<li>My dream is to become a digital nomad and work remotely from different places around the world!</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/railsgyn_amanda.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Amanda (Photo: Juliana dias) </div>
<h4 id="juliana-diashttpsgithubcomjuuh42dias"><a href="https://github.com/juuh42dias">Juliana Dias</a></h4>
<ul>
<li>I am a transgender woman.</li>
<li>I love to take pictures.</li>
<li>I am a pseudo-writer.</li>
<li>I am a coffee and pizza addicted.</li>
<li>I love Open Source.</li>
<li>I helped promote an event of Rails developers into my current city - and I want promote Rails Girls here.</li>
<li>I prefer Telegram than What’s App (Of course I want to make this clear for the rest of the world)</li>
<li>My programming life started in the university when I learned some languages like C, Java and PHP. But I just started to work with as a developer in the last course year and since then I’m coding (more specifically with Ruby on Rails for last 3 years)</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/railsgyn_juliana.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Juliana (Photo: Juliana dias)</div>
<h3 id="the-journey-to-find-a-partner">The journey to find a partner</h3>
<p>Since I (Amanda) started working in technology, I’ve become involved with women in tech groups.
In a beautiful day, in a WhatsApp group related with woman who codes, some girl sent the RGSoC link.
I loved the idea and I had all the pre-requirements except another girl to partner with me.
Since then, I started a really long journey looking for a girl to apply with me. It was not easy, in fact, I did not know how hard it would be.
I published in Facebook groups, I talked with college girls, I asked for help for the conference’s organizers. There was nobody.
When I was almost giving up, Juliana answered a message from one of the Facebook groups I had posted.
From then on we began to fill out our application form, with little hope since there were many girls competing.
When we heard about our approval, we almost did not believe!
Juliana already had some open source contributions, but for Amanda this is the first time.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/railsgyn_students.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Us: Juliana and Amanda (Photo: Kaio Magalhães) </div>
<h3 id="our-project-choice">Our project choice</h3>
<p>Since the beginning, we loved the RGSoC idea and our wish was to contribute to it. It was not difficult to choose our first option for the project. We were already sure that RGSoC teams app was the one.
We love the idea of inclusion that this amazing project promotes. It is really nice to see initiatives that care about women in tech.
Participating in RGSoC contributing to RGSoC teams app makes us feel members of this team that cares so much about the inclusion of women in the open source world.</p>
<h3 id="our-team---the-coaches">Our team - the coaches</h3>
<p>Fortunately, we have people around us that are here to help no matter what.
This support makes all the difference, and maybe this is one of the things that are missing for more women to start in technology: A friendly environment with supportive people!</p>
<h4 id="halisson-brunohttpsgithubcomhalissonvit"><a href="https://github.com/halissonvit">Halisson Bruno</a></h4>
<ul>
<li>I am a software engineer with more than 10 years of experience and I still learn something new every day. And I love it!</li>
<li>I am passionate about writing code! Clean and expressive code. No matter if it’s backend or frontend, mobile or web, test or bugfix. Let me code!.</li>
<li>I have been working with a remote and distributed team for the last couple of years and learned how important communication is. Let’s talk!</li>
<li>I also love sports and games ( Games of sports included 🙂 ).</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/railsgyn_halisson.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Halisson, one of our coaches (Photo: Amanda Branquinho) </div>
<h4 id="kaio-magalheshttpsgithubcomkaiomagalhaes"><a href="https://github.com/kaiomagalhaes">Kaio Magalhães</a></h4>
<ul>
<li>I rock a great mustache</li>
<li>I know some good jokes</li>
<li>I do an awesome sandwich</li>
<li>I break dance fight</li>
<li>I’ve worked with a lot of projects in a lot of different languages like PHP, C#, Java, Javascript, Groovy, and Ruby. With a lot of frameworks like Grails, Rails, React and NodeJS. For a lot of platforms like Desktop, WEB, Android, and Hololens.</li>
<li>I love programming related topics like code quality, software engineer, best practices, design patterns and I write about it always that I have time to.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/railsgyn_kaio.jpg" alt="coach-kaio" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Kaio, another coach (Photo: Amanda Branquinho) </div>
<h4 id="marcelo-giovanehttpsgithubcommgswolf"><a href="https://github.com/mgswolf">Marcelo Giovane</a></h4>
<p>We also count on Juliana’s brother support. He is always really helpful and close.
He has been working with ruby on rails for six years.</p>
<p>That is our team!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/railsgyn_all-team.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> All the team together! (Photo: some guy that was passing by) </div>
<h3 id="our-team---remote-members">Our team - remote members</h3>
<p>Last, but not least we will present our dear remote members - our two mentors Carsten and Max and our supervisor Ines.</p>
<p>Our mentors are always around and involved with our PR’s. Their suggestions always make our code better. It is really good to have help from them, with all their attention and care.</p>
<p>Ines is our dear, sweet, lovely supervisor :heart:
She helps us with all the thing (not code related) and also she talks with us about random things and Game of Thrones.</p>
<p>Our team is the best! :heart:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/railsgyn_remote-members.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Our dear remote team! (Photo: Github) </div>
<h3 id="what-do-we-want">What do we want</h3>
<p>We would love to use our experience as RGSoC students to organize a Rails Girls event here in our city.
In this event, we will talk about our summer and we will help girls to start coding with ruby on rails.</p>
<p>We have already found a company to help us on this and we are really excited!
We believe this will encourage more girls to participate in these initiatives.</p>
<p>We think this is necessary because where we live, it was really difficult to find a partner.</p>
<p>We want to show the girls that they can do it and we want to show them all support we had and make them interested in applying to RGSoC next year.</p>
<h3 id="follow-us-closely">Follow us closely</h3>
<p>We have <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGyn">twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/railsgirlsgyn/">facebook</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@railsgirlsgyn">medium blog</a>…
Feel free to follow us, add us on all social medias and everything. We love to get close to the community, let’s stay close!</p>
<p>That is our story! we are open to answering any question, just ping us on twitter and we can start talking!</p>
<h4 id="thank-you-all-">Thank you all 🙂</h4>
Codeaholics, the first Hangover!Codeaholicshttp://twitter.com/codeaholics_AL2017-08-03T00:00:00+00:002017-08-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Codeaholics-the-first-hangover<h3 id="how-they-started-to-get-into-the-open-source-world"><strong>How they started to get into the open source world!</strong></h3>
<p>Jona and Xheni met each other 5 years ago at the University of Tirana, Faculty of Economy because both of them wanted to study for Business Informatics. At the beginning they didn’t “like” each other a lot because Xheni was an Inter fan while Jona a Milan fan, different teams that play in Italy and their fans “fight” a lot with each other. YES, you read it very well, so don’t get surprised if they know football rules/ football players/ teams pretty well because they are crazy about football. The good news is that they found something in common, yaaay 🙂 They attended together the first edition of OSCAL, <a href="https://oscal.openlabs.cc/">Open Source Conference Albania</a>, the first conference in Albania dedicated only to open source software. After meeting a lot of other FLOSS enthusiasts at the conference, they discovered <a href="https://openlabs.cc/en/">Open Labs</a> that is the community behind OSCAL. Open Labs organizes a lot of events dedicated to different open source projects like GNU/Linux, Mozilla, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, LibreOffice etc. Both of them were intrigued by the world of Linux, that’s how they first started contributing to open source and became FLOSS advocates. Now that they have been part of Open Labs for four years, you see them part of different open source communities because being part of a community has helped them a lot to gain new experiences, learn new things, make new friends and have fun!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_1.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Team Codeaholics - Jona and Xheni at Open Labs hackerspace. (Photo: Jona Azizaj, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/jonatoni">Jona</a> was really interested to learn more on how to be a Linux system administrator that’s why she is part of the Fedora Project and became the first Fedora Ambassador in Albania promoting this operating system in her country. On the other hand <a href="https://twitter.com/xh3n1">Xheni</a> was really interested on security stuff and that’s why she is studying Msc in Information Security and wants to become an ethical hacker. In the meanwhile, they have discovered the gender gap that exists in tech industry and especially in open source communities, something they don’t face at their local hackerspace because 70% of the members are girls. That’s why when they travel to different conferences they try to share the situation they have at Open Labs with other people to encourage them and feel more motivated. Even though not all the girls part of Open Labs know how to code, they are willing to learn, that’s why Jona and Xheni want to help girls start coding and get them on board. Their future plans include establishing a Django Girls and Rails Girls local community, starting with some beginner workshops at Open Labs.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_working.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Team Codeaholics - Working time! (Photo: Kristi Progri and Jona Azizaj, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<h3 id="rgsoc-lets-apply"><strong>RGSoC, let’s apply!</strong></h3>
<p>Jona’s and Xheni’s latest involvement into open source is <a href="https://nextcloud.com/">Nextcloud</a>, a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting service, where their contributions consisted mostly on promoting Nextcloud and translating it in their local language (shqip).</p>
<p>At OSCAL (third edition) they met Jan-Christoph Borchardt and had the chance to talk with him. After some months, they saw his tweet about a
dedicated scholarship program that aims to foster diversity in Open Source since 2013, called “Rails Girls Summer of Code”. Both of them were
really enthusiast and happy to hear about such a great opportunity that could help girls develop their skills and gain new exciting experiences. After posting this on the <a href="https://forum.openlabs.cc/">Open Labs forum</a> to share it with all the girls, they even organized an “unofficial” meeting with all the interested girls to help each other with the process. It was the first time that 4 teams from Albania applied to be part of RGSoC!</p>
<h3 id="why-nextcloud"><strong>Why Nextcloud?</strong></h3>
<p>After picking each other as teammates, Jona and Xheni had to decide about the project they wanted to spend all their summer working on. Wait, what about the name of the team?
Hmmm let’s say they needed only a couple of hours to find the appropriate name for them. And it was not very difficult, because both of them are <strong>CODEAHOLICS</strong>. Yes, I mean it! They stay awake all night long and they like to sleep in the morning because for them is way easier to work when the place is very quiet, people are sleeping and the only thing that they can hear is their favorite music. Okay now let’s get back to the topic. After scouting all the projects listed, the first one that was deemed a perfect fit for them was Nextcloud. Why? Because they were already using it and they were familiar (not a lot) with the community. Both of them believe that when you use something and you like it, it’s very easy for you to start promoting and working on it, in this way you will always do something that you love and are not forced to. They decided to work on the contacts app and documentation part during the summer.
After finishing the application all the albanian teams were “stressed” waiting about the final result. Who could imagine that we would be one of the lucky teams, being the first albanian team part of RGSoC! Imagine their happy faces when they saw the approval email, <strong>yaaay</strong> :D</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_2.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Codeaholics at Open Labs hackerspace during. (Photo: Anxhelo Lushka, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<h3 id="meet-their-amazing-team"><strong>Meet their amazing team!</strong></h3>
<p>The Nextcloud mentor is <a href="https://twitter.com/jancborchardt">Jan-Christoph Borchardt</a>, their coaches are: <a href="https://twitter.com/nickvergessen">Joas Schilling</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/MorrisJobke">Morris Jobke</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/aziflaj">Aldo Ziflaj</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/ed_hox">Edi Hoxhalli</a>, and their supervisor is <a href="https://twitter.com/benediktdeicke">Benedikt Deicke</a>. They will be working and keeping in touch with them for any issue they might face, help they might need, etc. They have organized their workflow by creating a project at the <a href="https://github.com/nextcloud/contacts">Contacs app</a> repo on Nextcloud organization on GitHub. To communicate with each other, they use IRC, you can find them on #nextcloud-contacts and #nextcloud-dev. Spreed app is their favorite choice when it comes to do the weekly video call with their supervisor. Xheni and Jona are really happy to be part of the Nextcloud community and to have this amazing team ready to help them when needed. End of August they will be in Berlin to attend the <a href="https://nextcloud.com/conf/">Nextcloud conference</a> and meet in person all the community members. They will have the opportunity to share with the participants their experience as RGSoC students working on Nextcloud, so if you will be in Berlin make sure to be part of the conference!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_team.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Codeaholics and their amazing team! (Photo collage: Anxhelo Lushka, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<h3 id="codeaholics-just-kicked-off-their-first-rgsoc-event-in-tirana"><strong>Codeaholics just kicked off their first RGSoC event in Tirana!</strong></h3>
<p>On 1st of July they organized their first event at Open Labs Hackerspace at 6pm. A lot of participants attended and they were really interested on this scholarship and eager to learn more on how to apply for the next round of RGSoC. They also had a short video call just to say Hello to their amazing team, kudos to Laura and Jan for joining the video call. After the introduction to the program and the video call, they had a small party with the participants, that made the atmosphere more friendly and enjoyable.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_OL.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Codeaholics during kick off event at Open Labs. (Photo: Anxhelo Lushka, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
<p>By the way, do you know the great news from their <a href="https://nextcloud.com/blog/the-capital-of-albania-moves-to-nextcloud/">municipality of Tirana</a>?
The Municipality of Tirana, the biggest municipality in the country serving over 800,000 citizens, goes free open source by using Nextcloud! An important contributor in raising the public awareness on the importance of free open source culture in general and the public administration embracing it in particular, has been the local community of the Open Labs Hackerspace where Xheni and Jona are involved.</p>
<h3 id="what-they-have-done-so-far"><strong>What they have done so far?</strong></h3>
<p>Nextcloud is a safe home for all your data – community-driven, free & open source. It is a very big <a href="https://github.com/nextcloud">project</a>, with more then 30 teams working on contacts app, calendar, android, server, spreed etc. The project has a very detailed documentation which helps a lot, also a very active and friendly community. Being part of RGSoC and working on this specific project doesn’t mean to write only code but at the same time combining it with tutorials, learning new stuff not only related to AngularJS but even other concepts related to their work, put in practice what they both already know and shape their skills. Therefore, working on this project has helped them a lot related to the AngularJS part, their coaches have been really helpful (and patient :P) with them when they were working on different issues related to the Contacts app. Jan has done a great job with them, identifying some starter issues to work on, and working on the workflow they are following.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_screenshot.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Nextcloud organization on github.</div>
<h3 id="and"><strong>And…</strong></h3>
<p>…Jona and Xheni want to thank everyone involved, their mentor Jan, their coaches Morris, Joas, Aldo and Edi, their supervisor Benedikt, and also the amazing RGSoC organising team for offering one of the best ways spending the summer to all winning teams!! Keep up the good work.</p>
<p><strong>Happy coding!</strong> 🙂</p>
<p><em>PS: Did we mention that they have a logo for their team? Check it out on their <a href="https://github.com/Codeaholics-AL">github organization for Codeaholics</a>. And… don’t forget to follow them on <a href="https://twitter.com/codeaholics_al">twitter</a>!</em> :)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/codeaholics_logo.png" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Codeaholics logo, thanks to Anxhelo Lushka for designing it. (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)</div>
Bear Hugs from 200OKPrachi & Ipshitahttp://twitter.com/Team200OK2017-08-02T00:00:00+00:002017-08-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/bear-hugs-from-200ok<p>Hello! We are Ipshita and Prachi of Team 200 OK, from New Delhi, India, working on coala this summer. One month into Rails Girls Summer of Code already and we didn’t even realise how time flew by. What a whirlwind of a month!</p>
<h3 id="two-broke-girls">Two (Broke) Girls</h3>
<h4 id="fact-files--ipshitahttpsgithubcomipshitac">Fact Files : <a href="https://github.com/ipshitac">Ipshita</a></h4>
<ul>
<li>She is extremely meticulous and will not take anything up without making a checklist for it</li>
<li>She has a very eclectic taste in ‘get psyched’ music, much of which blares through her headphones as she works through this summer. Also, she loves to sing as she works, much to the annoyance of her teammate (sorry Prachi!)</li>
<li>If you want her to be your friend, just get her a cup of coffee and something nice to eat. She is a huge foodie!</li>
<li>She can stop almost any work midway and scribble poetry at the first piece of paper she gets her hands on.</li>
<li>She is already overjoyed that you’re reading about her! <em>blushes</em></li>
</ul>
<h4 id="fact-files--prachihttpsgithubcomprachi1210">Fact Files : <a href="https://github.com/prachi1210">Prachi</a></h4>
<ul>
<li>She is the antithesis of Ipshita. Her desktop and working area is disorganised chaos. You can only and only find your way through folders, if she is there to guide you.</li>
<li>She works well under pressure, but only if she has a deadline to meet.</li>
<li>There is no easy way to say this but her jokes suck.</li>
<li>She reads. A lot. Like a person who has been starved of any reading material for years. She also quotes random facts that have no relation whatsoever with the conversation on hand.</li>
<li>She is secretly dancing at the prospect of people reading this and her becoming famous. <em>(You have high hopes, Prachi)</em></li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team200ok.jpg" alt="Team 200Ok" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(L-R) Prachi and Ipshita; Image taken by Prachi</div>
<h3 id="how-i-met-my-teammate">How I Met My Teammate</h3>
<p>Back in the first year of college, we were introduced to each other by a mutual friend who thought we’d get along. And boy, did we get along! From being co participants in a college festival to being best buddies, we’ve come a long way in these three years.</p>
<p>The innumerable similarities and common interests we share are the major reason for us getting along like a house on fire. Our shared love for poetry (both of us are writers), reading, music, programming and of course, Harry Potter, ensure that there is never a dull moment when we’re together.</p>
<p>So it was no surprise when we decided to form <strong>Team 200 OK</strong> and team up with each other for participating in various competitions. Here’s a fun fact behind our team name. <strong>200 is the HTTP response code for success and that was our primary motive behind coming together to work - be successful together</strong> with your best friend <3</p>
<h3 id="the-one-with-the-application">The One With The Application</h3>
<p>Prachi came across Rails Girls Summer of Code sometime in December 2016 and immediately decided that it was an ideal 200 OK thing to do. Ipshita, too, agreed instantly. Both of them started keeping an eye out for the application period.</p>
<p>Once the applications opened, we realised that we were as spoilt for choice as a child in a candy store. Both of us couldn’t believe the variety of projects and the technologies being used, in the shortlisted projects for RGSoC 2017.</p>
<h3 id="the-game-of-projects">The Game of Projects</h3>
<p>Having some basic programming experience in Python, we started looking up projects working on it and stumbled upon coala, a unified interface for code analysis and linting, irrespective of the underlying programming language. We were extremely captivated by the concept and started interacting with the community and the project mentors. What really tipped the scales in coala’s favour and made us choose it as our first choice project was the extremely vibrant, robust and beginner-friendly nature of the community. There is an extremely detailed and self-explanatory newcomer’s guide to contributing, which we got our hands on as soon as possible, and picked up a few newcomer issues in the application period itself. The project mentor for coala, Udayan, helped us formulate a proposal of our work and a timeline of events, which we could follow through the course of the program.</p>
<p>As the deadline drew closer, we were so fixated by coala, that we didn’t even think of getting involved in any other project. It was coala all the way for us <3</p>
<p>When we got a mail from the organising team in April, we really couldn’t believe it. The subsequent interview with Anika and Ramon and finally, the much awaited results, were actually a dream come true!</p>
<p>We were one of the four teams from India which made it to the top 10, making it the only country apart from Germany to achieve such a feat. Wow! It was indeed a moment of pride and joy for us to be a part of this wonderful initiative.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/200ok-coala.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">coala Logo</div>
<p><br /></p>
<h3 id="five-reasons-why-coala">Five Reasons Why coala</h3>
<ul>
<li>Our project, coala is a code analysis tool. So, developers at coala write bears to help you check for bad coding practices, styles etc. in different languages. And who doesn’t want to help people write maintainable code?</li>
<li>coala can be used by anyone around the world, whether they have contributed to the project are not.</li>
<li>Bear writing at coala is of basically two types:
— Native Bears
— Linter Bears
A lot of programming languages already have linters implemented, so if a project uses a language that does not already have a linter bear we do not need to implement it on our own. Linter bears are python wrappers (since coala is in python) around existing code linting tools available in other languages.</li>
<li>coala has a very robust CI pipeline including checks for commit and code quality (of course!), Travis, Appveyor, Circle CI and codecov.</li>
<li>Oh, and something that we have experienced for the first time at an open source org — at coala, the more code reviews you do — the faster your code gets reviewed by the community (they have a lot of developers and so a lot of PRs!) So, we need to perform code reviews too :D</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="the-crew">The Crew</h3>
<p>As is true with any show, it is the people behind the scenes who actually make it all happen. For us, our wonderful coaches, Vidur, Tushar and Suryansh, our beloved supervisor Mayar (we like to call her our team buddy) and our project mentor, Udayan, are the people guiding us through this summer. We are incredibly blessed and humbled to have such a supportive team, which is the actual reason for getting a 200 OK this summer! We can’t thank you people enough! <3</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/200okcrew.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(clockwise order from top left) Udayan, Prachi and Ipshita, Mayar, Vidur, Suryansh, Tushar (Photo collage: Team 200OK)</div>
<p><br />
Our coaches are all our seniors from college and we already knew them very well in person. They have guided us all throughout our college life and jumped at the opportunity of doing the same through Rails Girls Summer of Code too.</p>
<p>Vidur Katyal is an avid competitive programmer and developer. He is also a closet filmmaker and scriptwriter. He is currently working at Bloomberg as a Software Developer.</p>
<p>Suryansh Tibarewal loves to create things which leave a high impact, meet and collaborate with people on new technologies and is a self-professed kindle freak who reads startup origin stories at leisure. He is currently working at Booking.com as a Graduate Software Developer.</p>
<p>Tushar Sinha is a programming geek who also secretly enjoys videography. he is an avid rail fan and aviation enthusiast, He is currently working at Expedia as an Associate Software Developer.</p>
<p>Our supervisor, Mayar Alaa, is from Cairo, Egypt and a student of Computer Engineering. She is also an alumna of Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016.</p>
<h3 id="the-fortnightly-blog-theory">The Fortnightly Blog Theory</h3>
<p>In case, you wish to follow our RGSoC journey in detail, we also blog fortnightly on our <a href="https://medium.com/@team200OK">Medium blog</a>. So far we have written about writing linter bears and the community outreach at RGSoC. Do visit us, we’ll be waiting ;)</p>
<h4 id="thats-all-folks">That’s All Folks!</h4>
One month of RGSoCVaishali Thakkarhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2017-08-01T00:00:00+00:002017-08-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/one-month-of-RGSoC<p>This year’s program has started off with a bang! As today marks the start of the fourth week of RGSoC, we thought you would be interested in seeing what our amazing teams have been doing since the first day of our program.</p>
<p>From enjoying Global Kick-off events to having their kick-off calls with team members, from making their first pull request to preparing for conferences, our students are ready to mark their presence in the open source world.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Ah that satisfaction when you run the first module on Tessel ❤️ Ambient module measuring light and sound levels <a href="https://twitter.com/tesselproject">@tesselproject</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/rgsoc?src=hash">#rgsoc</a> <a href="https://t.co/NTFyQzOeaJ">pic.twitter.com/NTFyQzOeaJ</a></p>— 276linesofCode (@276linesofCode) <a href="https://twitter.com/276linesofCode/status/885099913998217222">July 12, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Weekly sync with the whole <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ifmeorg">@ifmeorg</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/sophierose239">@sophierose239</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/HashNotAdam">@HashNotAdam</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/JennyNamster">@JennyNamster</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/fleurchild">@fleurchild</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/tmoore">@tmoore</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/adelsmee">@adelsmee</a> <a href="https://t.co/vQNohKAiyT">pic.twitter.com/vQNohKAiyT</a></p>— ifPairElseUnknown (@IfPairElse) <a href="https://twitter.com/IfPairElse/status/884596784349065217">July 11, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">It was so nice to meet our incredible supervisor <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho">@ines_opcoelho</a> !! We had a meeting today with her and all our team :D <a href="https://t.co/Ep0gpb3DYS">https://t.co/Ep0gpb3DYS</a></p>— Rails Gyn (@RailsGyn) <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGyn/status/882023345478414336">July 3, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<div class="image-credits">
Our teams are having fun with kick-off calls & their projects (Credit: RGSoC Teams)
</div>
<p>One amazing thing to note this year: we have teams from Sri Lanka (Team Fusion), Albania (Team Codeaholics) and Russia (Team Alexa) for the first time! If you’re interested in knowing where the other teams are from, check out <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2017-05-22-teams-2017">this</a> post.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Yesterday, we had our <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> kick off celebration! 🎉So our coaches joined to help us planning our project & finish eating the cake 😁 <a href="https://t.co/65jDBAYQ8L">pic.twitter.com/65jDBAYQ8L</a></p>— Team Fusion (@TeamFusionJK) <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamFusionJK/status/882101855861460992">July 4, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<div class="image-credits">
Team Fusion on their kick off call celebration (Credit: Team Fusion)
</div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Been at Pydata Moscow meetup today, they wrote "RGSOC" on our badges. Not sure if it qualifies as a kick-off party, but it was nice. <a href="https://t.co/rzybOP2dLD">pic.twitter.com/rzybOP2dLD</a></p>— Team Alexa (@linguistsare) <a href="https://twitter.com/linguistsare/status/878379842697285632">June 23, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<div class="image-credits">
Team Alexa at PyData Moscow meetup (Credit: Team Alexa)
</div>
<p>Looking at the progress of our teams, this seems to be a wonderful start of the program. Stay tuned for blog posts from our teams to follow their amazing journey and checkout their daily logs on our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams app</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-rgsoc-team_collage.jpg" alt="A month of RGSoC!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">
Our 2017 teams :) (Image: Laura Gaetano)
</div>
<p>Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">us</a> and our <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/lists/rgsoc-2017-teams">teams</a> on twitter for more updates. And let’s enjoy the journey of our awesome teams this summer together!</p>
Team ImpactDevs Amsterdam - Part 1Jesshttp://twitter.com/teamimpactdevs2017-07-31T00:00:00+00:002017-07-31T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-impactdevs-part-one<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-teamimpactdevs.jpg" alt="team impactdevs at work" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Nuno Cruz</div>
<p>Team Impact Devs - Amsterdam</p>
<p>Four years ago I was on the tube late at night in London. Some drunk girls were being noisy and boisterous, squealing and moaning about their painful feet in their high-heels.</p>
<p>A goth-attired man in his mid 30s looked up from his book and said “don’t wear those shoes if they hurt, no one wants to hear your shrieking.”</p>
<p>“Oh, go home and listen to your Morrissey albums!” said one of the girls.</p>
<p>I caught her eye and grinned and asked them where they’d been that evening. They said they had just finished their final exams and were about to graduate and started asking me about myself.</p>
<p>I told them I worked at a startup and I made apps. “Wooaaahhh you are clever!” they chimed in response. I was bending the truth, I edited xml in apps — basically a tester/ proofreader but it felt very good to gain the approval of these impertinent girls.</p>
<p>That’s what set me off on this journey to learn to create applications myself.</p>
<p>After 4 years of going to meetups, hackathons, many online tutorials and a 3-month boot camp, I met my teammate, Vanessa. Like me, transitioning into web dev after a different career — as a water technology and sustainability expert.</p>
<p>Our project is worldbrain.io, a Chrome extension which helps scientists organise and search their bookmarks and history. We were attracted to the idea of helping researchers in science and we thought it made a good mix of both our backgrounds.</p>
<p>We are building a notification centre which allows admin users to log on and send updates to users, using Pouch db, React, Mongo and Node.</p>
<p>And now it’s already the end of week 4 and these 3 months are going so fast. Although we are doubtlessly learning a lot, at times I feel like a roiling mess of frustration. Nearly everyday I have to give myself a pep talk in the mirror and spend 5 minutes google image-searching ‘Michelle Obama working out’. However, my kate-bush-song-listened-to-to-lines-of-code-written ratio has fallen from 10:1 or 5:1.</p>
<p>It feels so lucky to be in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, right in the centre, in summer — surrounded by creative, flat-hierarchy companies and awesome people, giving us their limited time and sought-after skills willingly.</p>
<p>We’ve been really lucky to get so much support from our mentors and coaches — so much so that we would like to start a “Male Allies in Tech awards”, to let people know that the tech industry has more than stories of sexism and harassment. One of the prizes will include a t-shirt that says “This is what a male ally in tech looks like”.</p>
Meet Team CodeBears!Rete and Netahttp://twitter.com/ruby_bears2017-07-28T00:00:00+00:002017-07-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-codebears<h3 id="who-we-are">Who we are</h3>
<p>We are the Team CodeBears based in Berlin. Both of us got into coding after attending a Rails Girls Beginners Workshop in Berlin almost to the date one year ago. So this blog post is also our personal coding anniversary.</p>
<p><img src="../img/blog/2017/2017-07-codebears-pic.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">CodeBears Neta and Rete at the SoundCloud office / Photo by: Alon Peer</div>
<h3 id="how-we-met">How we met</h3>
<p>Actually, even though both of us attended the same workshop, we didn’t meet there. After the workshop two new study groups formed and we met in both, realising that we had been to the same workshop. One of those groups - RubySprouts - was smaller and very cozy. It was also very practical from the very start: the coaches thought us while working on a real group project. We liked that approach very much.
With time the group got smaller and smaller until it was only the two of us as students and four coaches. We were lucky :) Starting our RailsGirls adventure, none of us had imagined that this study group would entirely turn into a RGSoC team half a year later as three of our RubySprouts coaches are actually also our RGSoC coaches!</p>
<h4 id="rete">Rete</h4>
<p><em>When I first heard about the Rails Girls Summer of Code at the Beginners Workshop I thought to myself, “oh this is what I wanna do”, but didn’t think that I would already be experienced enough to apply in February. I always kinda had this option in the back of my mind, but I wasn’t sure if I would still be in Berlin, if I would have a job or what my situation in the summer would be. Fortunately, all the pieces fell to the right place and I managed to fulfil my initial thoughts and wishes :)</em></p>
<h4 id="neta">Neta</h4>
<p><em>With a background in psychology and history, I didn’t imagine programming would be so much fun! Moreover, I didn’t expect to work on a full-time project after less than a year of studying. Every day since last summer, I discover more and more how fun, hard, challenging and frustrating this experience is to me. One thing is certain: I want more!</em></p>
<h3 id="how-was-our-application-process">How was our application process?</h3>
<p>Even though we already knew each other and both of us had thought about applying for some time, we first talked about applying as a team 4 days before the deadline, which luckily got extended by one week :). So within those crazy few days we worked non-stop on the application: we found six coaches, chose a project and issues from it (we were so happy to see we are the first to pick diaspora*!), managed to get SoundCloud as a coaching company, wrote tons about our motivation, experience and why we really have to do this summer of code.
The intense application process proved us that we can work well together, as we complement each other quite well with our skills and work processes. Other than that we realised we are both vegetarians, like pets and more little stuff that makes it more fun too work together.</p>
<h3 id="who-is-on-our-team">Who is on our team?</h3>
<p>##### We are very proud to present our great team:<br />
<strong>Chiara</strong> is one of our coaches from the RubySprouts study group and self taught Ruby on Rails backend developer through RailsGirls Berlin with 4 years experience, betrayed the frontend development to join the dark side and never came back.<br />
<strong>Dani</strong> is a backend engineer at SoundCloud. He has used mostly Scala and Ruby so far and is interested in system design and functional programming.<br />
<strong>David</strong> is one of our coaches from the RubySprouts study group and a Ruby developer, hacking on the basic income @meinbge.<br />
<strong>Glauber</strong> works at SoundCloud mainly with Scala and little bit of Ruby/Sinatra, but worked with Ruby/Rails for 3 years professionally before and a Ruby/Rails enthusiast since 2007. Also had some experience as full-stack.<br />
<strong>Jano</strong> is a backend engineer at SoundCloud, in the past he has worked in both startups and the enterprise world as programmer, architect and team lead. Also, he has spoken in different Ruby conferences in South America, Europe and USA.<br />
<strong>Laura</strong> is one of our coaches from the RubySprouts study group and a former RGSoC student. She worked at ThoughtWorks 2.5 years (mostly python, javascript, devops) and is interested in security and server admin.<br />
<strong>Liron</strong> is a UI developer at Dell-EMC, coaching us remote on frontend issues.</p>
<p>And then of course there are our project mentor <strong>Lisa</strong> and our supervisor <strong>Fanny</strong></p>
<p><img src="../img/blog/2017/2017-07-codebears-wholeteam.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Team Code Bears / Collage by: Rete and Neta</div>
<h3 id="how-is-the-summer-going-so-far">How is the summer going so far?</h3>
<p>We are super happy to have this amazing team supporting us. Our coaches have excellent coaching skills and either help us out with the issue we work on, git mess on our computers or prepare sessions on single topics such as TDD, databases, ActiveRecord, Ruby basics, Reg-Ex and much more. This has been super helpful and we feel that we have been learning a lot not just on Rails but also on software development in general. The combination of learning from tutorials, working on the source code and watching the way our coaches work was very productive and satisfying so far. After a lot back and forth our first pull request got merged this week, which is amazing!!</p>
<h3 id="what-are-we-working-on-anyway">What are we working on anyway?</h3>
<p>Diaspora* is an open-source distributed social network that takes privacy issues serious. Check it out <a href="https://diasporafoundation.org/">here</a>. It is a huge project, with more then 300 open issues and a complex structure, all very challenging aspects. Luckily, the project also has an impressive documentation which helps a-lot, and a very active community. Therefore, working on this project does not only mean to write code, but also learn how to get involved in a very active community working on an complex open source project. It was super helpful that we - by coincidence - met an active member of the community who could give us useful insight into how the community works, alongside the constructive correspondence on github with other active members.</p>
<h3 id="finally">Finally…</h3>
<p>…we want to thank everyone involved, our coaches, our supervisor, our mentor, our coaching company and also the whole RGSoC organising team for making this great learning experience possible for us!!</p>
Alexandra + Alexandra = team AlexaSasha & Sashahttp://twitter.com/linguistsare2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:002017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team-Alexa<p>Hi! We are a team of computational linguists/Python/Django developers from Moscow, Russia. We are working on a JClub project. It’s a social network for LGBTQI+ people. It’s built using Django framework, and our goal is to make it multilingual.</p>
<h2 id="teamhttpstwittercomlinguistsare"><a href="https://twitter.com/linguistsare">Team</a></h2>
<h4 id="about-sasha-melanoyahttpsgithubcommelanoya">About Sasha (<a href="https://github.com/melanoya">melanoya</a>)</h4>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/alexa-melanoya.jpg" alt="melanoya" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Alexandra Martynova</div>
<ul>
<li>Four and a half years ago Sasha was going to be an interpreter and believed that she had no talent for math and programming.</li>
<li>She studied Russian sign language for two years, and knows it better than any other foreign language.</li>
<li>She can juggle and do slacklining.</li>
<li>From the first year at the university Sasha’s been studying Yiddish. She even went once to Moldova to find there native Yiddish speakers.</li>
<li>Adores phonetics and automatic speech recognition!</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<h4 id="about-sasha-religofsilhttpsgithubcomreligofsil">About Sasha (<a href="https://github.com/religofsil">religofsil</a>)</h4>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/alexa-religofsil.jpg" alt="religofsil" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Alexandra Ershova</div>
<ul>
<li>Gives public lectures on computational linguistics, chatbots, machine learning, and all that AI stuff. Once managed to explain to a group of 11-year-olds how neural networks work, was (and still is) very proud of herself.</li>
<li>At 16 she made a promise to herself that she will never ever ever get into programming. Broke it at 19, first week at the university.</li>
<li>Listens to a lot of music. Like, A LOT. Used to spend most of her money on concert tickets, been to a 30+ shows.</li>
<li>Can’t do anything without tea, drinks up to 10 cups of tea per day.</li>
<li>Studied Indonesian for a year, just for fun.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/alexa.jpg" alt="team alexa" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo of Sasha and Sasha taken by Sergey Ershov</div>
<p>We met each other four years ago at the university. Despite the fact that we’ve been classmates, we met only at the end of the first year in preparation for the exam in language theory. Then we went roller-skating, and from there our friendship began. Many walks, board games, delicious food and joint projects awaited us in the future.
During these years, we worked together on many projects in various fields, from sociolinguistics to web development, and we’ve always been a great team, because we make each other stronger.</p>
<h2 id="coaches">Coaches</h2>
<p><a href="https://github.com/Sereni"><strong>Kate</strong>:</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/alexa-sereni.jpg" alt="Kate" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Ekaterina Ageeva</div>
<p>Back at the university Katya was one of the students, just like us, only a year older. After her second year, she started doing Google Summer of Code, received Anita Borg scholarship, and gave several talks about it at the university. She’s the person who inspired us (and many other students) to try and get into summer of code programs. Katya is not only our coach, she’s also our role model, and a person who gave us much needed moral support throughout the application process and first few weeks of RGSoC, when everything was unclear and kind of scary. Right now Katya works at Google, at London office, so we have to use Hangouts for our meetings.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/theotheo"><strong>Ildar</strong>:</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/alexa-ildar.jpg" alt="Sasha and Ildar" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo of Alexandra Ershova and Ildar taken by Alexandra Martynova</div>
<p>Ildar is a data scientist who we met before the very beginning of the program at PyData meetup. Before being our coach, he was a Django Girls mentor. When we told him about Rails Girls Summer of Code, he immediately wanted to be our coach. It is rare to meet a person who so unexpectedly appears in life and begins to play an important role in it. It turned out that Ildar, like us, is interested in the natural language processing (and, unlike us, knows Python and Django very well :)) He lives in Moscow, so we often meet for lunch and discuss our project. These lunches are very helpful, as everything becomes much clearer after our meetings.</p>
<h2 id="project">Project</h2>
<p>The JoopeA Club is a social network for Persian LGBTQI+ community. It is supposed to be a safe space for people of any gender and/or sexual orientation. Right now the social network is only available for people who speak Persian. Our task for this summer is to build support for other languages, so that more people could use the social network.</p>
<p>We picked this project not only because it matches our skills, but because we believe in its social importance. Living in a country where homophobia is the default option makes you appreciate safe spaces and communities where people are allowed to be themselves and can talk openly about their problems, without the risk of breaking the laws or being called names. We hope that our work for JoopeA Club will make at least some difference for some people.</p>
Creating our own Plugin, Yeeey!Kajahttp://twitter.com/AlizeNero2017-07-25T00:00:00+00:002017-07-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-berlindiamonds-part-one<p><img src="../img/blog/2017/2017-07-firstday-confetti.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Kaja at her desk / Photo by: Jen</div>
<p>Hello Hello!</p>
<p>We are the Team BerlinDiamonds, consisting of Jen and Kaja. It is the 4th week of the RailsGirls Summer of Code and we already feel like we have never been doing anything else, because it feels so natural to come to our beautiful office at our coaching company ABSOLVENTA and keep building and refactoring our plugin for Discourse. But before we tell you more about what we have been up to, here is a little bit about us:</p>
<p>Kaja</p>
<p>I am a passionate Ruby developer and a member of the Rails Girls Berlin. Originally I studied philosophy and historical linguistics, but I soon discovered my love for programming and am now a junior Rails developer. Besides coding I also love playing football, eating and learning new stuff. Oh and I am addicted to the internet in general. I just learned to accept it and use that in a good way.</p>
<p>Jen</p>
<p>Since I originally come from photography and psychology, I love to connect creativity and coding. So building web apps with Rails is just the right medium for me. I also joined the Open Tech School Berlin and soon met the Rails Girls Berlin at some events at our co-working space. I love to travel and see beautiful things and I can do some tricks on the skateboard.</p>
<p>The First Days</p>
<p>On our very first day, we came to the office and found our desks set up beautifully with confetti and welcoming messages. We received our chipcards for entering the building and because we have already been setting up the environment on our local computers, we finally could start looking at the actual tasks for this summer. While our office, our supervisor and all of our coaches are in Berlin, our mentor and the app owner are in Canada. So arranging a kick of call with our mentor took some planning because of the time and space difference. But forunately Discourse has a huge community called <a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/rails-girls-summer-of-code-2017-backup-providers/65597">Discourse Meta</a>.
As we already knew that our task would be to create a plugin for Discourse that allows the Admin User to backup his app to a clowd provider, we followed some tutorials on Discourse Meta on <em>How to install a plugin</em> and looked at the <a href="https://github.com/xfalcox/discourse-backups-to-dropbox">Backup-To-Dropbox-Plugin</a> in order to understand the structure of a Discourse plugin. So when we finally had our call with our Mentor the third day, he was gladly surprised how far we already were and he gave us our first really good feedback. We were very flattered and pleased with ourselves and so the following weeks went very smoothly with a lot of motivation from our side and allways encouraging feedback and really good explainations from our mentor’s and our coaches side. Coding for the RailsGirls Summer of Code felt like being freshly in love and it made our cheeks blush from euphoria. Not kidding.</p>
<p>Our Coaches</p>
<p>We are very lucky with our team of coaches. First of all we have a team of 2-3 coaches at our coaching company who are sitting next to us daily. They are very much in love with Ruby and asking them a question about an issue with the code mostly is followed by a little spontanious lesson enthusiastically explained with haptic examples like Monkey classes and banana methods. All of them have their fields of expertise and together they form a big universe of knowledge. We also have some geniuses in our remote coaches, who regularly fall into deep discussions about wether a plugin should be constructed like a gem or not and other fascinating questions in our slack channel. We follow these “fights of the giants” with big interest because there is a lot to learn from it.</p>
<p>Our Plugin</p>
<p>We already got quite far within the first weeks and finished building a plugin for Discourse that can upload backup files to Google Drive. If you want to check out the code and see our progress, please take a look at our <a href="https://github.com/berlindiamonds/discourse-googledrive-backup">Github Repo</a>. Although the plugin itself is technically working, as good coders we will still refactor our code and also create a reusable structure in order to build more backup plugins after that.
All in all this project has really made us feel more competent and growing with every problem we solve. We feel very empowered and happy and are very thankful for the chance of being part of the RailsGirls Summer of Code. Thanks to all contributers and organizers! We love it <3
<img src="../img/blog/2017/2017-07-empowered-diamonds.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Kaja and Jen / Photo by: Markus from Absolventa</div>
Meet Us - Team Serv0101Neha & Rakhi2017-07-21T00:00:00+00:002017-07-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team-Serv0101<h2 id="introducing-team-serv0101">Introducing Team Serv0101</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/TeamServo_Neha_Rakhi.jpg" alt="Neha and Rakhi" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Neha and Rakhi</div>
<p>Together_we_can_do_anything. Yes this is true. Rakhi and Neha met each other 4 years back in university. The journey of becoming friends from stranger was amazing. We had fun together and now working together on same project, Isn’t this amazing?. When we entered into our last semester this January, we realised after few months this is going to end. But RGSoC has given us an opportunity to work together. We were lucky enough to get in.</p>
<h4 id="story-behind-project-selection-and-our-team-name">Story behind project selection and our Team Name:</h4>
<p>We went through many projects and shortlisted two projects but both us attracted more towards Servo. The only thing we were scared about was none of us had experience with rust. That was the time when we both shared our thoughts about servo and after few days of discussion and research we were done with project selection. We both were computer science engineering students, we love playing around with 0 and 1, so here is our project- servo with team name #Serv0101.</p>
<h4 id="team-serv0101">Team Serv0101</h4>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/neha_28_yadav"><strong>Meet Neha</strong>:</a>
<img src="/img/blog/2017/TeamServo_Neha.jpg" alt="Neha" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Rakhi</div>
<p>Neha started her journey in the field of programming when she was in the mid of her 3rd year. So, it’s been one and half year since she started her journey. But after starting her journey she never stopped. She started with Learn IT Girl, then worked with a startup and then made to finale of Smart India hackathon and now finally in RGSoC. So this is a small journey in short period of time.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/atbrakhi"><strong>Meet Rakhi</strong>:</a>
<img src="/img/blog/2017/TeamServo_rakhi.jpg" alt="Rakhi" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Neha</div>
<p>Rakhi graduated last month with Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering. She worked as an Outreachy intern at Mozilla last summer(2016). While at Mozilla, She helped in improving several distinct aspects of Firefox’s UI on all desktop platforms. Also, she was a Learn IT Girl Scholar. She has keen interest in computers and She love to code. Hence, She can be found near her system most of the time. Outside of Computers, She like to play Badminton, Volleyball and go on trekking sometimes.
You can find more about her here (http://rakhisharma.me/).</p>
<h4 id="mentor-and--coaches">Mentor and Coaches:</h4>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/lastontheboat"><strong>Josh Matthews</strong>:</a>
An amazing person we ever got to interact with. Sometimes we both discuss about how is it possible for a person to be filled with such talent :P. He is always up for the help. He is an amazing developer and a mentor. Everyone we interact with said us one thing, “You Girls are on safe hands”.</p>
<p><a href="https://wafflespeanut.github.io"><strong>Ravi Sankar</strong>:</a>
Ravi is Code fiddler, FOSS enthusiast, science lover, Pythonista, Rustacean, Mozillian, juggler, adventurer and rest we are still figuring out. Find more about him here: https://wafflespeanut.github.io</p>
<p><a href="http://creativcoder.github.io/"><strong>Rahul Sharma</strong>:</a>
Rahul is passionately curious about computer science and programming. He is 2016 GSoC Intern with Servo and currently works at AtherEnergy. He also contributes to rustc, and other projects in the Rust Community. His interests includes systems programming, realtime web technologies, compilers and type theory.</p>
<h2 id="about-our-work">About Our Work</h2>
<p>Just like our mentor Josh Matthews (jdm on IRC) says on FosDem, “Basically all of the browser engines you are using were designed before the year 2000, and hardware at that time was very different. It usually only had one core, clock speeds were lower and you had much less memory available to you”
In Servo, things run in parallel. Also according to Josh “Modern engines will often be able to do the actual painting to the screen in parallel and then you have a loop between computing and executing. Even so there are a lot of serial and sequential operations that we believe we could do better”
We are working on making servo support responsive images.</p>
✨ Meet Team Fusion ✨Janakshi & Kalpanihttp://twitter.com/TeamFusionJK2017-07-20T00:00:00+00:002017-07-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/meet-team-fusion<h2 id="hello-everyone---ayubowan-"><strong>Hello Everyone!, ආයුබෝවන් | Ayubowan 🙏</strong></h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-jana-and-kal.gif" alt="Team Fusion Pair" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>The two of us (Image: Janakshi)</b></div>
<p>We are <em>Janakshi</em> and <em>Kalpani</em> from <strong>Team Fusion</strong>, working on project <strong>OpenDF</strong>. We are not just any team, but the first ever Sri Lankan team, to be a part of RGSoC Journey and the one and only Sri Lankan team from RGSoC 2017! 😌🎉 We feel so lucky to be a part of RGSoC family and we thank Rails Girls Summer of Code team for giving us this golden opportunity.. 😇</p>
<h2 id="so-who-are-we">So who are we?</h2>
<p>We are two young ladies who love to code. But, that’s not enough for an introduction.. So this is who we really are. 👇</p>
<p><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/janakshidulanga"><strong>Janakshi :</strong></a> Janakshi Dulanga (22 years) is from Kegalle, Sri Lanka. She’s someone who loves to do lots of things, that’s right, a multi-tasker. Cooking comes first, then wandering about stars and music, and guess what? She loves Programming too.. She had to choose them all! She’s currently a software engineering undergraduate, from APIIT Sri Lanka, who’s waiting for her final degree results, and hoping to become a Software Engineer who can cook! 🔭💻👩🍳</p>
<p><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/kalpani-bhagya-ranasinghe-256585110"><strong>Kalpani :</strong></a> Kalpani Ranasinghe (22 years) is from Kegalle, Sri Lanka. She is a Karate player, guitarist and pianist. She loves programming too. She wants to become a game developer and a Karate Referee in World Karate Federation one day. 🎮💻🥋 Currently she’s a computer science undergraduate, from University of Colombo School of Computing and apart from her studies she is playing for the Karate Team of University of Colombo.</p>
<p><strong>So what are the similarities between them?</strong>
Both of them are from the same school, were in the same class, from the same area, having the same height, left handers when it comes to writing, and the list goes on.. And the most important similarity, that made them a part of RGSoC, is their love for being a part of something bigger. 😊✨</p>
<h2 id="the-origin-story">The origin story!</h2>
<p>It started, with Kasun Delgolla (currently a coach of Team Fusion), mentioning Rails Girls Summer of Code, in front of Janakshi. Being an undergraduate, who has completed the degree and wanted nothing but a way to gather experience before stepping in to the IT industry, as soon as she heard about that, she was curious, so she googled, and got to know about the RGSoC program and thought to herself, “This is cool!” and then she went through the requirements, and tried her best to achieve them all. That includes coming up with a team!
Then having a teammate in her mind, she turned to Kasun Delgolla and Tharindu Delgolla, asking them to be a part of the team, as coaches. They said YES!!✌ and offered their help in finding the rest of the team coaches. The best part comes when Janakshi, asked from Kalpani to be her teammate. Janakshi didn’t know that Kalpani has lots of girls asking her to be their teammate for RGSoC, so she asked.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-how-we-got-together.jpg" alt="A screenshot of our first chat on RGSoC" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>A screenshot of our first chat on RGSoC (Image: Kalpani)</b></div>
<p>They say, girls are experts in saving screenshots for later.. See what they got out of it now? <strong>Memories!</strong></p>
<p>Just like that Kalpani took a bit of time to make her choice.. And guess what she said YES!!!..✌ See? Is it even possible saying NO to your childhood friend? Nah.. Because both of them knew, they are gonna make a great team..😇
Then they were preparing for the application . First they came up with the name Fusion, which means “The process or result of joining two or more things together to form a single entity.”⚛ Thank you google for letting us know about this beautiful meaning.
As the next step, they went through the approved project list, and kept their eyes on two projects considering their familiarity with the required skills. With the help of Kasun and Tharindu, they finalized their decision. While the application process is happening, they wanted to find a suitable working place. What place is better than the place you learned it all? yeah, that’s why they wanted to work in one of their universities.</p>
<h3 id="if-you-have-to-ask-youll-never-know-if-you-know-you-need-only-ask"><strong><em>“If you have to ask, you’ll never know. If you know, you need only ask.”</em></strong></h3>
<p>#### <em>― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</em> ⚡</p>
<p>They asked from APIIT Sri lanka, because they always knew, universities will never say “No” to the real need of students, and actually they did say YES!!..✌ See everything started with a YES for them.. So finding the room of requirement from APIIT, was a success! 🎉</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-our-working-place.jpg" alt="Our little working space" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our little working space (Image: Janakshi)</b></div>
<p>Before submitting their application, they wanted to have a plan, a plan for everything, from the working schedule to , the project management tools. So they thought of using tools like Trello, and Slack. 📝✔ And they even had a plan for the working days that they are gonna miss. So they thought of mentioning in their application, how they are gonna cover up the workload, by working in weekends, if they ever miss a working day. May be having such plans, made them stand out from most of the applicants for RGSoC. Then they submitted their application after reviewing it many times, hoping to be one of the selected teams..
It was near midnight, for April 30th, when they heard the good news.. They got a mail from RGSoC team, saying “CONGRATULATIONS! We want to offer you a spot in Rails Girls Summer of Code 2017 as a sponsored team!”.🎉 They felt so happy and couldn’t even believe that they are one of those 20 teams, out of 190 teams, who got selected for RGSoC 2017! Oh the feels.. 💃</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-celebrate.gif" alt="Celebrations peeps" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Celebrations peeps.. (Image: giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>So that was how the Team Fusion made it to the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2017. Such a great and inspiring story.. Isn’t it?</p>
<h2 id="our-team--the-cool-team">Our Team | The Cool Team</h2>
<p>Since you all know about the two of us now, here’s an intro for the rest of our cool team. 👇</p>
<h3 id="coaches"><strong><em>Coaches</em></strong></h3>
<p><em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/kasundananjaya">Kasun Delgolla:</a></em> He’s currently working as the Head of Mobile Development in
Riverview B2B- Sri Lanka. He’s a Enterprise Mobility & IoT Enthusiast. He’s loves to help people and play cricket. He’s our lead coach.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/tharindudananjaya">Tharindu Delgolla:</a></em> He’s a well experienced software engineer from IFS- Sri Lanka, who’s also a technical consultant at the same company. He hopes to become a great film maker one day. Well, Good luck Tharindu!. He’s our remote coach, who’s gonna do the code reviewing for us.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/imranhishaam">Imran Hishaam:</a></em> He’s a software engineer from Riverview B2B- Sri Lanka. He may be young, but he’s a genius and very passionate, when it comes to coding. He’s helping Team Fusion with ReactJS app development as a local coach.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/udanie-gunasena-191b8730">Udani Gunasena:</a></em> She’s a well experienced software engineer from ICTA Sri Lanka. She loves music and she’s a great pianist. And we must say, she has a keen eye, when it comes to reviewing UI designs. Currently she’s helping our team as a local coach.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.facebook.com/chanakanurad">Anuradh Caldera:</a></em> He’s a software engineer from Riverview B2B- Sri Lanka, who’s currently working as an iOS developer. He’s a genius when it comes to development and the management of native mobile applications. He’s also great at frontend development and will be helping our team with ReactJS as a local coach.</p>
<h3 id="our-mentor"><strong><em>Our Mentor</em></strong></h3>
<p><em><a href="https://lk.linkedin.com/in/agentmilindu">Milindu Kumarage:</a></em> He’s a software engineer from Sysco Labs- Sri Lanka. He’s very enthusiastic when it comes to helping the IT Community in Sri Lanka. He’s doing the best he can to help us and guide us through all the project related work as our mentor.</p>
<h3 id="our-supervisor"><strong><em>Our Supervisor</em></strong></h3>
<p><em><a href="https://twitter.com/senorhuidobro?lang=en">Ramón Huidobro:</a></em> He’s a freelance software engineer who knows how to have fun. He loves to help people. He enjoys swimming and hiking too. The best thing is, he’s our supervisor for this summer!</p>
<p>And this is our lovely team!😎👇 Looking fantastic right?
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-team-fusion.jpg" alt="Team Fusion" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our Fabulous Team.. (Images: Team member photos provided by themselves; RGSoC logo: twitter.com)</b></div>
<h2 id="the-project--opendf">The Project- OpenDF</h2>
<p>Project <em><a href="https://github.com/scorelab/OpenDF">OpenDF</a></em> is a cloud based digital forensics tool which helps forensics investigators in investigating forensics evidences. It enables the investigators, mine the evidences effectively and report successfully. Through OpenDF, the usability of analysis of processed forensics data can be improved. It supports team collaboration in investigations and has been able to increase the confidentiality and security of the investigation. Mind Blowing !!.. Isn’t it?</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-mind-blowing.gif" alt="Mind blowing" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Mind blowing!.. (Image: Buzzfeed.com)</b></div>
<h3 id="so-what-exactly-are-we-doing-with-opendf">So what exactly are we doing with OpenDF?</h3>
<p>During the summer, we are developing a new file browser component using React, so it can be integrated later, once the OpenDF UI is fully implemented in ReactJs. And also, we are hoping to contribute to document the OpenDF APIs. Well, that’s some exciting work, eh? 😁</p>
<h2 id="hows-our-journey-with-rgsoc-so-far">How’s our journey with RGSoC so far?</h2>
<p>It’s been only two weeks since we started our RGSoC journey, and we are already feeling blessed to be a part of this family.</p>
<h3 id="before-july-1st">Before July 1st</h3>
<p>We had a list of tasks to be completed before July 1st, we tried to complete them all to have a better start. From May to June, we both tried our best to get familiar with the project technology stack. From the setting up of the environment for the project to coming up with a plan for each month and each week was done during the month of June. Since we love to do everything in proper and tidy way we started a Trello board to track our To-do list for each week and our improvement. We even created a GitHub account for our team and published a blog for our team, Team Fusion. Be professional!! 👆</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-tidy-up.gif" alt="Tidy-up" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Tidy-up! (Image: MakeAGIF.com)</b></div>
<p>During the last 2 weeks of June, we had many discussions with our mentor Milindu regarding the user requirements for the file browser. And we managed to finalize all of the requirements with the help of our mentor and our coaches.
So we were ready for the Start of RGSoC 2017! And were pretty confident too. Because we did months of preparing and had a great plan!.</p>
<h3 id="after-the-start">After the start</h3>
<p>Even before July 1st, the starting date of RGSoC, we knew this summer is going to play a huge part of our lives. So we couldn’t just start it without celebrating! That’s how our tiny kick-off celebration, which happened on July 3rd 2017, the very first working day of RGSoC, came into the picture. That was a wonderful and lovely day for all of us. Even some of our coaches could make it to the event. They helped us finishing the special cake! Actually they did the coaching for that too.. How to slice a cake better! 🎂🔪</p>
<p>And this is how our first day of RGSoC 2017 looked like.👇
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-our-first-day.jpg" alt="Our first day of RGSoC" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Our first day of RGSoC (Image: Coach Kasun & Janakshi)</b></div>
<p>That Cake, Coffee and those team chats on the project and the plan, and our very first call with the supervisor, gave the start to our RGSoC journey, in the best possible way.
By the end of our 1st Week of RGSoC, we could finalize the user stories and the wireframes for all the requirements as planned. Actually sketching wireframes is the real deal, if you are someone who’s going through exam stress! You can ask about that from Kalpani.💆</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-stress-release.gif" alt="Stress releasing" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Stress releasing.. (Image: giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>Opportunities were always on our side, we just had to take them. One day a very special person visited to see how we work. And that was professor Gamindu, from APIIT Sri Lanka. And he suggested an interesting way to improve how we work. That’s <strong>Scrum Meetings</strong>. According to his suggestions, we are starting Scrum meetings from this week onwards. And our Scrum Master, is none other than Dr. Gamindu, himself!
Our coaches are very helpful .. Although we disturb them every week, every day and actually every time, they do not hesitate to give us the best support they can give. And since we are learning most of the new technologies from scratch, their helping hands are precious to us..
Be it an UI related matter, an issue related to implementation, or project management issue, our coaches always made time to give us the best possible solution. So they saved us through the struggles. 😁</p>
<p>This is coach Imran, trying to teach some sense into our brains, on structuring the implementation for the file browser component.
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-coaching-session.jpg" alt="First coaching session of coach Imran" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>First coaching session of coach Imran.. (Image: Kalpani)</b></div>
<p>So far we’ve had five coaching sessions which made us realize that there are so many things that we have to learn. The good thing is, because of their advices, now we are adapting to read more and gain knowledge rather than cramming video tutorials. :D
Thank you very much for everything you’ve done for us so far and making sure we are not stuck in the same place for years. (බොහොම ස්තූතියි | Bohoma Sthuthie .. 😁)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-thank-you.gif" alt="Thank you" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Thank you for real.. (Image: giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>For these three weeks of RGSOC, we have learnt about Javascript, Git, React , Redux, JSON, ES6 vs ES5, Swagger annotations, APIs and etc by giving our highest commitment.
Time is flying so fast. So, we started the development process. Currently we are working on the searchable fields panel and Query bar of our file browser. It is off to a good start! And now our weekly Trello boards looks good and the Done and In-Progress lists are keep getting populated! ✅</p>
<h2 id="our-goals-for-this-summer">Our goals for this summer</h2>
<p>We want to <strong>learn more</strong> about the technologies from the technology stack of OpenDF and other related technologies which are being used in the industry. And our final aim for this summer is to <strong>give our best shot at it</strong> and do our tasks, in the best possible way. And of course yes!, We are going learn so much! 💻📚😌 Both of us <strong>share our knowledge</strong> with each other. Most of the times we do self studies in separate machines and discuss the things that we have learned. That is a better a way to learn quickly. And we want to continue this throughout this summer. 😌</p>
<p>And most importantly, we all know that a work like this can be very stressful. But it depends on how we embrace it. So why don’t we <strong>enjoy</strong> it instead - which is the exact thing we do. 😎💃🍕🍨 Our team find these kind of work more entertaining, than frustrating, which makes it more interesting in return.</p>
<p>So let’s enjoy being a part of RGSoC family!.. 😇🎉</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-20-team-spirit.gif" alt="Team Spirit" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>We are in this together.. (Image: giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>Follow us on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamFusionJK">@TeamFusionJK</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/JanakshiDulanga">@JanakshiDulanga</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/KbKalpani">@KbKalpani</a> and Read our <a href="https://rgsocteamfusion.wordpress.com/">blog</a> on WordPress.</p>
Team ifPairElseUnknownifPairElseUnknownhttp://twitter.com/IfPairElse2017-07-17T00:00:00+00:002017-07-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/ifPairElseUnknown<h1 id="hello-world"><strong>Hello World!</strong></h1>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifPairElseUnknown_v5.png" alt="Team Banner" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Images created at https://www.faceyourmanga.com/</div>
<p>We are <strong>Jenny</strong> and <strong>Sophie</strong> from <strong>Melbourne, Australia</strong>. It’s winter here! For us it is <em>Rails Girls <del>Summer</del> Winter of Code!</em> We are working on <a href="https://www.if-me.org/">ifme.org</a>- <em>a community for mental health experiences</em>. We can’t believe it has started and we are already in our third week.</p>
<h3 id="about-us"><strong>ABOUT US!</strong></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifpair-Zendesk.jpg" alt="Our First day at Zendesk" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny</div>
<h4 id="jennyhttpstwittercomjennynamster"><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/JennyNamster">Jenny:</a></strong></h4>
<p><strong>Hot Wheels and Nexo Knight Advocate, learning ukulele, eating chocolate, fruit lover, curious about the world</strong></p>
<p><strong>Why coding?</strong> I am interested in languages and communities. For me coding is an interesting language that has the ability to create something of value to the community. I feel that this could be a way that I can contribute positively to the community.</p>
<h4 id="sophiehttpstwittercomsophierose239"><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/sophierose239">Sophie:</a></strong></h4>
<p><strong>Domestic household engineer & Tantrum and Meltdown negotiator. Unwinds by creating handmade cards and the occasional glass of white wine</strong></p>
<p>Before becoming a full-time mother, I worked in the beauty industry, in some of Australia’s top spas, as a Beauty Therapist. I am now making a career change into web development and have been doing so by self-directed learning.</p>
<p><strong>Programming</strong> is something that I enjoy and find great pleasure in. As a mum, I find it is a great way to escape from my everyday mother duties and focus on something which I find rewarding. I love the mental challenge that programming presents and the possibility of being able to conceive a new idea and bring it to life.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifpair-SimonH.jpg" alt="Simon helping us set up our Dev Environments" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny</div>
<h4 id="how-we-met"><strong>How we met?</strong></h4>
<p>We were both interested in applying for the <strong>RGSoC</strong> and were connected via a 2016 participant, Ramya. We organised to meet at a cafe and straight away clicked, as we shared many things in common. To get the ball rolling, we presented at a Ruby meetup one night and asked for volunteer coaches and had awesome experienced Rubyists approach us, offering to coach.</p>
<h4 id="why-if-me"><strong>Why if me?</strong></h4>
<p>When we were looking through the open source projects, we instantly said it was the project for us. We believe passionately in the app and the aims of <strong>if me</strong>. Mental health is really important to us and we want to contribute to something that will have a positive impact on the world.</p>
<h4 id="about-our-project-and-mentor"><strong>About our Project and Mentor</strong></h4>
<p><strong>if me</strong> is a mental health communication app that allows people to share their mental health experiences in a safe and private space with their loved ones. If me is a free, not-for-profit open source software project.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifpair-atom.jpg" alt="Coding" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny</div>
<p><strong>Julia Nguyen</strong>, the founder of the project, started it in 2014 as an undergraduate student studying computer science at the University of Waterloo. During this time, Julia started writing and giving talks about her struggles with OCD, depression, and anxiety.</p>
<p>The idea for if me came from Julia’s experiences being a Vietnamese-Canadian struggling with mental illness and having conversations about it with her family. A main focus of the project is to increase conversations in communities lacking mental health education, including minority, immigrant, and English as a Second Language (ESL) communities. The site is offered in Spanish and the plan is to continue internationalization efforts. Julia, who was raised in a low-income family by a single-mother, believes it is important that the project remains free and not-for-profit.</p>
<p><em>Julia is so excited and honoured that if me is part of Rails Girls Summer of Code.</em></p>
<h4 id="coaches--coaching-company"><strong>Coaches & Coaching Company</strong></h4>
<p>We work in the heart of <em>Melbourne</em> at our coaching company <a href="https://www.zendesk.com/">Zendesk</a>, which is located in a beautiful building, which used to be an old bank.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifpair-Adelsmee.jpg" alt="Adel teaching us about Git" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny</div>
<p>At <strong>Zendesk</strong>, we are lucky to be working amongst an awesome team of Developers, with a wide range of experience. The team is really friendly and we feel at home here. They also have yummy snacks, coffee and lots of chocolate and avocados on hand, to help keep our minds focused and our tummy’s happy. <strong>We are so lucky to have such a generous Coaching Company</strong>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ifpair-Teammeeting.jpg" alt="Team meeting over Zoom" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny</div>
<p>We are blessed to have the support of our local Ruby community and RGSoC organisation. <strong>Thank You</strong> to our wonderful coaches; <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/adelsmee">Adel Smee</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/HashNotAdam">Adam Rice</a>, <a href="https://au.linkedin.com/in/simonhildebrandt">Simon Hilderbrandt</a></strong> and <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/tmoore">Tim Moore</a></strong>, our Project mentor <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/fleurchild">Julia Nguyen</a></strong> and RGSoC Supervisor <strong>Vi Nguyen</strong>.</p>
<h4 id="our-goals-for-the-winter"><strong>Our Goals (for the winter)</strong></h4>
<ul>
<li>To gain as much experience working as part of a team on if me that we can contribute positively towards</li>
<li>During our time with RGSoC we would both like to develop our Ruby and Javascript concepts and testing</li>
<li>Build our network of peers in programming</li>
<li>Pair programming</li>
<li>Learning about dev tools</li>
<li>Have <strong>FUN!</strong></li>
</ul>
Hello WorldCynthia & Roselynehttp://twitter.com/code_Hoppers2017-07-14T00:00:00+00:002017-07-14T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/We-are-Code-Hoppers!<h2 id="introducing-team-codehoppers">Introducing Team Code_Hoppers</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/code_hoppers.jpg" alt="Cynthia and Roselyne" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Roselyne and Cynthia (Image: Cynthia)</div>
<p>Hello World!🌍, we are <em>Cynthia</em> and <em>Roselyne</em> from Nairobi,Kenya🇰🇪. We are Code_Hoppers! Throughout summer we will be working on OpenFarm.</p>
<p>We met on Twitter while trying to find partners to collaborate with for the program. Once we connected we realized that we had so much more in common, other than our interest in participating in #rgsoc. We realized that we had both attended the same high school but in different years. We had both stayed in the same dormitory while in high school and we were Ruby on Rails developers. We were only left with one week before the applications for RGSoC closed so we quickly had to put our application together, submitted and hoped and prayed that we make it this year (Cynthia had applied the previous year and she was not successful😭) and as they say … the rest is history🎉.</p>
<h4 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h4>
<p>We are enthusiastic Ruby on Rails developers!</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/annyango"><strong>Cynthia</strong>:</a><br />
Jambo!! “Hello”<br />
Cynthia Anyango here, I am a student pursuing a BSc in Information Technology at Maseno University. I am also a Ruby on Rails developer with an interest in contributing to Open Source projects.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/RoselyneMakena"><strong>Roselyne</strong>:</a>
I’m Roselyne Makena. I have one year of experience in Rails. I spent a year in Accra, Ghana, learning software development. I also enjoy jazz music🎺 and taking nature walks.</p>
<h4 id="our-coaches">Our Coaches</h4>
<p>We have a great team of wonderful coaches helping us out as we work on the project.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/s_igu"><strong>Sigu</strong>:</a>
Sigu is an Open Source enthusiast, remote volunteer developer and mentor at <a href="https://github.com/agileventures"><strong>@AgileVentures</strong></a>, developer <a href="https://github.com/craftacademy"><strong>@CraftAcademy</strong></a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/wanyama_man"><strong>William</strong>:</a>
He is an Electrical and Computer Engineer from Kenya. He loves working on Open Source software and he tries to give back to the community whenever he can. Formerly a python developer, now a fully converted Rubyist.
<a href="http://twitter.com/achachiez"><strong>Emmanuel</strong>:</a>
He is a software developer currently working with Ampath Kenya, Eldoret. His preferred tools of trade are Ruby and Javascript (Node and Angular 2)😁</p>
<h4 id="what-are-we-working-on">What are we working on?</h4>
<p>We are working on OpenFarm. OpenFarm is a free and open database for farming and gardening knowledge. OpenFarm provides a platform for expert and beginner farmers and gardeners to share their knowledge in the form of Growing Guides.</p>
<p>We chose this project because it relates to farmers and trying to provide open farming knowledge to farmers is a noble cause; we also want to learn as much as possible about Ruby and Rails and Angular JS in the process.</p>
<p>During summer we hope to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Make UI changes on the footer</li>
<li>Redesign the Homepage UI</li>
<li>Create a search page, ensure that the architectural flow in the search page is according to the description and fix the existing bugs</li>
<li>Work on a bunch of Newcomer issues</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="what-are-we-looking-forward-to-this-summer">What are we looking forward to this summer?</h4>
<ul>
<li>We want to <strong>learn</strong> as much as possible, improve our programming skills and move to a higher level with our programming experience</li>
<li>We are looking forward to <strong>share</strong> this experience with the developers here and hope to encourage more ladies to take up Ruby on Rails</li>
<li>Have <strong>fun</strong> through this process, it’s never that serious 💃🏽</li>
</ul>
<p>We would like to thank: <br />
Our Mentor: Simon<br />
Our Supervisor: Kasia<br />
RGSoC Team</p>
<p>Follow us on twitter @code_Hoppers</p>
<p>Thank you RGSoC Community!</p>
print(“Hello World!”)Marie and Ineshttp://twitter.com/nk422017-07-13T00:00:00+00:002017-07-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/print_hello_world<p>“Machine learning for the curious but scared!!” – that was the name of the Meetup where we (<em>Ines</em> and <em>Marie</em>) almost met each other. Indeed, we didn’t notice each other until nine days later when Marie posted this comment:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/meetup_screenshot.png" alt="Team nk42" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>PyLadies meetup page</b></div>
<p><br />
<br /></p>
<p>Ines read it, googled “Rails Girls Summer of Code”, read it again and went to bed. A crazy idea to spend a whole summer with coding! She has a job and and … Ines really wants to speed up her coding skills. So she decided at the next day it might be a good idea to meet Marie.</p>
<p>Six months later we are sitting together at the Hackdays at ImmobilienScout Berlin and writing this blogpost.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="de"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Finished a productive day <a href="https://twitter.com/Immobilienscout">@Immobilienscout</a> hackdays <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RGSoC?src=hash">#RGSoC</a> <a href="https://t.co/AWOra59lJ5">pic.twitter.com/AWOra59lJ5</a></p>— NK42 (@nk42_) <a href="https://twitter.com/nk42_/status/885208850152001536">12. Juli 2017</a></blockquote>
<h3 id="so-ines-who-is-marie">So, Ines: who is Marie?</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/marie.jpg" alt="Team nk42" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Photo by Natasha Linde, @photolinde</div>
<p><br />
<br /></p>
<p>I could give you some data points about her (from Czech Republic, lives in Neukölln, studied German language and literature, …) but that doesn’t really say much about Marie. So let me tell you something else – and there are two obvious facts to talk about:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>You can’t just visit Marie. You always visit Marie AND her Husky. Pushki. He will check you first (I am very happy that he accepted me) and spend the rest of the time running circles around you, begging for food, poking Marie’s knees and start again from the beginning. So if you ever struggle to distract yourself from work: Pushki will help you!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Marie loves Python. She can tell you about 42 reasons why Python is the best programming language ever(!) and why you should immediately start to learn it. She started learning Python about 1.5 years ago and never doubted if it was a good idea – even though it was not always easy. Some errors literally rubbed her sleep.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="and-marie-who-is-ines">And Marie: who is Ines?</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/ines.jpg" alt="Team nk42" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Photo by KAthrin Gütt</div>
<p><br />
<br /></p>
<ul>
<li>Ines is a Marketing expert, studied Museology and Art History and also lives in Neukölln (that’s why our name starts with NK).</li>
<li>Ines does not like text written in points (see this text!), she likes paragraphs.</li>
<li>She has deep knowledge of art dealing with mass surveillance. When Ines tells you the story of a surveillance photo, it makes a very scary impression! She could even write a book about it!</li>
<li>Ines connects elements together in a very original way that others can understand at the end of the day purely by accident. No idea how it is possible, but it works! Isn’t that impressive?! :p</li>
<li>Ines is very friendly to people, likes to be Marie’s teammate. :)</li>
<li>Ines likes to play beach volleyball and goes everywhere by bike in Berlin.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="these-are-the-great-people-making-our-project-possible">These are the great people making our project possible:</h3>
<p>Our coaching company became SoundCloud. Our mentor for the project Foodsaving is <em><a href="https://github.com/tiltec">Tilmann Becker</a></em>. He is an expert in Web Development, Requirement Engineering and Software Architecture.</p>
<p>We have 6 coaches in our team:</p>
<p><em><a href="https://github.com/ellenkoenig">Ellen König</a></em> is a Data Scientist, works on A/B testing tools and machine learning, mainly works with Python and Django, and is our main contact for data understanding.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://github.com/bruderstein">Dave Brotherstone</a></em> is a Software Engineer, works with JavaScript, worked on Open Source Python projects, is one of our main contact coaches.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://github.com/starkcoffee">Duana Stanley</a></em> is a Software Engineer, coach at Rails Girls, helps us with the organisation at the coaching company.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://github.com/dmt">Daniel Temme</a></em> is a Software Engineer, expert for test driven development and agile methodologies.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://github.com/snordhausen">Stefan Nordhausen</a></em> is a System Developer, works with Python and regularly teaches Python.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://github.com/infraredgirl">Ana Krivokapić</a></em> is Software Engineer, works with Python, was a coach at DjangoGirls.</p>
<h3 id="about-food">About Food</h3>
<p>Enormous amount of food is wasted every day – in stores and restaurants, at home etc. and I think we don’t need to explain to you why this is a massive problem. That’s why a small but dedicated group of people started the Foodsaving & Foodsharing project in Germany, Austria, Switzerland in 2013. The website <a href="https://foodsharing.de/">Foosharing</a> was created for the purpose of surplus food exchange. Since then, the community has grown and people from non-German speaking countries started to be interested. So the organizers decided to build a multilingual platform called <a href="https://foodsaving.world">Foodsaving</a>.</p>
<p>We would like to support this great project during our Summer of Code. Foodsharing & Foodsaving is a great project to learn all relevant basics we need to build a solid web application. The web application is using Python and Django in the backend and JavaScript (AngularJS) in the frontend. We learn about backend web development with Django REST Framework, API, PostgreSQL and virtual environment.</p>
<h3 id="nk42-plans-rgsoc17">NK42 Plans @RGSoC’17</h3>
<ul>
<li>Improve our ability to understand and write code</li>
<li>Better orientate in technical documentation and find the solutions for implementation</li>
<li>Contribute to the foodsaving.world and support this great project</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="after-rgsoc">After RGSoC</h3>
<p><a href="https://github.com/mddemarie">@marie</a> will be a great python/django programmer and will solve tons of issues.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/id-gue">@ines</a> will understand all the data stuff and will never again spend a day figuring out how to install node with a version manager.</p>
Namaste, RGSoC! 🙏🏼Brihi and Shravikahttp://twitter.com/276linesofCode2017-07-12T00:00:00+00:002017-07-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/namaste-rgsoc-2017<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-12-pair.JPG" alt="Team 276linesofCode" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Brihi and Shravika (Credit: Brihi's Phone)</b></div>
<p>We are <em>Shravika Mittal</em> and <em>Brihi Joshi</em>, a duo from New Delhi, India working on Tessel this summer. It’s been a great experience since and we’ve tried to detail as much as possible 😁</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-12-276linesofCode-logo.png" alt="Team 276linesofCode Logo" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Team 276linesofCode Logo (Credits: A very dear friend of ours — <a href="https://twitter.com/isaatvikj">Saatvik</a>)</b></div>
<h2 id="the-beginning-of-it-all">The beginning of it all</h2>
<p>As the famous Bollywood dialogue goes:</p>
<h4 id="kehte-hain-ki">“Kehte hain ki…</h4>
<h4 id="agar-kisi-cheez-ko-dil-se-chaaho-toh-puri-kayanat-usey-tumse-milane-ki-koshish-mein-lag-jaati-hai">Agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaaho, toh puri kayanat usey tumse milane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai”</h4>
<p>which means: “It is said…that if you really desire something from the heart then the whole universe will work towards getting you that.”</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-12-think.gif" alt="Deep huh?!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Deep huh?! (Credits: giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>This perfectly summarizes our journey till July’17, when we started our Summer of Code. Exactly a year back, during the Induction Programme of our freshman year at our institute was when we first met — two confused, scared and shy humans who had absolutely no idea how we would survive the tech world 😰 We formed a small little study group (which often did all things besides studying together) of equally confused, scared and shy humans. We would hang out together in breaks, classes, post-classes and thus, the bond became stronger.
Cut to December 2016, when we came across the RGSoC website and within no time, we decided to be a team 💃🏼 💃🏼 Fortunately, there were three teams from our institute in RGSoC 2016, which gave us some initial boost to apply.</p>
<p>It was January 18th, when we were casually scrolling through the list of selected orgs in RGSoC 2017, that we came across <a href="https://tessel.io/">Tessel</a> which was at the top of the list. The category tags included JavaScript, Hardware and Command Line Interface — things that both of us were extremely enthusiastic about. Within no time we found ourselves scrolling through its website and joining their slack channel. After putting up a tiny introduction, we were pinged by the project mentor, Kelsey who suggested that we do a video call!</p>
<p>It was a cold January morning on the 20th, when we had our first video call with her. She was so supportive, introducing us to some contribution starters in Tessel, along with the work culture in an Open Source project. It made us more determined to apply, now that we knew Tessel was what we wanted to work on. 🙇🏽♀️</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-12-its-go-time.gif" alt="Us during Application! " /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Us during Application! (Credits: giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>It was February 2017 <strong>(cracks knuckles)</strong> and the application for RGSoC was in full swing. We were still devoid of coaches, which we were in dire need of. We first came across Dana in the RGSoC Google Group, who was kind enough to agree to coach us — all the way from Hong Kong! 🎉 🙌🏼</p>
<p>On 3rd February, we got in touch with Jigyasa on twitter. She messaged us saying that she would be willing to coach our team during RGSoC 2017. We got in touch with another coach of ours, Umair through Jigyasa.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-12-work.gif" alt="Us searching for Coaches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Us searching for Coaches! (Credits : giphy.com)</b></div>
<p>The whole of February went in looking for coaches for which we even approached some teams in our University which were past RGSoC scholars 🙆🏽 During this search we got in contact with two of our seniors at our University — Sanchit and Divam. They guided us through the entire application process including reviewing it a several number of times and suggesting what all points to add, what to delete, sharpening the language etc 😎</p>
<p>We met Diksha at a Women Who Code, Delhi meetup. We got to know that she has an expertise in IoT. She willingly agreed to be our guide.</p>
<p>After a long wait, came May 1st, “The” day. It was 6 AM in the morning, when both of us are usually sleeping like logs. And one of us just got up randomly to check our mails, and there it was, “Congratulations…”. At the end of June, we got a mail from the RGSoC Organizing Team that Vaishali would be our Supervisor during the summer. We are glad to work with her for the summer. After a long long wait, we’ve finally geared up to generate the best out of our 3 months here with RGSoC, looking forward to create memories of a lifetime! 🎉 🤗</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-12-yay.gif" alt="Us when we got selected" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Us when we got selected (Credits: giphy.com)</b></div>
<h2 id="the-team">The team</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-12-collage.jpg" alt="The Team" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>The Team, vertically moving right: Shravika, Brihi, Kelsey, Vaishali, Jigyasa, Diksha, Sanchit, Umair, Dana, Divam (Credits: Twitter — Jigyasa, Vaishali; Facebook — Umair, Divam, Sanchit; Provided themselves — Shravika, Brihi, Dana, Diksha, Kelsey)</b></div>
<h3 id="the-students">The students</h3>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/shravika_mittal"><strong>Shravika:</strong></a> Perfectionist is just the word for her 💆🏽 . One year back, she had no experience in programming or anything related to tech for that matter. Not a day goes by now when she isn’t found grilling herself in front of the screen, coding. Music works as a stress buster for her. She is the happiest capturing random moments on her camera.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/BrihiJ"><strong>Brihi:</strong></a> Music is what she thrives on. She tries to add a little spunk and creativity in whatever she does. During her free time she would be found scrolling through memes 💁🏽 , trying out new tech and frameworks or composing a tune. She loves anything that’s caffeine or chocolate. She aims to incorporate more Music in Tech later in her career!</p>
<h3 id="the-mentor">The mentor</h3>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ifoundtheme"><strong>Kelsey:</strong></a> Kelsey is the team’s mentor. She has been at Tessel since its beginning and is a member of the Tessel Project Steering Committee. She is also a neural engineer, a cartographer, a lover of the woods, and an adventurer. Adding to this, Kelsey is a founder of hc3.io.</p>
<h3 id="the-coaches">The coaches</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/danatuoliu/"><strong>Dana:</strong></a> Dana is a consultant specializing in healthcare compliance technology. She is located in Hong Kong, and has been actively involved in various programs promoting women in technology.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/jigyasa_grover"><strong>Jigyasa:</strong></a> Jigyasa is an Open Source Enthusiast. She has been awarded the Red Hat Women in Open Source 2017 award. Adding to her list of achievements, she is a GSoC scholar. She is also the director of Women Who Code Delhi.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/omerjerk"><strong>Umair:</strong></a> Umair is a full-stack developer with extensive Android and Web projects under his hat. He’s passionate about building scalable products from scratch. In his free time, he likes to contribute to open source.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamsanchitgupta/"><strong>Sanchit:</strong></a> Sanchit is a budding researcher who aims to help the humanity progress forward by doing cutting-edge research in Computer Science. He has recently completed his undergrad from IIIT-Delhi, and loves to play chess in his free time.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/divamgupta"><strong>Divam:</strong></a> Divam is a Senior at IIIT Delhi, majoring in Computer Science. His interests lie in Data Science, more specifically Deep Learning. He is extremely fluent in Python and JavaScript and is always up for helping others.</p>
<p><a href="http://dikshadeo.com/"><strong>Diksha:</strong></a> Diksha Deo is a technology coach, speaker and entrepreneur. She is the owner of IoT solution provider company called Incubsence. Her endless curiosity and enthusiasm to learn and how everything works makes Diksha a “pro” in uniting digital and physical worlds.</p>
<h3 id="the-supervisor">The Supervisor</h3>
<p><a href="http://vaishalithakkar.in/"><strong>Vaishali:</strong></a> Vaishali is an Open Source enthusiast and works as a Linux Kernel Engineer. She also conducts various Linux based workshops such as “Getting started with the Linux Kernel Hacking” to introduce new programmers to it.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-want-to-achieve-by-the-end-of-summer">What we want to achieve by the end of Summer</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>Learn</strong> as much as we can: JavaScript, Rust, Git, any new tech, all about microcontrollers, their protocols — basically any and everything that RGSoC and Tessel would be able to offer us.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Work</strong> and contribute to the community. Scale the Tessel project, add features to it, make projects that can help the community in some way using Tessel.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Bond</strong> with the community. We’ve heard from our seniors and read blogs, and have always been awed by the fact that teams from different parts of the world bond together. We are so excited to meet and talk to our fellow teams, know more about them, their culture and their work!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Have fun!!</strong> because why not? 🙌🏼</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Here’s to an amazing summer! 🎉 🍻 📝 🎈 🍕 🍧 🍦</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-07-12-end.gif" alt="Lets do this!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"><b>Let's do this! (Credits: giphy.com)</b></div>
4 Tips to Make Your RGSoC SuccessfulVi Nguyenhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2017-07-11T00:00:00+00:002017-07-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/4-tips-to-make-your-rgsoc-successful<p>Congratulations on being selected to participate in Rails Girls Summer of Code!</p>
<p>Now that you’re doing Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC), you’re going to be executing on plans you originally made. Doing things is always harder than coming up with the plan, because doing things requires effort, organization, communication and more.</p>
<p>‘Doing’ successfully is how you can come out of RGSoC with a great experience.<br />
This blog post is intended to be a practical guide to help you with the ‘doing’ part guide of RGSoC so that you can have a successful three months!</p>
<p><strong>Tip 1: Manage your role well — that’s the dual role of teacher and student</strong></p>
<p>RGSoC is a self-guided program and a crucial part of your success relies on you managing the dual the roles of “teacher” and “student” well.</p>
<p>Just like a teacher will set homework, the student completes it, the teacher assesses it and the loop continues—you also need to set your own “homework”, complete, assess and repeat. If you’ve just come from university or a workplace where someone manages you by giving you work and assessing you, this dual role may require adjusting to.</p>
<p>Don’t wait for someone to give you work — set it yourself.</p>
<p>So…how do you manage this dual role successfully?</p>
<p>It’s easy—<strong>be the teacher first</strong>.</p>
<p>This means putting effort and thought into how you will:
* Set “homework”. Will you tag in issues? Will you follow a set guide?
* Organize your schedule so you can complete your work, daily logs and anything outstanding (Suggestion: Use a Trello board to set out your to do list or “homework”).
* Set up communications. What’s the best way to give updates to your mentor, coaches and supervisor?
* Decide how to assess your work. How will you get feedback on your code? Will you send through a pull request?</p>
<p>When you’ve completed tasks under the role of the teacher, the role of student should just fit into one part—completing the work.</p>
<p><strong>Tip 2: Set clear goals and figure out how RGSoC fits in with your broader life plans</strong></p>
<p>Finding a job in web development is one of the common goals students going through RGSoC have. That’s a career goal and success in achieving this goal depends on interviews, finding suitable employers and more. RGSoC is not a guaranteed pathway to a job (just like university isn’t a guaranteed pathway). However, with RGSoC, you could view the work produced as being part of a portfolio to demonstrate your coding ability to potential employers.</p>
<p>RGSoC can be seen as a stepping-stone in the career goal of finding a job. The goal then, in RGSoC, is to come out with a high-quality portfolio of work.</p>
<p>Before being accepted into RGSoC, I was a user of <a href="https://www.discourse.org/">Discourse</a> (open source forum software) and coming into RGSoC, I wanted to work on a particular feature of Discourse. My goal was to complete work so an advertising plugin could be used. The broader goal was to get ads served on my Discourse forum and the goal in RGSoC was to complete the plugin to enable this.</p>
<p>In fact, I remember saying to my pair “If we don’t create a functioning plugin that serves ads, I would not consider my summer to be successful”.</p>
<p>It’s often harder to answer a question like “What would make my summer successful?” because there are many things that could contribute to making your summer successful. Instead, a more focused question would be <strong>“What one thing, if not achieved, would make me consider my experience in RGSoC unsuccessful?”</strong></p>
<p>Clarify this, check to see if it’s a realistic goal—then make clear plans to work towards achieving your goal.</p>
<p><strong>Tip 3: Over-communicate</strong></p>
<p>Let’s say you’ve been working hard on fixing up an issue that has taken 2 weeks. You’ve done your daily logs and are proud that you and your pair have finally conquered this issue. You also have multiple forked repositories. To you, everything’s going fine. You’re making progress.</p>
<p>Let’s imagine now that you’re a coach. Your team hasn’t contacted you in a fortnight. You see a whole bunch of forked repositories but it’s difficult to know which one is relevant. You’ve volunteered to help, and want to help, but don’t know how to because no one has contacted you or updated you. You feel isolated and unwanted.</p>
<p>RGSoC is where you want to over-communicate. Extended periods of silence can be open to any type of interpretation and what’s clear to you may seem vague to others. People can’t read your mind; they forget things and can get distracted.</p>
<p>Communication is something to prioritize straightaway, even before doing work. Try using Slack as a single communication channel so you can talk to your coaches, mentor and supervisor in one place. Use Github issues and pull requests to discuss code. Tagging people in and asking clear questions while noting down a time you need a response by will help your coaches understand exactly what you need and avoid confusion (Thank you to <a href="https://twitter.com/jocranford?lang=en">Jo Cranford</a> for this tip!).</p>
<p>Many people are supporting you and invested in your success in this program. Giving them regular updates and clear communication is courteous and shows them the respect that they deserve.</p>
<p><strong>Tip 4: Take feedback, as it is — feedback on your work</strong></p>
<p>Open source software is software that anyone can examine and is peer-reviewed.</p>
<p>What does that mean for you?</p>
<p>It means you’re likely to get feedback on your work. From people you know and from strangers. The feedback might be positive, it might be negative and it could be something in between or off the spectrum — regardless, it will be <strong>public</strong>.</p>
<p>The Internet also has a habit of creating <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect">online disinhibition</a>, so feedback may come across in quite a direct or curt way. Just make sure that you distinguish between real feedback that is designed to help you improve your code versus bad behavior disguised under the guise of “feedback”.</p>
<p>Getting feedback publicly is quite a daunting thing if you are a private individual. That’s the nature of open source and the Internet.</p>
<p>In this way, RGSoC does prepare you for “real life” as a developer because you are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Collaborating with other developers on a real project,</li>
<li>Coding, and</li>
<li>Getting your work reviewed, albeit very publicly, before it’s merged to the codebase.</li>
</ul>
<p>You can make the best out of this situation by making sure you review your work before it is publicly available and learn from feedback to improve your code.</p>
<p><strong>In Summary…</strong></p>
<p>There’s not one particular learning skill that I took from RGSoC, but rather, a successful RGSoC comes from a combination of:</p>
<ul>
<li>Managing your dual role of teacher and student well,</li>
<li>Setting goals,</li>
<li>Over-communicating, and</li>
<li>Taking on board any feedback to improve your code.</li>
</ul>
<p>In reality, things never go to plan perfectly. When I was doing RGSoC and in my observations as a supervisor, there were times when some of the above points could have been improved further. Don’t be too hard on yourself, if you can get the four actions above right most of the time, then you’ll be ok!</p>
<p>Lastly, what you get from RGSoC is <strong>an opportunity to contribute to open source with support</strong>. What you make of that opportunity now and beyond is up to you.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://github.com/ladydanger">Vi Nguyen</a> is a former RGSoC student (2015) and supervisor & <a href="https://www.examsuccess.com.au/">sponsor</a> (2016 & 2017) of Rails Girls Summer of Code.</em></p>
Team Victorious SecretVictorious Secrethttp://twitter.com/VictoriuSecret2017-07-07T00:00:00+00:002017-07-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team_victorious_secret_first<h2 id="the-learners">The Learners</h2>
<p><a href="https://github.com/saumya1906">Saumya</a>, an ECE undergrad from IIIT- Delhi and <a href="https://github.com/Katy310">Katyayani</a>, a CSE undergrad from <a href="https://iiitd.ac.in/">IIIT- Delhi</a> are the learners from Team Victorious Secret. They’ve been teammates since their first semester and have been friends for most of the bumpy ride that college can be. They are always up for a challenge and are truly grateful to RGSoC for giving them the opportunity to learn, work and code together.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team_victorious_secret.jpg" alt="Team Victorious Secret" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Katyayani and Saumya</div>
<hr />
<h2 id="things-you-didnt-know-about-saumya">5 Things You Didn’t Know About Saumya</h2>
<ul>
<li>She loves reading the news on her phone as much as millennials (me :P) love texting. When she’s scrolling down on her phone, she’s not checking the idle newsfeed of an idle fellow human, but actually trying to understand the economic crisis in Greece.</li>
<li>She uses every minute of her rare free time to learn languages. French, Spanish, and even Esperanto, she’s tried her hand at all of them. She is currently learning Japanese.</li>
<li>She has an incessant love for mangoes which is often on full display every time she picks a flavour- be it for ice cream or birthday cake or milkshakes!</li>
<li>You probably don’t want to be riding a bicycle with Saumya on Delhi roads. That situation has two dangerous elements- Delhi roads and Saumya on a bike!</li>
<li>If you want someone to apply your eyeliner and Saumya is the only one around, just go without the eyeliner. Trust me on this!</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="things-you-didnt-know-about-katyayani">5 Things You Didn’t Know About Katyayani</h2>
<ul>
<li>Her Facebook feed is just a series of makeup tutorials, which she plans on trying one day. But till then, the makeup ninja continues to train diligently. I wonder if she has ever missed any Met Daan makeup tutorial.</li>
<li>Sometimes, she reads her horoscope. Need I say more? :p</li>
<li>She cannot function without GPS. She even needs someone to tell her the directions to a place that she is visiting the tenth time.</li>
<li>Scary movies don’t scare her. At all.</li>
<li>She listens to the most unheard-of music on the entire planet. Randomly plug her earphones, and you’ll be listening to some music in a language you don’t understand. She doesn’t either.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="the-guides">The Guides</h2>
<p>We have 8 wonderfully helpful <strong>coaches</strong> who have happily agreed to help us in this journey. <a href="https://github.com/tegacodes">Tega Brain</a>, a core contributor to p5.js, will help us navigate the massive codebase and give overall direction to our endeavours. <a href="https://github.com/ChaitanyaKr">Chaitanya Kumar</a> and <a href="https://github.com/jokereactive">Sarthak Ahuja</a> graduated from our college last year, and <a href="https://github.com/divyanshu-talwar">Divyanshu Talwar</a> is our batchmate. We met <a href="https://github.com/5achinJani">Sachin Jani</a> and <a href="https://github.com/nitishg">Nitish Goel</a> on Quora (yes, that happens :P), while we met <a href="https://github.com/PrabhanshuAttri">Prabhanshu Attri</a> and <a href="https://github.com/djungowski">Dominic Ehrenberg</a> on Twitter. Our coaches will play an instrumental role in our learning, helping us every step of the way. So, a big thank you to our brilliant coaches for volunteering to help us.</p>
<p><strong>Our mentors</strong>- <a href="https://github.com/lmccart">Lauren McCarthy</a> and <a href="https://github.com/catarak">Cassie Tarakajian</a>- have been very warm in welcoming us to the Processing Foundation. Cassie will be overseeing our efforts on the p5.js eb Editor codebase and we hope to learn a lot from the community.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/Althaire">Pilar Huidobro</a> is our <strong>supervisor</strong>, and it helps a lot that she also did RGSoC in 2015. We hope to learn from her personal experiences and her journey.</p>
<p>We are incredibly lucky to have such an amazing support system to see us through this journey. With their invaluable inputs, we hope to put our best foot forward.</p>
<h2 id="the-project">The Project</h2>
<p>This summer we will be working on the <a href="https://github.com/processing/p5.js-web-editor">p5.js web editor</a>, an active project of the <a href="https://github.com/processing">Processing Foundation</a>. The most important reason for choosing the Processing Foundation is the fact that we both identify with the core principles of the organization. Processing aims to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators and beginners. We also believe that coding should not be limited to people pursuing degrees in Computer Science. Everyone should have the opportunity to learn how to code. The Processing Foundation is making noble efforts in that direction and we wish to further this cause by becoming active contributors to our chosen project.</p>
<h2 id="plans-for-rgsoc17">Plans for RGSoC’17</h2>
<ul>
<li>Becoming proficient React developers.</li>
<li>Contributing to the faster release of the p5.js web editor.</li>
<li>Building a network of brilliant open source enthusiasts, who we can learn from and look up to.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
Introducing Team ClojuriansSaskia and Chrishttp://twitter.com/lipskasa2017-07-06T00:00:00+00:002017-07-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-team-clojurians<p>We are <a href="https://twitter.com/lipskasa">Saskia</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/daiyitastic">Chris</a> working together on <a href="https://github.com/Day8/re-frame">re-frame</a> from Berlin. It still feels a bit unreal that our summer of code has finally started this week!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/clj-saskia-and-daiyi_xl.jpg" alt="saskia and chris" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">image drawn by Chris Sun</div>
<h2 id="about-us">about us!</h2>
<p>Chris is nomadic, originally from California, and Saskia lives in Berlin.</p>
<p><strong>Saskia</strong>: fueled by movement, connection and music. huge curiosity for life. exploring learning sharing. will finish my studies this summer!</p>
<p><strong>Chris</strong>: likes riding bicycles and motorcycles, climbing mountains, currently wondering how they somehow ended up stranded in the flattest part of Germany. Strengths: drinking a liter of tea and a liter of coffee per day without dying, aggressively subtweeting people who disrespect front-end engineering. Weaknesses: difficulty taking things seriously, can’t resist purchasing every interesting art supply and cute sketchbook they set their eyes on.</p>
<h2 id="so-how-did-we-meet">so how did we meet??</h2>
<p>We have <a href="http://clojurebridge-berlin.org/">ClojureBridge Berlin</a> and the greater <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Clojure-Berlin">Clojure Berlin community</a> along with Twitter dot com to thank for connecting us!</p>
<p>Sometime last year, we’d both seen <em>the same tweet</em> about RGSoC from our mutual friend and notable clojurian <a href="https://twitter.com/plexus">Arne</a>:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/clj-plexus-rgsoc-tweet.jpg" alt="plexus rgsoc tweet" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">screenshot taken by Chris Sun</div>
<p><strong>Saskia</strong>: RGSoC and re-frame had been on the back of my head for a while already, as I remember having seen that tweet. I thought I wouldn’t be able to participate, as I had a job that I wanted to continue over the summer. To my surprise and luck, my job ended one day before the applications opened. From there, everything seemed to fall into place. We didn’t know each other, but a friend pointed me (Saskia) to this tweet that Chris had posted:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/clj-teammate-tweet.png" alt="looking for teammate tweet" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">screenshot taken by Saskia Lindner</div>
<p>Chris and I got connected, I went to the ClojureD conference here in Berlin where I got the chance to talk to many people from the community and we found six coaches who were willing to support us for this project.</p>
<p><strong>Chris</strong>: I’d left San Francisco the summer before to take a break from coding, so of course I went to Berlin and got involved with the programming communities there :P That’s how I met the wonderful <a href="http://clojurebridge-berlin.org">ClojureBridge</a> folks! After I left Germany we kept in touch through twitter, which is how I heard about RGSoC and also how I was introduced to Saskia. I was surprised that there was actually a clojure project included in RGSoC, and thought I’d apply on the <em>miniscule</em> chance it’d work out. And now, somehow, we’re among the rare humans on this planet who are paid to write clojure(script)!</p>
<p>The first time we met in person was last month! We immediately got along super well and went climbing at the boulderhalle (because of course), ate tasty vegetarian food, and talked about life. We’ll complement each other well because Saskia has more experience with clojure and Chris has experience with browsers and javascript, and we’ll meet in the middle with clojurescript!</p>
<h2 id="companies-coaches-mentors--supervisor">companies, coaches, mentors, & supervisor</h2>
<p>We spend our work week at two different companies in the heart of Berlin nearby many of our favorite places. We feel very lucky to have the opportunity to work in such a great and beautiful environment where we can get some fresh air walking along the ‘Landwehrkanal’ or sitting on the balcony overlooking the roofs of the city.</p>
<p>Most days we’re at <a href="https://nextjournal.com">NextJournal</a>, which actually uses Clojurescript and re-frame for their front-end, so we have opportunities to exchange ideas and ask upcoming questions! We also visit <a href="https://bitcrowd.net/en">bitcrowd</a>, which frequently also hosts Clojure and Ruby community events in their office with a beautiful rooftop balcony.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/clj-sky.jpg" alt="courtyard" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">picture taken by Saskia Lindner</div>
<p>We have so many awesome coaches experienced with different parts of clojure and clojurescript development! They are spread out all over, so sometimes we’ll meet in co-working spaces, other times at our host companies, and some of our coaches even invited us to their homes. It’ll be really nice to get some air and feel some sun (or not, haha Berlin) when we step out to have 2:1’s with our coaches. And Chris is super excited to have an excuse to ride their bike around the city more. We’ll introduce all the coaches next time!</p>
<p>Our <a href="https://github.com/Day8/re-frame">re-frame</a> project mentor is <a href="https://twitter.com/danielwithmusic">Daniel Compton</a>! It’s pretty gnarly scheduling calls with Berlin and New Zealand being on opposite sides of the planet, but this is another skill we’re learning: remote team organisation.</p>
<p>And then we have our friend and RGSoC liaison/supervisor, <a href="https://twitter.com/plexus">Arne</a>!</p>
<h2 id="best-summer-ever">best summer ever!</h2>
<p>So many exciting things are ahead of us, we can’t wait!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/clj-tea.jpg" alt="tea" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">picture taken by Saskia Lindner</div>
<p>In two weeks, there will be another Clojure conference here in Berlin where we will get to meet a lot of people from the global community.</p>
<h2 id="our-goals">our goals</h2>
<p>We both want to improve our ability to understand large codebases and to contribute to complex existing projects, practice communicating with maintainers and project leaders, gain more experience with the Clojure tooling systems, write better tests, and have a more intuitive grasp of idiomatic Clojure. We are also really curious to learn more about how ClojureScript works underneath the hood for a deeper understanding. Because that isn’t enough work already we also decided to keep a <a href="http://daiyi.co/dev-diary">developer diary</a> once we realised that we both had goals to improve our technical writing, and we’re challenging each other to write one post per week. You can follow along on our learnings there!</p>
And so it begins!Emma Deaconhttp://twitter.com/EmmaMDeacon2017-07-04T00:00:00+00:002017-07-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/and-so-it-begins<p>Hi, we’re <a href="https://twitter.com/EmmaMDeacon">Emma</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/KaraMarck">Kara</a>, the members of Pivotal, London! We’re working on <a href="https://github.com/babel/babel">Babel</a> the JavaScript language compiler, with the help of our incredible mentor <a href="https://twitter.com/left_pad">Henry Zhu</a>, our supportive supervisor <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho">Ines</a>, and our amazing hosts <a href="https://twitter.com/pivotal">Pivotal</a>. We’re so lucky to be in this position, and we cannot thank Rails Girls Summer of Code enough!!</p>
<p><img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/k3kqJ2d8cUvSM/giphy.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credit: Giphy</div>
<p><strong><em>so fabulous</em></strong></p>
<p><img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/y4PQTcLTYJwOI/giphy.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credit: Giphy</div>
<p>We met through <a href="https://twitter.com/founderscoders">Founders and Coders</a>, and we were joined together by fate ❤️ Hahah no, not really, we were paired together during one of the paired programming sessions on Object Oriented Programming, and since then, we’ve always be involved in coding and being involved in the women in technology scene. We are deeply and passionately involved in <a href="https://twitter.com/codebar?lang=en-gb">codebar</a> and a huge number of other coding meetups and coding classes in and around London - if you ever want to know about which ones to attend if you’re in London, we’ve got tonnes to recommend! :)</p>
<p>Emma is currently doing her MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship at UCL, and Kara was working as a developer at Ticketmaster before joining Rails Girls Summer of Code. Both of us have been involved in smaller team projects through Founders and Coders, but this is the first time we have been heavily involved in Open Source projects.</p>
<p>One of the best things about working somewhere like Pivotal is the incredibly open and friendly environment (as well as the amazingggg breakfasts 😍 😍), and despite having only been here two days, we have already learnt a tonne about Babel and compilers in general. We’re really lucky to have so many coaches, who are truly interested and passionate about promoting women in technology, and women in open source. We’ve had two informative and engaging lunch and learns with them (and we’ve haven’t even been here two full days!), where we’ve explored working in a technology company, and the scope of future technology teams.</p>
<p>And now… we’re pleased to introduce you to our coaches!!</p>
<p><img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/MJVEi3fmDjd1S/giphy.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credit: Giphy</div>
<p><strong><em>drum roll, please</em></strong></p>
<p>Firstly, we have <a href="https://twitter.com/deniseyu21">Denise Yu</a>, who has acted as our primary lead coach at Pivotal, and who we hope to be one day ❤️ As well as Denise, we are privilleged and incredibly humbled to have a huge and overwhelming number of additional coaches. This is just proof of how kind and thoughtful Pivotal is; we could not have asked for more opportunities, and we are both overwhelmed by the amount of support we are receiving. We have coaching support and guidance from <a href="https://twitter.com/jonrsharpe">Jonathan Sharpe</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/jamesjoshuahill">Josh Hill</a>, <a href="@kirederik">Derik Evangelista</a>, <a href="@thepreviewmode">Winifred Bridgewater</a>, Maria Ntalla and Thomas Godkin! We are so lucky to have the support from these Pivots, and we cannot wait to work with them for the next three months.</p>
<p><img src="../../img/blog/2017/2017-07-04-and-so-it-begins.jpg" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credit: Personal Photo</div>
<p><strong>😍 Our incredible Pivotal team 😍</strong></p>
<p>We had an AMAZING first day, and met so many developers from different parts of Pivotal. We had an unbelievable afternoon, where we got to speak to Henry and Ines, and really understand more about the incredible Rails Girls community, and where the future of team Pivotal lay.</p>
<p><img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/1PMVNNKVIL8Ig/giphy.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credit: Giphy</div>
<p>This is how we felt after our first day. INVINCIBLE. WE CAN DO THIS. THIS IS AMAZZZZIIINNNNGGGGGGGG!!!!!! WE’RE GOING TO LEARN SO MUCH 🦄 🦄 🎊 🎊 🎉 🎉</p>
<p>As well as being involved with an awesome team, we’ve embarked on an even more challenging and ambitious project thanks to Pivotal… PING PONG.</p>
<p><img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/kpy18R3NVSLy8/giphy.gif" alt="Alt Text" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image Credit: Giphy</div>
<p>Because we rarely give up in the face of a challenge, we’re planning on making a projection graph over the summer to pinpoint our ping pong growth (which we all know is the more complicated element of learning to code). Some may say it’s - in fact - the most crucial element to learn…</p>
<p><strong>Our goals are</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Help and contribute to Babel, and be involved in as many aspects of the project as possible</li>
<li>Become better JavaScript developers</li>
<li>Apply for the 2020 Olympic Ping Pong team</li>
</ul>
Teams 2017Mariahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2017-05-22T00:00:00+00:002017-05-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/teams-2017<p>This year we got <strong>190 applications</strong>, which is twice more than last year (can you imagine our surprised faces?!). The applications came from <strong>21 different countries</strong>, some of them new to RGSoC: Albania, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka.</p>
<p>With happiness came lots of work selecting the teams who would be <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/#selection">best fitting</a> for the program. <strong>19 people</strong> with different backgrounds rated the applications for almost <strong>two months</strong>; it was a real challenge, as there were many really good applications. Two countries did especially great job this year: four teams from <strong>Germany</strong> and four teams from <strong>India</strong> made it to our TOP-10! Well done!<br />
Besides that, we were really happy to see that some students who applied last year have submitted applications again and been selected!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-05-22-teams-locations.png" alt="RGSoC Teams 2017" /><font color="grey"><small><i>RGSoC Teams 2017 (Image: Maria Ronacher)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Selecting the teams means also selecting the projects which will participate in the Summer of Code. We are very proud to say that this year we have a very diverse technology stack! Time to think about a RGSoC rebranding! :D</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-05-22-project-technologies.png" alt="Project technologies 2017" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Project technologies 2017 (Image: Maria Ronacher)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The saddest part of the selection process is saying ‘no’ to some of the teams. As much as we want more diversity in tech, <a href="/campaign/">our budget</a> is not big enough to fund all the teams that apply to RGSoC. We want to encourage all students who haven’t been selected this year to continue their path in programming and Open Source. While RGSoC is a great opportunity to learn and contribute, there are other ways to do it. One of them would be to contribute to the project you chose when applied to RGSoC (or <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/">any other project submitted to RGSoC 2017</a>); most mentors would be happy to help you make your first steps in Open Source. That said, please be assured that you are very welcome to <a href="/students/application/">apply to RGSoC 2018</a>.</p>
<p>But let’s not make you wait any longer. Here are the <strong>20 teams of RGSoC 2017</strong>.</p>
<h3 id="sponsored-teams">Sponsored Teams</h3>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-red200-ok-ipshita-and-prachispan"><span class="color-red">200 OK (Ipshita and Prachi)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: coala</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-red276linesofcode-shravika-and-brihispan"><span class="color-red">276linesofCode (Shravika and Brihi)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Tessel</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redalexa-alexandra-and-aleksandraspan"><span class="color-red">Alexa (Alexandra and Aleksandra)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Moscow, Russia<br />
<em>Project</em>: JoopeA Club</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redberlin-diamonds-kaja-and-jenspan"><span class="color-red">Berlin Diamonds (Kaja and Jen)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: Discourse</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redclojurians-chris-and-saskiaspan"><span class="color-red">Clojurians (Chris and Saskia)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: re-frame</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redcode-bears-neta-and-retespan"><span class="color-red">Code Bears (Neta and Rete)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: diaspora*</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redcode-hoppers-roselyne-and-cynthiaspan"><span class="color-red">Code Hoppers (Roselyne and Cynthia)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Nairobi, Kenya<br />
<em>Project</em>: OpenFarm</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redcodeaholics-jona-and-xhenispan"><span class="color-red">Codeaholics (Jona and Xheni)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Tirana, Albania<br />
<em>Project</em>: Nextcloud</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redifpairelseunknown-sophie-and-jennyspan"><span class="color-red">IfPairElseUnknown (Sophie and Jenny)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Melbourne, Australia<br />
<em>Project</em>: if me - mental health communication app</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-rednk42-marie-and-inesspan"><span class="color-red">NK42 (Marie and Ines)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: Foodsaving and Foodsharing</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redpivotal-london-kara-and-emmaspan"><span class="color-red">Pivotal London (Kara and Emma)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: London, United Kingdom<br />
<em>Project</em>: Babel</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrailsgyn-amanda-and-julianaspan"><span class="color-red">RailsGyn (Amanda and Juliana)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Goiânia, Brazil<br />
<em>Project</em>: RGSoC: The Teams App</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redserv0101-rakhi-and-nehaspan"><span class="color-red">Serv0101 (Rakhi and Neha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Bangalore, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Servo</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redteam-fusion-janakshi-and-kalpanispan"><span class="color-red">Team Fusion (Janakshi and Kalpani)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Kegalle, Sri Lanka<br />
<em>Project</em>: OpenDF</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redteam-impact-devs-jessica-and-vanessaspan"><span class="color-red">Team Impact Devs (Jessica and Vanessa)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Amsterdam, Netherlands<br />
<em>Project</em>: WorldBrain - Verifying the Internet with Science</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redvictorious-secret-saumya-and-katyayanispan"><span class="color-red">Victorious Secret (Saumya and Katyayani)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: The Processing Foundation</p>
<h3 id="volunteer-teams">Volunteer Teams</h3>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbanshee-bandits-lillian-and-shelbyspan"><span class="color-red">Banshee Bandits (Lillian and Shelby)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New York, United States<br />
<em>Project</em>: PublicLab.org</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbundledore-anagha-and-amritaspan"><span class="color-red">Bundledore (Anagha and Amrita)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Kollam, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: AFDC League Management System</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redgemini-ramya-and-akarshaspan"><span class="color-red">Gemini (Ramya and Akarsha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: Susi AI Server</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redprodyogeeky-protichi-and-nikitaspan"><span class="color-red">prodyoGEEKY (Protichi and Nikita)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: OpenLMIS: vaccine and medicine logistics for low- and middle-income countries</p>
<p>We are looking forward to the Summer of Code with these <strong>great teams</strong>! Stay tuned — you’ll have the possibility to learn more about each team when they introduce themselves on our blog in a few weeks.</p>
5 Years of RGSoCLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2017-04-10T00:00:00+00:002017-04-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/5yearsofrgsoc<p>In 2013, we kicked off <a href="http://2013.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/hello_world">the first edition of RGSoC</a>: What an adventure it’s been since then! 2017 marks our 5th birthday (time flies!), and with a little bit of your last-minute help and support, we have 4 days left on our campaign and with your help can <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">reach our funding goal</a> — let’s celebrate this moment by taking some time together to look back and see where it all started. #5YearsOfRGSoC</p>
<h3 id="the-very-beginning">The very beginning</h3>
<p>Back in the day, we started the program kind of low-key, and the very small organiser team at the time managed to “just make things happen” by joining forces with members of the local Berlin community — one example among the many is <a href="https://twitter.com/bioshrimp">Becci</a>, who provided us with awesome illustrations for our website and even designed a team building game for the 2013 teams. Without too many frills (and with a lot of cat gifs), RGSoC managed to raise roughly $80,000 to support women entering Open Source. Because of the grassroots nature of the program, registration at the time was open until <strong>June 7th</strong>, meaning roughly a month before the summer of code started! Pretty wild, considering our deadline for registration in 2017 was March 8th.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-04-10-2013-logo.png" alt="Our 2013 logo" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Blast from the past! Our 2013 logo (Image: RGSoC)</div>
<p>Our participants in 2013 (19, for a total of 10 teams) were spread out across the globe and some were working remotely with each other; we had teams in Poland, the USA, Colombia, Germany, and more!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-04-10-2013-map.png" alt="2013 team locations" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Location of selected teams in 2013. (Image: Laura Gaetano/RGSoC)</div>
<p>One of the special highlights of 2013 was the amazing support we got from the community, validating our work right away. The (now sadly defunct) boxer shorts company “Unerdwear” even did a pre-launch of their unisex limited edition Rails Girls boxers, and <a href="http://unerdwear.tumblr.com/post/54283118355/unerdwear-is-supporting-rails-girls-with-our">all profits were donated to RGSoC</a>. <3</p>
<h3 id="more-volunteers-better-support">More volunteers, better support</h3>
<p>2014 was the year we got a little more organised. We introduced a <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/code-of-conduct/">Code of Conduct</a> and our Trust Committee, to help us handle Code of Conduct breaches; that year, we also introduced supervisors from the beginning of the summer (instead of halfway-through as we did in 2013), to help better support all of our teams, sponsored and volunteering. While our application rate stayed roughly the same, we were able to collect more funds for our teams and had participants in new locations (such as Peru and Australia).</p>
<p>The organisers team also grew a lot throughout the preparation phase of the 2014 edition — so many people from the Berlin tech scene and beyond started helping out, working on the Teams App, offering to supervise, coach, and write posts on our blog. You can find a few of them <a href="http://2014.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-10-06-last-days/">here</a> <3 — with their messages about RGSoC and the soundtrack of their summer!</p>
<h3 id="of-our-participants-stay-in-tech">90% of our participants stay in tech</h3>
<p>In our third year (2015), we started to focus a little bit more on our website and appearance to the outside. With the help of <a href="https://twitter.com/JuniorAtze">Claudi</a> (our volunteer designer with superpowers!) we reworked our landing page, giving it a cleaner look — that’s the very same version we have today! We also surveyed our 2013 and 2014 participants, and found out some amazing facts: Our program empowered them in such a way that out of the surveyed participants, 90% of them found jobs in the tech industry, 55% were still contributing to Open Source software regularly, and 8% had even founded their own company or start-up; this reinforced our belief that RGSoC was changing women’s lives for the better.</p>
<h3 id="ruby-heroes">Ruby Heroes</h3>
<p>In 2016, a lot happened: for the first time, the amount of applicants doubled from the previous year, showing an extremely high interest worldwide to participate in the program. As we did the previous year, we surveyed our past participants to find out where they were at and from the survey results and found out that 75% of the 36 participants who answered the survey were still contributing to Open Source Software and that roughly 95% were either studying, working, or doing an internship in a tech field.<br />
In spring, Anika, Sara and I flew to Kansas City to receive a Ruby Hero Award on the stage of RailsConf on behalf of Rails Girls Summer of Code — for the program’s work in making the Ruby community a better place. You can read more about this, about the context and our feelings about collecting this award in <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-06-01-ruby-heroes-2016">this blog post</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-04-10-rgsoc-participants-2013-2016.png" alt="2013–2016 selected participants" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">All selected participants, 2013–2016. (Image: Laura Gaetano)</div>
<p>That year, we went on to accept 40 participants overall (16 sponsored teams and 4 volunteer teams, the same as the previous year). While 4 volunteer teams may seem like a small number, especially in comparison to to our numbers in the past, it’s important to note that volunteer teams get the same support from us as sponsored teams do, so we need to limit the number of participants that our team can handle. And that’s a good thing! That way we can ensure everyone gets treated the same way and gets the same possibilities — which is also why all teams, regardless of whether they are volunteer or sponsored, go through the same application process.</p>
<h3 id="cant-wait-for-may">Can’t wait for May</h3>
<p>This year, we received 190 team applications — more applications than ever before, more than double the applications of last year, even though our application process has developed into a very extensive and competitive one and is far from the one we had in 2013! With every year, we’ve improved the process a little bit, taking feedback from coaches, mentors, students, and supervisors into account. We’re currently in the middle of our selection process, and can’t wait to get to know our 2017 teams.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-04-10-rgsoc-applications-2013-2017.png" alt="2013–2017 submitted applications" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Look at the growth in the number of team applications over the years! (Image: Laura Gaetano)</div>
<h3 id="help-us-grow">Help us grow</h3>
<p>Our team has grown, but it’s still pretty small (3 core organisers, 10 organisers in total) considering all the work that goes into making RGSoC a reality every year. This work is possible only because of long-term commitment from organisers (who are mostly volunteers) and from sponsors, who help fund teams every year. This year, with 380 people applying in total, we’ve set ourselves the goal to fund 12 teams (24 participants) across the globe; and for this, we need your help!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-04-10-donations-2017.png" alt="2017 donation progress bar" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our donations as of April 10th, 2017! (Source: railsgirlssummerofcode.org)</div>
<p>In the next 4 days, you will still be able to donate to RGSoC to help support teams for this year. We’ve already funded 10 teams with the help of our sponsors and of individual donors — but we know we can do better! If there are any companies you want to reach out to, <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a7bS6M78ZqUCCBxa6G-1_RgUxaJ0mCBylOK54poaFK0/edit?usp=sharing">we’ve prepared a small document for you</a> with a step-by-step to reach out to your contacts. <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">Let’s get the last one and a half team funded!</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-04-10-2013-2016-map.png" alt="Map of team locations, 2013–2016" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Map of team locations, 2013–2016. (Image: Anika Lindtner)</div>
Team Reactives at FOSSASIA!Team Reactiveshttp://twitter.com/shwetha_ravi32017-03-27T00:00:00+00:002017-03-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-reactives-at-foss-asia<h2 id="hello-again-rgsoc-blog-readers">Hello again RGSoC Blog Readers!</h2>
<p>Shwetha from Team Reactives here and I was excited to experience FOSSASIA at Singapore Science Centre!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team-reactives-fossasia-AttheEntrance.jpg" alt="At the Entrance" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">At the entrance - Source: Team Reactives</div>
<p>I was tempted to spend all day at the science centre’s famous VR gallery with a full fledged flight simulator where you’ll be able to flap and take off just like a bird but was glad I stopped by the Microsoft Mission to Mars workshop by James Lee where I got to learn how to build my very own conversationally intelligent personal chatbot using Microsoft LUIS AI.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team-reactives-fossasia-VRFlightSimulator.jpg" alt="VR Flight Simuator" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: <a href="http://www.channelnewsasia.com/image/2336330/1449798532000/large16x9/1010/568/e3-exhibition-at-science-centre-birdly.jpg" target="_blank">Channel News Asia</a></div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/team-reactives-fossasia-MarsMission.jpg" alt="Mars Mission" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Source: Team Reactives</div>
<p>I later attended several talks on computer vision and machine learning, one that stood out to me was the talk on machine learning in medical imaging by 15 year old Gaeun Kim of Stanford Canary Center for Cancer Early Detection who presented on the MeVisLab software that can be used to improve the accuracy of cancer diagnosis. She also shared her journey from open source project contributor to working in a professional laboratory all while she’s still in highschool.</p>
<p>My favorite part of the conference was a workshop on building your own pokemon world on web-based virtual reality by Santosh Viswanatham. As a long-time pokemon fan and recent VR enthusiast, I was amazed to see how accesible developing for VR had become.</p>
380 applicants, Open Source, and YOULaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2017-03-17T00:00:00+00:002017-03-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/380-applicants-open-source-and-you<p>Last week, on International Women’s Day, we closed our applications for 2017. Since then, we’ve been absolutely speechless at the amount of interest we received from applicants worldwide. <strong>ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY APPLICATIONS</strong>! Yes, you’ve read that correctly — this year, 190 teams (meaning 380 applicants!) applied to our 3-month scholarship program from all over the world.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">You did it! 💪 <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RGSoC2017?src=hash">#RGSoC2017</a> Applications are closed! We can't wait to read your submissions — all 190 of them 😱 <a href="https://t.co/PJ3f7JKDML">pic.twitter.com/PJ3f7JKDML</a></p>— RGSoC 2017 (@RailsGirlsSoC) <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/status/839563940925476874">March 8, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<h3 id="exponential-growth">Exponential growth</h3>
<p>This year is our fifth year running the program, and the numbers speak for themselves: since 2016, the number of applications has doubled, and it’s quadrupled since 2015. That’s what they call exponential growth!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-03-17-blackish.gif" alt="OMG!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">OMG! (Image: <a href="http://giphy.com/gifs/hulu-blackish-3o7TKEExyBzu4jDoha" target="_blank">giphy.com</a>)</div>
<h3 id="more-support-than-ever-before">More support than ever before</h3>
<p>With great interest comes greater responsibility (and more support): in the last couple of months, a small part of our team (mostly just two to three people) responded to a ton of support requests. As every year, most activity happened in the last few days before the deadline, and here are some numbers: 100 support requests on helpscout, 9 requests through Facebook, and way too many to count through twitter — mostly asking to be RT’ed or connected to coaches or the community. Our Google Groups community was also pretty active, with 103 topics posted from different people connecting to form teams and help out applicants. But the most activity happened in slack — our #application-support channel was already buzzing since January 4th (a month before we officially opened up applications), and it was the most active channel of communication to ask questions in: we received roughly 140 requests regarding the application process and our program.</p>
<h3 id="last-minute-and-all-over-the-world">Last minute and all over the world</h3>
<p>And, because the best time to submit an application is right before the deadline, the last application to come in before the deadline was submitted at <strong>17:59:45 UTC</strong> (that is, 15 seconds before our 18:00:00 UTC deadline). Hats off to that team living on the edge!
As always, the applications are scattered across the world, on every continent, with some potential new countries such as Nepal or Albania joining the ranks of countries RGSoC applicants are located in. To get a better idea of all the possible locations of RGSoC teams, <a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=15KXn6frHYAlOTegJhkoRoAtZTFM&usp=sharing">take a look at the map</a> below!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-03-17-map.png" alt="OMG!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our 2017 applications (Image: Google Maps/Anika Lindtner)</div>
<h3 id="we-need-you">We need you</h3>
<p>We’ve just finished putting together our selection committee for the year and for the next few weeks we’ll be busy rating all the applications we received. Until then, we need your help! With the funds we’ve collected so far, we can “only” fund 6 teams to participate in RGSoC this year. Our goal for 2017 is to fund at least twice as many, so if you’re as passionate about our mission to bring more diversity into Open Source as we are: reach out to your community, to your friends, and to your company; ask them to <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donate</a>, support, or <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/packages/">sponsor our program</a>, so that we can support at least 12 teams of amazing people!</p>
Ruby Conf AustraliaRamyahttp://twitter.com/ramya6902017-03-15T00:00:00+00:002017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/ruby-conf-australia<p>I had the privilege to attend RubyConf held in Melbourne last month as a part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code program. The Venue was set at the Melbourne Convention Hall and it was a great opportunity to meet so many interesting people in the Ruby community. Also a good learning experience.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-03-15-rubyconf-logo-au.jpg" alt="Ruby Conf Australia" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">photo: RubyConf Australia</div>
<p>Following are some of my personal favorite talks:</p>
<h3 id="shana-moore-so-you-want-to-become-a-software-engineer">Shana Moore: So you want to become a software engineer</h3>
<p>This talk was about her career-changing journey to become a developer. It was very inspiring to learn about the approaches she followed in her coding challenges and her technical interviews. She emphasizes on how hard work and passion always pays off. And encouraging more people to get into technology. It was awesome meeting this amazing gal!</p>
<h3 id="tim-riley-reinvesting-in-ruby">Tim Riley: Reinvesting in Ruby</h3>
<p>It was interesting to learn about the challenges being faced by the ruby over other new functional languages like elixir and how can it be improved in the future — Dry ruby is the collection of next generation ruby libraries. How it helps you write clear, flexible, and more maintainable Ruby code. Each dry-Rb gem fulfills a common task, and together they make a powerful platform for any kind of Ruby application.</p>
<h3 id="marcos-actors-in-ruby">Marcos: Actors in Ruby!</h3>
<p>Ruby has its own limitations when it comes to dealing with the concurrency over Erlang or Elixir. This talk was about how making it better using an Actor model. It was great.</p>
<h3 id="aja-hammerly-datacenter-fires-and-other-minor-disasters">Aja Hammerly: DataCenter Fires and other Minor Disasters</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-03-15-rubyconf-au.jpg" alt="Aja Hammerly" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">photo: RubyConf Australia</div>
<p>She mentioned: “If nothing bad happens, you don’t have a good story to tell”. She shared her experience working with the Google data center. She talked about the mistakes she made, which helped her understand the importance of automation. How having a team with different background added to the learning and could save a day in many aspects. It was a impressive one.</p>
<p>Apart from all these amazing talks, I enjoyed delicious food, unlimited coffee which was served all day. It was another grateful event. Thanks to all the people who made it possible. And many thanks to the RGSOC committee for sponsoring the tickets.</p>
Our Anniversary campaign is open - Celebrate with us!Anikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2017-02-16T00:00:00+00:002017-02-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/anniversary-campaign<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/RGSoC_alumna_2013-2016.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">All sponsored and volunteering RGSoC teams from 2013-2015. (Collage: Anika Lindtner)</div>
<p>Can you believe it? This is the 5th year of RGSoC! We are so happy to be reaching a quite noble age for grassroots initiatives and projects in Open Source! 5 years!</p>
<p>You can now celebrate with us and share the love and <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donate</a>.</p>
<p>Since our beginning in 2013 we have been fighting for getting more women* into the Open Source community by giving out scholarships that we finance through crowdfunding and sponsorships.</p>
<p>We believe our mission of enabling women* to pursue a career in tech and help to foster diversity in tech is as simple as it is radical. We believe that fostering diversity is now more important than ever and want to take a stand: We are not going anywhere. We are staying. For the next summer, the next four years - and the next five.</p>
<p>But we can only do it together with you.</p>
<p>Let’s fight together for continuing our amazing success of enabling women* all over the world to dive into the world of Open Source and making the community more inclusive, diverse, and newcomer-friendly.</p>
<h3 id="yearsofrgsoc">#5YearsofRGSoC</h3>
<p>Today we our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">anniversary funding campaign</a> begins and throughout the next month we’ll celebrate our #5yearsofRGSoC with fun facts, statistics and things you didn’t know about your favorite summer scholarship program. With the campaign we hope to fund as many scholarships as we can - We’ve been able to fund more and more teams since 2013 (starting at 10, going up to 16 in the last years).</p>
<h3 id="section">🎂🎈🎉✊🏾💻🚀👧🏾👧🏿👧🏼👧🏻👧🏽✨🎈🎂</h3>
<p>Last year the applications for RGSoC have almost doubled (95!) and this year we expect no less! Since 2013 all we got over 600+ applications from all over the world. Thanks to our successful funding campaigns every year we could offer 145 scholarships to these wonderful women* in the pictures above.</p>
<h3 id="the-early-bird-supports-diversity">The Early Bird Supports Diversity</h3>
<p>In the last few weeks, we’ve been reaching out to companies and are happy to announce that these early bird sponsors have helped to build a solid ground for our road of RGSoC 2017. Most of you will know that fundraising year after year stays extremely hard work - budgets change, companies get aquired or sold, intern goals shift or life happens.</p>
<p>This is why we are extremely happy to not only welcome some of our most faithful partners and sponsors (yes, you, <strong>GitHub</strong>, <strong>Travis CI</strong> and <strong>innoQ</strong>) again on board this year but also some news companies (OHAI <strong>Nokia</strong> and <strong>Heroku</strong>) as well as our two earliest earlybird sponsors <strong>examsuccess, agilebloom</strong>.</p>
<p>Together with the fantastic sponsors <strong>Launchschool, Ableton, OpenSuse, Apcera, articulate and Honeybadger</strong> all you amazing early birds you show to us and the world that you care. About our program, our mission and diversity in tech! Thank you for that. We are so proud to be changing the world and our communities together with you step by step.</p>
<p><a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/"><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-02-16-earlybirds.png" /></a></p>
<p>To everyone out there who wants to take a stand with us, who wants to support us and our work, please join us in funding as many scholarships as we can and enabling as many women* to change their lives. Here is to our first 5 years and many more to come!</p>
<h3 id="lets-get-this-5-year-anniversary-campaign-startedhttpsrailsgirlssummerofcodeorgcampaign-">Let’s get this 5 Year Anniversary Campaign <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">started</a>! 🎂</h3>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>* <em>we welcome all people as applicants who identify as women or non-binary</em></p>
All things Ruby at the RubyConf India 2017Taneea S Agrawaal and Vrinda Malhotrahttp://twitter.com/Team_Twitches2017-02-07T00:00:00+00:002017-02-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/all-things-ruby-at-rubyconf-india-2017<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-swag-kochi.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">All of our swag at RCI17! (Photo: Team Twitches)</div>
<p>The eighth edition of RubyConf India was held in Kochi, India from 28th - 29th January, 2017. It was a 2-day affair packed with speaker and lightning talks amongst networking sessions. We were invited as student scholars — all thanks to the amazing RGSoC team! Onto the highlights from our visit!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-the-view.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">The stunning view from Le Meridien! (Photo: Team Twitches)</div>
<h3 id="the-venue">The Venue</h3>
<p>The conference was held in God’s own country — Kerala, which is named that because it is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places in the entire world. The palm trees and flowing rivers are some of the many elements that add to the beauty of the place, and the venue for the conference, Le Meridien, was nestled between the city and the backwaters. We were lucky enough to get a room facing them. We could swear it seemed as if there were diamonds in the lake, it glittered so at night! Check out the view:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-rain.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Kochi in the rain is even more beautiful! (Photo: Team Twitches)</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-night-view.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">The starry night and the starry lake! (Photo: Team Twitches)</div>
<h3 id="pre-conference-events">Pre-conference events:</h3>
<p>There was plenty lined up for before the conference. To start with, Red Panthers, quite possibly the most active Ruby community in all of India, had organized a pre-conference meetup for all attendees.
The meetup started like any other meetup would (read the projector stopped working, the laptop wouldn’t connect, and there was a HUGE delay), with a talk with a an interesting title — Philosophical Tools for Software Engineering by Praseed Pai. It was an interactive session as well as an enlightening one. This talk was followed by one more on effective ways to build chatbots.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-photo.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">And this is us at the pre-conference meetup! (Photo: Team Twitches)</div>
<p>After the talks were over, a networking session for all attendees of the meetup and conference was arranged.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-matz.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Meeting Matz (A YAYYYY Moment) (Photo: Team Twitches)</div>
<h3 id="st-day-of-the-conference">1st day of the conference:</h3>
<p>The conference kicked off with a keynote by the Ruby creator himself — Yukihiro Matsumoto (popularly known as Matz), where he stressed upon the importance of a community for programmers. The day went by with more enlightening sessions by a variety of speakers from India and abroad. With each new speaker came a new perspective, a new technique, a new way to code. We were so filled with information, we thought our brains would explode!
As the day neared an end, the time to present came closer.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-talk.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our Talk titled "What Does A Programmer Look Like?" (Photo: Team Twitches)</div>
<h3 id="our-talk">Our Talk</h3>
<p>Our lightening talk was called ‘What does a programmer look like?’ Since we couldn’t speak for more than 5 minutes, we had decided to make the talk an impactful one, highlighting the our experience in the Rails Summer of Code, and the most important of all — the need for diversity in tech.
We also introduced the Rails Girls New Delhi chapter that we’d initiated in our city, and we received an appreciative applause from the audience. It was a truly nerve-wracking experience, but we loved every minute of it!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-normalization.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">An enlightening talk on the 2nd day! (Photo: Team Twitches)</div>
<h3 id="nd-day-of-the-conference">2nd day of the conference:</h3>
<p>The second day was even better than the first. We heard talks about chatbots, skating and sometimes going slow to achieve success. We also golfed and had a blast talking to new people.</p>
<h3 id="the-diverse-set-of-people-we-met">The diverse set of people we met:</h3>
<p>We can’t even begin to describe the number of people we interacted with at the conference! From other student scholars, to people who lived half a world away, we met everyone! And keeping aside the great amount of laughter and fun, the amount of meaningful conversations we had really helped us gain perspective, and made us aware of the different kinds of thought processes, and the different kinds of problems and solutions that people need!
It was a lesson in Inclusivity and Holistic Approaches 101. We were also pleased to meet one of our remote coaches for the summer, Kashyap, who was instrumental in keeping us focused on the goal.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/twitches-rgnd.png" alt="Team Twitches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Rails Girls New Delhi! (Image: Team Twitches/Rails Girls New Delhi)</div>
<h3 id="thank-you">Thank You</h3>
<p>Thank you RubyConf India for giving us the student scholarship and a chance to share our experiences! Thank you, Rails Girls Summer of Code for giving us an experience we could talk about!</p>
Ready, Set, Apply!Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2017-02-01T00:00:00+00:002017-02-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/ready-set-apply<p><img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-02-01-how-to-apply.png" alt="" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Illustration: Rebecca Conrad</div>
<p><em>[Edit: We’ve extended the application deadline until <strong>March 8th 2017, 18:00 UTC</strong>.]</em></p>
<p>Do you want to spend three months coding on Open Source projects? Then this is for you! February 1st is finally here, and <strong>we will be opening our applications later today, at 18:00 UTC</strong>. You will have exactly <strong>one month</strong> to fill out and place your application; applications will close on Wednesday March 1st, 2017 at 18:00 UTC. Here is our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/">application guide</a>.</p>
<p>Before you get started, let’s make sure you’ve got everything ready to go to work on your application; we’ve summarised the steps you need to take before creating an application below.</p>
<h3 id="who-can-apply">Who can apply?</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-02-01-you.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
We are looking for applicants who are available <strong>for 3 months (from July 1st to September 30th) to work full-time</strong> on an Open Source project and who are proficient in English. Because of our strong focus on community, we expect applicants to be involved with their programming communities (through meetups, workshops or conferences) and to have one year of continued programming learning experience.<br />
We welcome applications from all people who identify as women and non-binary.</p>
<h3 id="find-a-pair">Find a pair</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-02-01-pair.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
One of the main requirements for applying is <strong>having a team mate who lives in the same city as you</strong> and with whom you can meet up every day to work. It’s not only important to find a pair; you should also make sure you get along and will be able to work together closely during the summer.<br />
Don’t know how to find a pair? Take a look at our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/">finding your team</a> guide.</p>
<h3 id="find-coaches">Find coaches</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-02-01-coaches.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
Teams are required to have <strong>at least two coaches (either local or remote)</strong> who can help them on a regular basis. Coaches are developers who will sit down with you and help you understand important concepts or provide help when you get stuck. Local coaches are not a requirement, but we still would recommend trying to find local coaches before you reach out to possible remote coaches.<br />
Still looking for coaches? Take a look at our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/">finding your team</a> guide.</p>
<h3 id="find-a-coaching-company--workspace">Find a coaching company / workspace</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-02-01-workspace.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
A coaching company provides your team with a place to work from during the summer; you’ll get office space and a team of coaches. <strong>Coaching companies are a good asset to have</strong>, so if you know any local companies who might be interested in hosting you, try reaching out to them and share our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">guide for coaching companies</a>.<br />
If finding a coaching company is not possible, working in a co-working space or a university space are also options for good work spaces.</p>
<h3 id="find-a-project">Find a project</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-02-01-project.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
We require all teams to apply for RGSoC with a project from our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects">accepted projects list</a>. Each project lists the technologies used and additional requirements in order to apply with that project, such as prior knowledge or coding challenges to solve.<br />
You should pick a project both you and your team mate are interested in working on; don’t hesitate to ask your coaches for assistance when choosing a project: are they familiar with the project? Do they think it would be a good fit?</p>
<h3 id="apply">Apply</h3>
<div class="smaller">
<img src="/img/blog/2017/2017-02-01-apply.jpg" />
</div>
<p><br />
Got a team mate, coaches, a place to work from, and a project? Then you’re pretty much ready to create an application; please make sure you’ve read everything in the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/">Application Guide</a> before you do so. For the application, we use our very own <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams app</a>; you will need to log in via GitHub to create an account. In the application guide you will find more detailed application on creating a team a filling out your application.<br />
You will have time until <strong>March 1st, 2017 at 18:00 UTC</strong> to submit your application. <strong>Any applications submitted after that date will not be considered.</strong></p>
<p>If you encounter any problems or have any questions during the application process, we’ve got a <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/pages/help">handy help page</a> to guide you; if that still doesn’t answer your questions, you can hop into our <a href="https://rgsoc-student-application.herokuapp.com/">Student support slack channel</a> to get help.</p>
<p>Good luck with your applications — ready, set, apply!</p>
Team Reactives at css and js conf AsiaTeam Reactiveshttp://twitter.com/shwetha_ravi32016-12-23T00:00:00+00:002016-12-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-reactives-at-css-and-js-conf-asia<h2 id="hello-rgsoc-blog-readers">Hello RGSoC Blog Readers!</h2>
<p>Team Reactives here and we have had the amazing opportunity to attend the JS and CSS conf Asia 2016! Kicking off with CSS conf, the conferences featured the likes of Chris Lilley “the father of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)” who talked to us about the evolution of CSS4 colors and author Lea Verou who introduced us to the concept of css variables.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-reactives-cssconf-CanIUseIt.jpg" alt="Can I Use It" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Chris Liley on CSS4 colors - Source: Team Reactives</i></small></font>
<p>CSS conf was a great learning opportunity about all the neat things that front end developers can accomplish with css by harnessing tools like grid and flex box to create beautifully resizable webpages and their ability to create functional animations using svg. It was really cool that speakers put up QR codes with which we could check out the cool stuff they have created.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-reactives-cssconf-QRcode.jpg" alt="QR code" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Source: Team Reactives</i></small></font>
<p>We attended JS conf on the second day and third days. It started right off with a talk by Cheng Zhao from Github who shared with us the community story behind Electron and how it grew from just single user to a tool that helps developers produce new apps everyday, a framework that we used for our RGSoC project! There were plenty of cool talks throughout the day and the two of the most memorable ones featured Kelsey Bresemann from Tessel who showed us a live demonstration of how she communicates with her microcontroller using javascript and Kenneth Auchenberg from Microsoft who shared with us how he and other devTool managers at Microsoft wished to revolutionise the way web developers handled their workflow.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-reactives-cssconf-ZodiacMural.jpg" alt="Zodiac Mural" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>We could not stop looking up at the zodiac mural on the ceiling of Singapore's Capitol Theatre- Source: Team Reactives</i></small></font>
<p>On all three days, there were people from Standard Chartered and Hired who came down to talk to attendees about work opportunities outside the main auditorium. Standard Chartered also had their Virtual Headset set up next to their booth for visitors to try on! The two of us go to experience a first person perspective of Manchester United’s locker room before a big game as well being out on the pitch to witness a penalty shootout.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-reactives-cssconf-Shwetha.jpg" alt="Shwetha" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Shwetha on the scene early- Source: Team Reactives</i></small></font>
Code in Motion: Story of the XYZ team in BerlinVeronika and Dariahttp://twitter.com/xyzcoode2016-12-20T00:00:00+00:002016-12-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/xyz-codemotion<p>Team XYZ has had the wonderful opportunity to attend the <a href="http://berlin2016.codemotionworld.com/">Codemotion</a> conference in Berlin, and these are some of the highlights of our experience.</p>
<h2 id="the-venue">The venue</h2>
<p>Berlin is just a stone’s throw from Prague, so this was not our first time visiting it. We both absolutely love this amazing city!
The conference took place in the <a href="http://www.kulturbrauerei.de/">KulturBrauerei</a> - a huge complex of former industrial buildings (with cool names such as Maschinenhaus, Flaschenabfüllhalle or Pferdeställe), which are now being used as a venue for all kinds of cultural events. The location has a unique industrial vibe and it really added a zing to the conference.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/codemotion-xyz-kulturbrauerei.jpg" alt="KulturBrauerei" /><font color="grey"><small><i>KulturBrauerei (Image by Team XYZ)</i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="the-conference">The conference</h2>
<p>Codemotion Berlin 2016 offered an array of insightful tech talks on 4 stages (one of them entirely dedicated to Community speakers) over two days. Besides, it provided a chance to meet fellow attendees from all over Europe and beyond. We had the opportunity to make friends and network with visitors from Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and many more countries.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/codemotion-xyz-keynote-day-one.jpg" alt="Keynote" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Fred George delivering his keynote on day 1 (Image by Team XYZ)</i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="the-talks">The talks</h2>
<p>There were so many interesting talks, but there is not enough space to talk about all of them.
So we selected just some of them that we found interesting:</p>
<p><strong>Women Techmaker Berlin</strong> - Andrea Bezold & Mirjam Körner</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/codemotion-xyz-women-techmaker.jpg" alt="Women Techmaker" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Andrea and Mirjam talking about Women Techmaker Berlin (Image by Team XYZ)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Andrea and Mirjam talked about the Women Techmaker group in Berlin and presented their community activities. They both took part in the bi-weekly Android course and built their own real Android apps, which they then showcased. Pretty impressive!</p>
<p><strong>Understanding Angular 2</strong> - Shmuela Jacobs</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/codemotion-xyz-angular2.jpg" alt="Shmuela Jacobs about Angular 2" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Shmuela during her Angular 2 talk (Image by Team XYZ)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Shmuela explained the core concepts of Angular 2 in a clear, easy-to-follow way. Besides, she also briefly introduced her shiny new project <a href="http://ng-girls.org/">ngGirls</a>, which aims to teach women coding through Angular 2. Way to go!</p>
<p><strong>Knowledge is Power: Getting out of trouble by understanding Git</strong> - Steve Smith</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/codemotion-xyz-understanding-git.jpg" alt="Steve Smith about Git" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Steve unravelling the secrets of Git (Image by Team XYZ)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Steve spoke about what is happening under the hood while we use Git. Since we both went through our fair share of struggle and frustration over seemingly confusing Git behaviour during our Summer of Code experience, we found this talk very helpful and reassuring, as Steve managed to summarize the concepts of Git in a very clear and logical way. We still learn something new about Git every day :)</p>
<p><strong>Costs of the Cult of Expertise</strong> - Jessica Rose</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/codemotion-xyz-keynote-day-two.jpg" alt="Jessica Rose Keynote" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Jessica speaking about recognizing and rewarding talent (Image by Team XYZ)</i></small></font></p>
<p>In her keynote on day two, Jessica presented us with some serious food for thought: What does it really mean to be an expert? Is the emphasize on expertise really the way to go in hiring? Where do recruiters often go wrong? Why is it important to reward the talent? And how about yourself - do you feel rewarded in what you do? If not, do you really want to stay where you are? The recording of Jessica’s talk (just like most of the others) is available for you to <a href="https://voicerepublic.com/talks/costs-of-the-cult-of-expertise">listen</a>.</p>
<p><strong>What did AlphaGo do to beat the strongest human Go player?</strong> - Tobias Pfeiffer</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/codemotion-xyz-go.jpg" alt="Tobias Pfeiffer about AlphaGo" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Tobias explaining the rules of Go (Image by Team XYZ)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo">AlphaGo</a> team has recently made headlines by beating the human Go champion Lee Sedol - an accomplishment which experts deemed unlikely to happen at this time, if not downright impossible at all. Tobias first introduced us to the concept of the game of Go and what makes it so unpredictable, and followed by explaining the algorithms which made the impossible come true.</p>
<h2 id="thank-you">Thank you</h2>
<p>Thank you for our community tickets, Codemotion! Attending the conference has been a truly enriching and inspiring experience. And of course, thank you, Rails Girls Summer of Code, for making this possible.</p>
<h2 id="whats-next">What’s next?</h2>
<p>Stay tuned for our upcoming report about dotCSS and dotJS in Paris!</p>
Open Source Project Submissions for 2017 are now open!Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/anasofiapinho2016-12-01T00:00:00+00:002016-12-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-2017-project-submissions-open<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-12-01-rgsoc-2017-project-submissions-open.gif" alt="RGSoC 2017 OSS Project Submissions (in ALL languages) are open! (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /><font color="grey"><small><i>RGSoC 2017 OSS Project Submissions (in ALL languages) are open! (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font></p>
<p>When we said <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-10-05-after-rgsoc-is-before-rgsoc">After RGSoC is before RGSoC</a> we really meant it! Just 2 months after RGSoC 2016 is finished we’re ready to announce that <b>Open Source Projects Submissions are OPEN for RGSoC 2017</b>.</p>
<p><b>You have until January 31st, 2017 to apply in the <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/new">RGSoC Teams App</a>.</b></p>
<p>Even though our name has the word “Rails” in it, <b>our Summer of Code accepts ALL programming languages.</b> So, whether your project is in Python, Javascript, Elixir, Go, Django, Ruby, Java, NodeJS, or PHP — you can still apply!</p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects/new"><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-12-01-rgsoc-2017-project-submissions-open-page-teams-app.png" alt="The project submission page on the Teams App (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)" /></a><font color="grey"><small><i>The project submission page on the Teams App (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font></p>
<p>If you would like to know more about submitting a project or being a mentor during our summer of code, please take a look at our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">“Becoming a Project Mentor”</a> guide. You can also send us an email to <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a> if you have specific questions.</p>
<p>You may have noticed that this year you will have two full months to submit your project; this will give everyone more time to think things through and will hopefully help us reach as many project maintainers as possible.</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redsharing-is-strikecaringstrike-making-tech-more-inclusivespan"><span class="color-red">Sharing is <strike>caring</strike> making tech more inclusive</span></h4>
<p>Call to Action: Please share this <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/status/804328063794343936?lang=en">tweet</a> or <a href="https://www.facebook.com/620914904656191/videos/1219773604770315/">facebook post</a> with your friends! Thank you!</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">🎉 Are you ready for RGSoC 2017? We are! OSS Project Submissions are now OPEN until Jan 31st!<br />Apply here 👉 <a href="https://t.co/xT0bjfr0ga">https://t.co/xT0bjfr0ga</a> <a href="https://t.co/VOhLJK7gRJ">pic.twitter.com/VOhLJK7gRJ</a></p>— Rails Girls SoC (@RailsGirlsSoC) <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/status/804328063794343936">December 1, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>Let’s make RGSoC 2017 the year with the most diverse selection of projects!</p>
Intercontinental conference meeting @GOTOber in BerlinMarie & Thea, Taneea & Vrinda, Mayar & Nadahttp://twitter.com/LoadToCode2016-11-30T00:00:00+00:002016-11-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/intercontinental-gotober<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161128-GOTOber_1.gif" alt="RGSoC goes GOTOber" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Twitches, Team Ruby's Secret and Team LoadToCode go GOTOber (Image: Team Twitches)</i></small></font></p>
<p>So GOTO Berlin meant two days of conference in Berlin on November 14th & 15th, and it is all about learning, networking and meeting developers. But it was not just another conference. Not only Team <a href="https://twitter.com/loadtocode">LoadToCode</a> from Berlin was attending, but also Team <a href="https://twitter.com/Team_Twitches">Team Twitches</a> from New Delhi/India and Team <a href="https://twitter.com/RubysSecretteam">Ruby’s Secret</a> from Cairo/Egypt \o/!</p>
<p>Happiness was in the air when Mayar from team Ruby’s secret and Taneea and Vrinda from team Twitches were informed that they won the diversity grant tickets, having already vowed that team Ruby’s secret will always be united, Nada decided to launch a crowd funding campaign to travel to Berlin and in just 4 days the total expenses were raised. For Nada going to GOTO wasn’t just meant to but with a little bit of persistence and the support of the amazing community of RGSoC and GOTO, Ruby’s secret were reunited.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/Nada_Ashraf96">Nada</a> was endlessly grateful for the support: Thank you <3 <3</strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161128-GOTOber_2.jpg" alt="RGSoC goes GOTOber" /><font color="grey"><small><i>All the teams on GOTOber stage with Carina C. Zona (Image: Team LoadtoCode)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Spending time with the extraordinary <a href="https://twitter.com/cczona">Carina Zona</a> led to very inspiring conversations you can find out more about her <a href="https://gotocon.com/berlin-2016/speaker/Carina+C.+Zona">here</a>. Seeing her on stage for the final keynote on Tuesday was definitely one of the highlights. It was about engaging in a critical approach towards algorithms and the unintended effects they might have on users.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161128-GOTOber_5.jpg" alt="RGSoC goes GOTOber" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Nada shared her thoughts on the talk in a tweet</i></small></font></p>
<p><a href="https://gotocon.com/berlin-2016/speaker/Sallyann+Freudenberg">Sal Freudenberg</a> has given a very personal talk about autism, raising awareness of neurodiversity within all the different people and colleagues, especially in tech environments & companies.</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redpodcasting-for-rgsocspan"><span class="color-red">Podcasting for #RGSoC</span></h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161128-GOTOber_3.jpg" alt="RGSoC goes GOTOber" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Tobi interviewing Vrinda about her Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 experience (Image: Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font></p>
<p>So we ran into <a href="https://twitter.com/pragtob">Tobi</a> again, after meeting him at <a href="/blog/2016-11-08-RubyConfPt">RubyConfPt</a> as a speaker! He joined our second podcasting episode and did a spontaneous interview with Vrinda. Tobi is a coach at RubyCorns, a weekly study group of the Rails Girls Berlin chapter and took part in previous RGSoCs!</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redwith-women-who-code-berlin-directorspan"><span class="color-red">With Women Who Code Berlin director</span></h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161128-GOTOber_4.jpg" alt="RGSoC goes GOTOber" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Meeting the director of Women Who Code Berlin Aleksandra (Image: Team Twitches)</i></small></font></p>
<p>We also met Aleksandra, who is one of the directors of <a href="https://twitter/com/wwcodeberlin">Women Who Code Berlin</a>, that are organizing really cool events for women who are coding or who are interested in doing so! We got invited to join the meet up later that week!</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redcompany-stalls-at-the-conferencespan"><span class="color-red">Company Stalls At The Conference</span></h2>
<p>Along with the attendees of the conference, there were company stalls that were showcasing their work at GOTO Berlin. Some companies like Thoughtworks and eBay were present. The stall tables were usually laden with give-away stickers or pens or cards that were strategically placed to invite the attendees to visit the stall. What was next was that the people manning the stall would tell you about their company or product and encourage you to use it or visit their site. Some companies were especially helpful for students in giving away internships.</p>
<p>It was the first time Team Twitches was traveling abroad. While we’d expected that the trip to Berlin wouldn’t be easy to forget, we didn’t realize that we would have so much fun! Berlin was a sure highlight, but nothing tops the conference, and the diverse set of people we got to meet. We heard inspiring stories, made new friends and realized that mansplaining happens more often than you’d think (thanks to Carina C. Zona).
<strong>Overall, pretty productive couple of days, eh?</strong></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redwhat-we-learnedspan"><span class="color-red">What we learned</span></h2>
<ul>
<li>Be mindful when it comes to unintended effects of algorithms</li>
<li>Meeting other RGSoC teams is one of the best parts of #RGSoC</li>
<li>At conferences watch out for possible internship or job opportunities</li>
<li>Podcasting is great fun!</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>And NOW: start you own podcasting episode for #RGSoC</strong></p>
<p><strong><3</strong></p>
Team kindr3d @ Beyond Tellerrand 16kindr3dhttp://twitter.com/TKindr3d2016-11-16T00:00:00+00:002016-11-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-kindr3d-beyond-tellerrand-16<h3 id="team-kindr3d--beyond-tellerrand-16">Team kindr3d @ Beyond Tellerrand 16</h3>
<p>Team kindr3d were lucky enough to get free tickets for this year <a href="https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/berlin-2016/speakers">Berlin BTconf</a>. We want to say thanks to every member of the RGSoC team who fought for us and got us the golden tickets to this unique event which gave us a lot to think about.
We also met <a href="https://twitter.com/nynnest">Nynne</a>, last year’s alumni and also our supervisor for a week this summer. And we had great conversations and exchanged our experience about our own RGSoC and being a female junior developer.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-kindr3d-dontpanic.jpg" alt="Don't Panic" />
<em>helpful advice - Source: kindr3d</em></p>
<h3 id="what-is-it">What is it?</h3>
<p>It is a general front-end/web/design conference. This particular instance had an absolute minimum of slides with code. Do with that information what you will. Some may not be happy about the overall <em>softness</em> of talk and topics, but there were definitely ideas worth sharing and pondering on. Ever since <a href="https://viewsourceconf.org/berlin-2016/">ViewSource 2016</a>, where people were friendly, talks were perspective-changing, food and drinks were plentiful and delicious, and the last week of Berlin summer warmed the hearts and MacBooks of attendees (in coalition with a free bar of course), it was clear that what makes a conference good is something elusive: atmosphere, vibe, whatever you want to call it. These events do not exist in the vacuum, they are perceived in their immediate historical context with sprinkles of one’s personal life events. And BTconf this year happened to be a very special snapshot of a very particular way of life.</p>
<h3 id="what-was-happening">What was happening?</h3>
<p>The moment <a href="http://www.sachajudd.com">Sacha Judd</a> made a hall full of tech folk contemplate on <a href="https://gimletmedia.com/episode/6-one-direction-larry-shippers/">One Direction fandom</a> it was on like donkey kong. It is rather unfair to identify this talk as the best, since there were many great ones, but this one hit us and our partner in crime Nynne directly in the feels. For most of the people in that room being shippers, writing a fanfiction or cheesy fansite were not direct life experiences, though they have been for us. But everyone does relate to the small tragedy of people doing things well and being excited about doing them while not appreciating their own skill, effort and enthusiasm. Somehow this feels a lot like being a junior. <a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/beyondtellerrand/190832862">This talk was wonderful</a> and you should watch it. We will always remember not to be ashamed of our passion and things we’ve made with love.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-kindr3d-btconf.gif" alt="team kindr3d gif" />
<em>team reunion - Source: kindr3d</em></p>
<p>There were funny and hands-on talks, where we were scribbling notes constantly. Big themes across them were accessibility, taking care of people outside the bubble of the european/north american high-speed paradise, and relying on simple and robust technologies (so no React love). There was funny, creative (if slightly salty) <a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/beyondtellerrand/190834530">advice on writing less code</a> by <a href="http://www.heydonworks.com">Heydon Pickering</a> (we are tempted to buy his book). Useful and very needed at the moment: a list of <a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/beyondtellerrand/190866449">refactoring practices</a>. Also notable talks on <a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/beyondtellerrand/190844058">typography in interfaces</a> and <a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/beyondtellerrand/190871719">image optimisation</a></p>
<p>The elephant in the room was the USA election. It’s best identified by a great switch from hopeful and angry <a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/beyondtellerrand/190834270">talk</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/monteiro">Mike Monteiro</a> about taking the responsibility for what you do on the day of the election to a humane and accepting <a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/beyondtellerrand/190883361">approach to data</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/mulegirl">Erika Hall</a> the day after. It was an unspoken framework for the event, because so many speakers were americans. Another reminder of how the tech world is obsessed with America.</p>
<h3 id="how-did-we-like-it">How did we like it?</h3>
<p>All in all this was a very interesting event, which recursively highlighted many problems most speakers were referring to. There is still a feeling that we just like to pat ourselves on the backs. It is pleasant to feel that we are better than the rest of the world because we are woke developers and designers, because we are aware. Sobering talks helped, but these things are still prevalent in tech and especially at tech conferences. And despite the talks about diversity, it was still a majorly white and male conference, though we met some inspiring women as well. As Micaela noted, RustFest was organised by a slightly different group of people and offered an interesting, activism-fuelled DIY alternative to that. I guess it is a good idea to take some of the advice by speakers to heart and be responsible and proactive about our lives just as much as we are about our code.</p>
<p>Overall, several days after the conference we are still pondering over many ideas people on and off stage shared with us, which is the reason why conferences exist! Also we found many new ways to become better developers and improve our code in thoughtful and meaningful ways. And talking to Nynne gave us another angle through which we can view our own careers and life in the future.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-kindr3d-btconf.jpg" alt="team kindr3d and Nynne" />
<em>Nynne and team kindr3d vs unfortunate lighting - Source: kindr3d</em></p>
Attending the Ruby Conference in PortugalThea Amanda Kupler, Marie-Luise Kochsiek, Mayar Alaa and Nada Ashrafhttp://twitter.com/loadtocode2016-11-08T00:00:00+00:002016-11-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/RubyConfPt<h2 id="span-classcolor-redchasing-the-sunspan"><span class="color-red">Chasing the Sun</span></h2>
<p>During the Rails Girls Summer of Code we obviously spent most of the time, when the sun was shining, inside and in front of the screen. We tried to have as many meetings as possible outside in the sun, but often rescued ourselves again into the cool and shady office to actually see something on the screen or to not melt away. To still be filled up with enough Vitamin D, having the hard Berlin Winter ahead of us, it was great news when we got the approval to join the <a href="http://rubyconf.pt/">Ruby Conference in Portugal</a>. Having had all the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> Support the last weeks and months we already experienced to grow into challenges. Having the “Why Not?”-Mindset additional to this, it was no surprise that not only our team, but also the other Rails Girls Summer of Code Team from Egypt, <a href="/blog/2016-07-11-we're-finally-revealing-our-secret">Ruby’s Secret</a>, wanted to take the challenge of talking on stage on the conference. We got the possibility to have together 40 minutes on stage!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-11-08-rubyconfpt-schedule.png" alt="RubyConfPt Schedule: LoadtoCode & Ruby's Secret" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>Ruby Conference Portugal Schedule: LoadtoCode & Ruby's Secret! (Image: Screenshot of <a href="http://rubyconf.pt/schedule/">RubyConfPt Schedule</a> )</i></small></font><br /></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redrails-girls-summer-of-code-falling-into-rabbit-holesspan"><span class="color-red">Rails Girls Summer of Code: Falling into Rabbit Holes</span></h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-11-08-iam_preethi-tweet.png" alt="Rabbit Hole Tweet" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>Wise words about falling into Rabbit Holes as a Coding-Newbie! (Image: Screenshot of <a href="https://twitter.com/iam_preethi/status/784232047506104320">Tweet by @iam_preethi</a> )</i></small></font><br /></p>
<p>The topic we chose for our talk was “Falling into Rabbit Holes”, because this seemed the quintessence of the whole Rails Girls Summer of Code experience. <a href="https://twitter.com/theatanzt">Thea</a>, being a part of <a href="https://twitter.com/loadtocode/">LoadtoCode</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/MayarAlaa122">Mayar</a>, being a part of <a href="https://twitter.com/RubysSecretteam">Ruby’s Secret</a> shared their individual <a href="https://twitter.com/rubyconfpt/status/791674914302492672">Rails Girls Summer of Code experience</a> with the audience. For a wrap up the other team members had their personal shoutouts: <a href="https://twitter.com/lila_luca">Marie</a> from <a href="https://twitter.com/loadtocode/">LoadtoCode</a>, made clear that, now being in the process of changing careers and becoming a programmer, she is not automatically <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho/status/791677324253159424">a person with superpowers</a> and remembering everyone of the fact that everybody can learn it and this message should be spread instead. <a href="https://twitter.com/Nada_Ashraf96">Nada</a> from <a href="https://twitter.com/RubysSecretteam">Ruby’s Secret</a> was presenting really big goals, for example to have <a href="https://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc/status/791682827158945792">100 female coders in Cairo within 1 year</a> - support this mission with mentioning <i>#1year100women</i>! As this goal wouldn’t have been big enough already she also invited everyone to a Ruby Conference happening in Egypt in 2017. One goal the team from Egypt already achieved though and this is to have the travel expenses to Portugal funded by the crowd - check out the awesome <a href="https://player.vimeo.com/video/188672656">video</a> they made to ask for support!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-11-08-RubyConfOnStage.jpg" alt="RGSoC On Stage" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>The Rails Girls Summer of Code Women on Stage at the Ruby Conference in Portugal (Image: Picture taken by RubyConf Portugal )</i></small></font><br /></p>
<p>The People behind the Conference, mainly being part of <a href="https://subvisual.co/">subvisual</a>, were very welcoming and caring - we were even invited to a super delicious dinner for the speakers, where we were lucky enough to share the table with awesome people like <a href="https://twitter.com/martinfowler">Martin Fowler</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/hiro_asari">Hiro Asari</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/pat">Pat Allan</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/PragTob">Tobias Pfeiffer</a>. The <a href="https://twitter.com/RubysSecretteam">Ruby’s Secret</a> Team even got a <a href="https://twitter.com/tenderlove/status/791683611040817152">Selfie with Aaron Patterson</a>.</p>
<p>The most interesting thing about the conference that we strongly felt is “Diversity”. We met so many people from different countries, with different cultures as well as backgrounds and speaking different languages but having one thing in common which is programming.</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redthank-youspan"><span class="color-red">Thank you!</span></h2>
<p>We are super grateful for this opportunity and experience. It was awesome to realize how big the Rails Girls Summer of Code community really is, because a lot of people at the Ruby Conference in Portugal participated in some way in the past, and to also have had the support and patience by the rest of the audience.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-11-08-RubyConf-allrgsoc.jpg" alt="RGSoC generation-wide" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>Four generations of Rails Girls Summer of Code in one photo! (Image: <a href="https://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc/status/792112104471924736">Tweet by RailsGirlsSoC</a>)</i></small></font><br /></p>
<p>What more to say? Stay tuned, since the LoadtoCode Team will be hitting to the <a href="https://gotocon.com/berlin-2016/">GoTo Conference in Berlin</a> and also write about that experience as well.</p>
Team MitPal - Connect Tech 2016Sherrihttp://twitter.com/MitPal20162016-11-01T00:00:00+00:002016-11-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-mitpal-connect-tech-2016<p>Summing up Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSOC) is not a simple task. True. RGSOC was an opportunity to work on an open source project, but the experience was so much more than that. After 3 months of working together on our project, Open Source Event Management System (OSEM), we had developed our own team vibe. We had our routine down pat. We spent our mornings working through our latest issue. We ate our lunches together outside followed by a walk around the block. These times became as important as our time coding. That was our time to talk about our lives, our interests, experiences, and sometimes fears. We learned a lot about working with Ruby, but we learned even more about ourselves as we worked on our project. Ups, downs, joy, laughter (lots of laughter), learning, frustration, and accomplishment. We went through it all. Together. That was one of the best parts.</p>
<p>Anitha and I (Sherri) are Team MitPal. We are two geeky women who decided to change careers. We had the support of two awesome coaches, Pamela Vickers and Pete Holiday. Their help was invaluable. They guided us when we needed to be guided, nudged us when appropriate, and pushed us when necessary.</p>
<p>Our project mentor, Henne Vogelsang, helped us navigate our project and plan our work. We appreciate his patience, insight, and imput.</p>
<p>Shelly Coen, our supervisor. We hit the supervisor jackpot! Whether it was our weekly calls, Slack conversations, or emails, Shelly was there guiding us and checking in on us. Shelly is a rockstar!</p>
<h2 id="so-what-did-we-do-this-summer-you-ask">So What Did We Do This Summer, You Ask…</h2>
<p>We worked on <a href="http://osem.io">OSEM</a>, an An event management tool tailored to Free and Open Source Software conferences. The OSEM codebase is pretty large, so we had to spend some time ramping up. We worked to set up our environment (Vagrant, Virtual Box, We spent time learning about the application, the technologies used, and looking at the open issues. Our mentor and coaches helped us a lot with this part. Once we figured out which issues we would work on, our coaches helped us break down each issue and decide how to approach it.</p>
<p>We did quite a bit of TDD using RSPEC, which was great experience for us. Some of the work we did summer included integrating a Twitter feed into the app, updating views, and meta tags.</p>
<h2 id="we-attended-connecttech">We Attended Connect.Tech</h2>
<p>Team MitPal attended the Connect.Tech conference here in Atlanta. A few weeks have passed since the end of RGSOC, and Anitha and I have been having a bit of separation anxiety. So it was great to see each other again. When we arrived, the venue was already busy with folks from all over. We stopped by the registration desk to pick up our I.D. and t-shirt, and then we were off. As we moved through our days, we often talked about how conferences can be a little overwhelming. We put together a few tips that we think may help those that are new to the world of technical conferences.</p>
<p><strong><em>Plan ahead</em></strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161021-mitpal-conf-registration.jpg" alt="Team Mitpal" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Connect.Tech Conference Check In (Image: Team MitPal 2016)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Check out the conference schedule ahead of time and decide which sessions you want to attend. If you are attending with another person, discuss which sessions you have chosen and if you are not going to all of the same talks plan where you will meet afterwards.</p>
<p><strong><em>Plan for Swag.</em></strong></p>
<p>Companies come to conferences with lots of stuff to give, and before you know it your bag will be full. So a good rule of thumb is to pack lightly. Don’t bring a lot of extra stuff with you. It’s just more to carry at the end of the day.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161021-mitpal-conf-sponsors.jpg" alt="Team Mitpal" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Connect.Tech Conference Sponsors (Image: Team MitPal 2016)</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong><em>Don’t Miss the Keynote</em></strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161022-mitpal-conf-keynote.jpg" alt="Team Mitpal" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Connect.Tech Conference Keynote (Image: Team MitPal 2016)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Although you may be tempted to sleep in, resist the urge and attend the keynote talks. YOu’ll find some really interesting speakers and divers subjects are covered during the keynotes. It’s also a good time to meet some new people.</p>
<p>Speaking of new people…</p>
<p><strong><em>Talk to people. Make some new friends.</em></strong></p>
<p>If you’re like me, you hate the word “Network”. Trying to “Network” just makes me feel awkward. Focus on talking to new people and connecting. Two of the speakers at this Connect.Tech this year were people that I had met at previous conferences. They are really smart and amazing people, and their talks were very imformative.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161022-mitpal-conf-vr-erica.jpg" alt="Team Mitpal" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Erica Stanely Speaking about Web-Based Virtual Reality (Image: Team MitPal 2016)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161022-mitpal-conf-vr.jpg" alt="Team Mitpal" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Connect.Tech Conference Web VR (Image: Team MitPal 2106)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/20161022-mitpal-conf-kanye.jpg" alt="Team Mitpal" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Delicia Brummet Speaking on How to Pick a Tech Stack (Image: Team MitPal 2016)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The last tip I have is to take care of yourself. Conferences make for long days. Drink plenty of water. Pace yourself. You don’t have to attend every session. The slides and/or video will be available after the conference. Have fun and enjoy yourself. We sure did!</p>
<h2 id="where-did-the-time-go">Where Did the Time Go?</h2>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code flew by so quickly. Too quickly. When we started, there seemed to be so much for us to do and learn. How would we get it all done? We felt a little wobbly. Unsteady. Not confident in ourselves or our abilities. As the summer moved along we discovered so much about who we are and what we are capable of. We got to know ourselves and each other so well. We had a community of people who cared about us and looked out for us, and we had our team. Team MitPal. We came. We saw. We killed it!</p>
<p>We are so thankful to RGSOC and the whole community of people who made this experience possible. We are stronger and more confident today because of this experience and we are forever greatful.</p>
B'More Stunners: Over and Out!Oreoluwa Akinsanmi and Ashley Jeanhttp://twitter.com/ashhjean2016-10-30T00:00:00+00:002016-10-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/B-More-Stunners-Over-and-Out<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/ashley.jpeg" alt="teamphoto" />
<br />
<span class="image-credits">Pair Programming Session with coach Beverly.</span>
<br />
<span class="image-credits">(Image Credit: Oreoluwa Akinsanmi)</span></p>
<p>It’s with heavy hearts we bid Rails Girls Summer of Code a farewell. We feel very humble to have been apart of this fellowship. RGSOC has given us the opportunity to not only sharpen our programming skills, but to also connect with an amazing community and form long-lasting friendships.
This summer we had the opportunity to work on the Bundler project alongside supervisor André Arko. We were tasked with the project of making modification to Bundlers’ metrics dashboard so that it can accurately reflect its current metrics.</p>
<h3 id="heres-a-little-short-summary-of-what-weve-accomplished">Here’s a little short summary of what we’ve accomplished:</h3>
<ul>
<li>A better understanding of how Bundler and Rubygems.org works</li>
<li>Submitted a Pull Request to Rubygems.org server</li>
<li>Built a class that focuses on capturing system information and the options run with Bundler upon installation</li>
<li>Refactoring our code…followed by a little more refactoring</li>
<li>Attending Strange Loop Conference and meeting team <a href="https://twitter.com/rgsocJaM">Team JaM</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/strangeloop.jpg" alt="newfriends1" />
<br />
<span class="image-credits">Ore and <a href="https://twitter.com/GirlMeetsCode">Nicola Hughes</a> at the Strange Loop Conference</span>
<br />
<span class="image-credits">(Image Credit: Oreoluwa Akinsanmi)</span></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team jam.jpg" alt="newfriends2" />
<br />
<span class="image-credits">Team JaM and Ore at the Strange Loop Conference.</span>
<br />
<span class="image-credits">(Image Credit: Team JaM)</span></p>
<h3 id="setting-the-bar-high-with-strange-loop">Setting the bar high with Strange Loop</h3>
<p><em>Ore</em> - Yes, it is true. Conferences can be diverse and inclusive while being absolutely phenomenal! Now, I hope every tech conference I go to will be just as progressive.</p>
<p>There was never a dull moment or boring talk at STL. Every workshop room or auditorium was consistently packed. I started my experience off with the ally skills workshop hosted by <a href="https://frameshiftconsulting.com/">Valerie Aurora</a> where I was reminded that even I (a marginalized person) have biases that can be damaging if left unchecked; there’s always room for personal growth. <a href="https://twitter.com/GirlMeetsCode">Nicola Hughes</a> talk, Is it a Bug or a Story, proved that tech can change the way we interact with information and produce justfying results. It affirimed alot about how I believe information should be represented.
I won’t forget how sore my legs were the next day from all the fun I had at City Museum. It was a literal adult playground with a 10-story slide!.
The entire audience including myself was captivated by the talk Ashley Nelson-Hornstein gave on the intersection of technology and hummanities. She really hit home when she introduced how gaming has been used to cope with cancer and depression.
Not only were the speakers diverse, the topics of the talks were as well. Talks ranged from deconstructing and systematising music from central Africa by <a href="https://twitter.com/ctford">Chris Ford</a> to “the future of web development” with <a href="https://twitter.com/Paul_Kinlan">Paul Kinlan</a>. I even got to see my mentor <a href="https://twitter.com/indirect">Andrei Arko</a> give a talk, LIES, DAMN LIES, AND METRICS, on the very project I was working on.
Lastly, I was fortunate enough to meet Crystal Martin CoderGirl Program Director at launch-code and Ashe Dryden from Alter conf! I want to give a special shout out to <a href="http://twitter.com/rgsocJaM">Team JaM</a> for letting me join their crew on this amazing adventure. I will definitely be going next year. Thanks you so much Rails Girls Summer of Code for sending me there.</p>
<h3 id="future-plans">Future plans:</h3>
<p><em>Ashley</em> - I fully attend to continue working on Bundler/Rubygems.org. There is still a lot of work that needs to be completed within the metrics project! Additionally, I will be starting my new job as a Junior Developer at a local tech company located in Baltimore. :D</p>
<p><em>Ore</em> - I’m more motivated than ever to finish the project. I got a lot further on the project than I ever thought, which has been a huge boost of confidence.</p>
<h3 id="advice">Advice:</h3>
<p><em>Ashley</em> - My biggest advice would be to continue to remind yourself that you CAN and you WILL do it! You were chosen to be apart of this fellowship for a reason, so don’t doubt your awesomeness. It’s okay to have bad days. Just remind yourself that no one was born a developer. Every great developer had to go through this learning process at one point to succeed :)</p>
<p><em>Ore</em> - My advice to next year’s participants is to keep on going no matter what. Also, be sure to get lost in the Rails Girls Summer Of Code slack channels; you never know what you’ll find in there.</p>
<h3 id="special-thanks">Special Thanks:</h3>
<p>Our sincere thank you goes out to our amazing coaches and mentors ( Benedikt
André , Lynn, Jamie, Mira and Beverly) who dedicated their time this summer to help us on this journey. We could not have done it without your ongoing support, mentorship and pep talks!</p>
<p>Lastly, We would like to thank the wonderful organizers of Rails Girls Summer Of Code. Thank you for making this fellowship possible and giving us the opportunity to be a part of it! Because of this program we have grown as developers and individuals.</p>
<p>And for that we are eternally grateful <3</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/dino.gif" alt="Dance" />
<br />
<span class="image-credits">(Image Credit: giphy.com)</span></p>
Our end of RGSoC,:( !Naggita Keziah and Nanjekye Joannahhttp://twitter.com/TeamEchoUg2016-10-26T00:00:00+00:002016-10-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team-Echo-wrapping-up<h3 id="team-echo-our-rgsoc-landing">Team Echo: Our RGSoC Landing</h3>
<p>Like a flight we just landed our RGSoC plane. It has been three awesome months of learning, connecting, coding and changing lives. We pushed, pulled, squashed, force pushed, gave talks, revived Rails Girls Kampala, interviewed, toured, travelled and became official contributors to qutebrowser.</p>
<p>The unforgettable memories of updating teams app, responding to emails and slack messages, having our PRs merged, attending conferences, renewing Rails Girls Kampala and so much more made Rails Girls Summer of Code an amazing experience. The summer is over and we are back to putting what we learnt and our experience to work in our communities.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team_echo2.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<br />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo (put together by Keziah Naggita)</span></p>
<h3 id="our-summer-achievements">Our summer Achievements</h3>
<p>The biggest highlight was the fact that RGSoC introduced us to open source software development. We all made our first PRs during RGSoC and have also contributed to other FOSS projects during our summer and intend to continue doing so after such inspired mentorship from <a href="https://twitter.com/the_compiler">Florian Bruhin</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/_idengager">Kasia jarmołkowicz</a> not forgetting our coaches <a href="https://twitter.com/WilsonKiggundu">Wilson Kiggundu</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/austiine04">Augustine Kisitu</a>.</p>
<p>RGSoC has taught us so many things, ranging from writing clean and clear code to soft skills. We have come to appreciate the need to impact our communities as well. We have become better speakers, mentors and coaches because we know exactly how it feels to be on the other side of life. Life is a learning experience and we’re glad on our way we met RGSoC to also teach us.</p>
<h3 id="on-qutebrowser">On qutebrowser</h3>
<p>We all made our first PRs during RGSoC. We will never forget this feeling 🙂. We have made a total of ten contributions. Below are our contributions to qutebrowser:</p>
<ul>
<li>We wrote a debug command to change the Ram Handler capacity.</li>
<li>We wrote end to end tests for Navigating multiline links.</li>
<li>We suggested and also solved this bug in qutebrowser code issue 1867 for validating logger names passed to logfilter.</li>
<li>We made the completion font configurable in qutebrowser.</li>
<li>We wrote two more commands. One is :debug-log-level, it changes the log levels for the logs in the console. The other is debug-log-filter that changes the filters for the console logs.</li>
<li>Worked on Purging UTM data when yanking url Added a new setting and improved the yank command so that it strips away UTM parameters from the URL for convinience when sharing the URL.</li>
<li>We also removed –qt arguments in qutebrowser and replaced them with –qt-flag and –qt-arg.</li>
<li>Made command keys (:/?) configurable.</li>
<li>We made zero a usable count for commands in the browser.</li>
<li>We were still working on creating a Global blacklist for URL completion model.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="general-foss-involvement">General FOSS involvement</h3>
<p>We have made other contributions to other projects during our summer. We have opened three PRs and opened one issue on taskcluster from Mozilla and PyConZA16, a PyCon South Africa website. The future holds many possibilities for us. We have started our FOSS involvement during RGSoC and hope to continue contributing.</p>
<h3 id="community-involvement">Community involvement</h3>
<h4 id="revived-rails-girls-kampala">Revived Rails Girls Kampala</h4>
<p>During summer, we revived the Rails Girls Kampala chapter. A community that had been started by Thoughtworks and died after Thoughtworks closing their Kampala offices. We started an eight-week Ruby on Rails training attended by 25 participants with support of our coaching company the <a href="http://innovationvillage.co.ug/">The Innovation Village Kampala</a>. We are still running the sessions and they will end at the end of October 2016. The goal of the training is to impart Ruby on Rails skills to the participants and ensure that they are in position to build something in form of a project at the end of the eight weeks. The participants shall write blogs on the projects they have developed, which we shall tweet about.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_rgk1.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by simoen at the innovation village kampala</span></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_rgk2.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by simoen at the innovation village kampala</span></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_rgk3.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by simoen at the innovation village kampala</span></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_rgk4.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by simoen at the innovation village kampala</span></p>
<h3 id="conferences">Conferences</h3>
<h4 id="pyconza">PyConZA</h4>
<p>We received diversity tickets much thanks to PyConZA through RGSoC to attend and speak at PyConZA that took place between 6th and 7th october in Capetown, South Africa. We had a great time networking and listening from other speakers from the python community.</p>
<p>We gave a talk on contributing to Python open source infrastructure and projects. The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7SwS7hIb1o&feature=youtu.be">Talk</a> and <a href="https://speakerdeck.com/pyconza/contributing-to-python-open-source-infrastructure-and-projects-by-joannah-nanjekye/">Presentation</a> were published.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_pyconza2.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by Humphrey batua during pyconza 2016, capetown</span></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_pyconza1.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by the media team during pyconza 2016, capetown</span></p>
<h4 id="african-women-in-technology-conference">African Women in Technology Conference</h4>
<p>We were invited to speak about RGSoC and a give a talk on how drones, sensors and apps are rewriting the rules in agriculture at the African Women in Technology conference that took place in Nairobi 21st–22nd of July 2016. We had good feedback and were also inspired by great talks from different women in technology fron the African tech space.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/presentation.jpg" alt="Day 1" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by Ian Yatich at the African Women in Tech conference (East Africa), Nairobi, Kenya</span></p>
<h3 id="smart-automation">Smart Automation</h3>
<p>After speaking at the African Women in Tech conference, we got another invite to speak about drones, sensors and apps at the first smart Automation conference that took place 2nd–3rd September in Nairobi, Kenya. We got another chance to network with automation engineers and got to learn about what technology can do in industry automation.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_sa1.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by Ian Yatich during smart Automation conference in Nairobi</span></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_sa2.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by Ian Yatich during smart Automation conference in Nairobi</span></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamEcho_bg2_sa3.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Echo photo taken by Ian Yatich during smart Automation conference in Nairobi</span></p>
<h3 id="what-we-have-learnt">What we have learnt</h3>
<p>We learnt alot during RGSoC , some of the skills which got include the following;</p>
<ul>
<li>We learnt the open source workflow, community engagement and handling code reviews for our own and other people’s code.</li>
<li>Lots of problem solving and working with big code bases.</li>
<li>We learnt debugging skills as the rescue to finding problems in big codebases.</li>
<li>We also improved our python programming skills.</li>
<li>Learn about the browser architecture and its development.</li>
<li>Team work, this included sharing of tasks and complementing one another and we also learnt how to do pair programming to learn new skills.</li>
<li>Building self-confidence.</li>
<li>Last but not least, we learnt how to accept and learn from criticism. This helped us grow especially during code reviews.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="appreciation">Appreciation</h3>
<p>We cannot say thank you enough to all the people that made RGSoC 2016 a success, for Team Echo at least. You made it possible for us to learn and be better people. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the following people:</p>
<p><strong>Our mentor</strong>: Florian Bruhin, it has been a real pleasure working with you! Thank you for being liberal and welcoming to newbies like us but now gurus. I would recommend newcomers to start with qutebrowser because of the welcoming community. You were the best mentor and you made RGSoC a great summer for us; thank you so much. Also before we forget thanks for the stickers.</p>
<p><strong>Our coaches</strong>: Wilson Kiggundu and Kisitu Augustine, you are the best coaches we could have! We are immensely grateful for all your help and most importantly for taking your busy time off your full-time jobs. For staying up for calls with the unfavourable time zones. A big shout out to you.</p>
<p><strong>Our supervisor</strong>: Kasia jarmołkowicz, thanks for all your support, for attending all the meetings, for listening to us and for always encouraging us, we are forever grateful.</p>
<p><strong>RGSoC 2016 Teams:</strong> Cheers to all the 2016 teams. You helped us, guided us, made us your friends and shared your experiences with us. You made RGSoC a loving community to belong to.</p>
<p><strong>RGSoC Organizers:</strong> Thank you so much for selecting us from the many to be a part of this incredible journey. We are so thankful for helping us everytime we needed you, for encouraging us and for making RGSoC a great community.</p>
<p><strong>RGSoC Sponsors</strong>: Thank you for making it possible for us to ditch everything else for three months and dive full-time into learning! For the swag… you really made these months worth it.</p>
<p><strong>Our friends and community</strong>: Thank you for bearing with us and supporting us while we were engaged in our RGSoC. You encouraged and pushed us to continue and pursue our dreams. We shall forever be thankful. Innovation Village, we value all your support, your encouragement, the space you gave us to host Rails Girls Kampala and for giving us a chance to speak at your events.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-our-plans-after-rgsoc">What are our plans after RGSoC?</h3>
<p>We have been started off to FOSS contribution and are not looking back. We are already contributing to other FOSS projects. We shall therefore continue contributing to qutebrowser and other open source projects. We shall also take it upon ourselves to mentor others to begin contributing to open source projects.</p>
<p>We shall ensure Rails girls kampala is sustained and all its activities. This shall act as a mentoring platform for even future scholars. We shall finish Rails Girls Kampala 2016 cohort and prepare for the next cohorts.</p>
<p>Keziah will go back to university to finish her final year in software engineering at Makerere University, but she will continue writing code and mentoring others.</p>
<p>Joannah will continue with her studies in Aeronautical Engineering at the East African School of Aviation in Nairobi, Kenya. Trying to marry code and aviation. She shall continue contributing to FOSS and mentoring others, too.</p>
<p>The RGSoC community we shall still keep in touch because you are an amazing community. Looking forward to future work with you: be it mentoring, coaching, you name it. Always available!!!!</p>
Emotional goodbye from RubyCatsKinga Kalinowska-Materniak and Izabela Komorekhttp://twitter.com/RubyCatsTeam2016-10-24T00:00:00+00:002016-10-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/emotional-goodbye-from-rubycats<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats_goodbye.png" alt="RubyCats goodbye" /><span class="image-credits">Goodbye from RubyCats</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Izabela Komorek @izuroxx)</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong>It has been an amazing journey!</strong></p>
<p>We are still shocked how emotional and draining the whole experience was. But mostly it was a dream come true.</p>
<p>We haven’t accomplished what we set out to do. But we are happy of the things we did and what we’ve learned.</p>
<p>We don’t know what the future will bring. We will try our best to learn more and hope for the best. We will continue our path, even if it’s rocky.</p>
<h5 id="few-words-from-each-of-us"><strong>Few words from each of us:</strong></h5>
<p><strong>Iza:</strong>
The end of RGSoC was very hard for me. RGSoC was a time I felt I was living the life the way I want to live it. Now I’m trying to pick myself up and collect the pieces of my life’s puzzle. Not sure what the picture looks like, but I’m determined to put the pieces together.</p>
<p><strong>Kinga:</strong>
The end of RGSoC was like waking up from a beautiful dream into life as usual. I’d like this dream to last forever.</p>
<p>It’s like in Fort Minor song <em>Where did you go</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Where’d you go?
I miss you so,
Seems like it’s been forever,
That you’ve been gone.
Please come back home…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I hope I’ll become a professional developer one day (soon!) and then this dream will be back. For now I got back to teaching kids about programming, which I really like. But without being a programmer I won’t be fulfilled.</p>
<p>And now like in a song <em>Oxalá</em> by my beloved Madredeus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oxalá meu futuro aconteça (I hope my future will happen)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I still have a lot to learn and do. Mission not accomplished and not aborted. Mission in progress. Some Teams App code still needs to be completed / included into a PR.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats_where.jpg" alt="RGSoC where did you go?" /><span class="image-credits">Where did you go RGSoC?</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Kinga Kalinowska-Materniak @Kalinowska_K)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats_over.jpg" alt="RGSoC is over" /><span class="image-credits">RGSoC is over</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Kinga Kalinowska-Materniak @Kalinowska_K)</i></small></font></p>
<h5 id="thank-you"><strong><em>THANK YOU</em></strong></h5>
<p>We would like to thank our Coaches, Supervisor and Mentors for giving us so much. Giving us their precious time and hearts, words of comfort and wisdom, sometimes sharing some of their strength in moments of weakness. They gave us emotional support, tools and knowledge that is priceless. They are the real Heroes and we shall name them all:</p>
<p><strong>Coaches</strong>: Monika Burdzy, Basia Kłosowska, Magdalena Malinowska, Tomasz Warkocki, Piotr Zientara.</p>
<p><strong>Mentors</strong>: Carsten Zimmermann and Ramón Huidobro.</p>
<p>Last but not least the best <strong>Supervisor</strong> - Rafał Cieślak.</p>
<p>Thank you <strong>Code Quest</strong> for giving us a warm and comfortable environment and amazing coaching support. We have to acknowledge your company has a strong, smart and cool team. It was a pleasure to meet all of you. We wish you all the best and let coding stay your passion.</p>
<p>Thank you Team Joda for a chance to meet you (Dayana, you are the master of humor and positive energy). Hopefully we will meet again soon.</p>
<p>Thank you RGSoC for this wonderful and unique experience, love, support and a chance to take part in Euruko 2016 in Sofia & first Codemotion Conference in Warsaw.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UehkClMTJDw&t=11m28s">BTW you can watch our Euruko Lightning Talk here</a>.</p>
<p>Team RubyCats signing off.</p>
<p>Live, learn, code!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats_words.png" alt="RubyCat says: live, learn, code!" /><span class="image-credits"> Live, learn, code! </span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Izabela Komorek @izuroxx)</i></small></font></p>
Rookies GotoCopenhagen conference!HyeSoo Parkhttp://twitter.com/hoodierookies2016-10-23T00:00:00+00:002016-10-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Rookies-GotoCopenhagen-conference<p>Hey, we are <a href="https://github.com/flyjwayur">HyeSoo</a> and <a href="https://github.com/titay2">Tehetena</a> from team <a href="https://twitter.com/hoodierookies">Rookies</a> :D</p>
<p>Team Rookies flew to Copenhagen to participate in ‘GotoConf Copenhagen’. It was a huge and lively conference with a beautiful blue color. Tehetena had a personal issue to solve, so we decide that I (HyeSoo) go there on behalf of the team and I shared interesting topics, what I have seen and how was the conference with her. It was a really amazing time to listen interesting talks about speakers’ experiences and cutting-edge technologies. It also gave me a chance to meet several inspiring and friendly people from different backgrounds.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-GotoConfGPH-Blue.jpg" alt="Blue passion towards technologies and people" /><br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>It is an entrance of the GotoConf Copenhagen. I felt full of bule passions towards technologies and people. It was very exciting time.(Image: HyeSoo)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="wonderful--interesting-talks">Wonderful & Interesting talks</h2>
<p>On 3rd of October, there were 6 tracks about Effective Deliver, Languages, Deep Learning Analytics, IoT and Robotics, Android and Solutions and Case Studies1. All the tracks had interesting topics and helped me to broaden the horizon to see and hear about not only IT topics of my interest but also new fields of IT beyond my interest.</p>
<p>In the morning, I joined the ‘Exploring RxJava 2 for Android’ talk in Android track and
‘Interoperability between R and other languages’ talk in Languages track. I learned that to explore the data, we can use ‘R’ language and we can mix with other languages such as C, C++, F# etc to improve the performance. Depending on how to use R with other languages, it can improve execution speed or memory management and so on.
In the afternoon I participated in talks about ‘Kotlin’, ‘Phoenix a web framework for the new web’ in Language track and ‘Exploring StackOverflow Data’ in Deep Learning Analytics.
It was interesting to get to know about the functional way of writing code with Kotlin. Kotlin is a statically-typed programming language that runs on the JVM and it also can be complied into JavaScript. It was useful to learn what functional programming features Kotlin has such as immutable data structure, higher order function etc.
In ‘Exploring StackOverflow Data’ talk, I learned playing with data can start from a good question and to explore the data, we can use R, and to visualize the data and compile into JavaScript, we can use ‘F#’. It was also interesting to see which programming languages people like to use for their side project or hobby project during the weekend.</p>
<p>On the second day, there were 5 tracks about Microservices, Tactics for better Teams, Web Frontend, Disruptive Technologies – Case Studies and Solutions and Case Studies2.
In the morning, I listened the talks about ‘A Quick Introduction to Angular 2’ and ‘Elm: Friendly Functional Programming for the web’.
I learned what are the new features in Angular2 and how we can use it in the project. There was another talk about the functional programming. It was about Elm. Elm does not have runtime exceptions and it has a library of interesting name called ‘Maybe’ which represents value that may or may not exist. It gives clear messages about error or what does not match the syntax. I was happy to know new language for the web.
In the afternoon, I was in talks about ‘The Return of Stream I/O’ and ‘Progressive Web app – the Return of the Web’. With progressive web app, we can expect from native apps to the mobile browser experience, using standards-based technologies. It has some of the core tenets such as Services Workers, App Shell and Installability & App Manifest. It was an interesting technology to help programmers who want to launch app in both the web and mobile.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-GotoConfGPH-HyeSoo.jpg" alt="Happy time in GotoCopenhagen" /><br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Team Rookies had a happy time in GotoCopenhagen Conference with wonderful talks and inspiring developers(Image: HyeSoo)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="inspiring--friendly-people-from-different-backgrounds">Inspiring & friendly people from different backgrounds</h2>
<p>There were chances to meet friendly participants in the GotoConf Copenhagen. During a lunch time, I met one engineer from a company that makes an application for visually handicapped people. The application has sounds and tough features to help them find the information in the application. He has used ‘Typescript’ to make it work both in the web and mobile for them. We also talked about ‘high level concepts of the programming languages’. I have been wondering why many people said that programmers might be able to adapt the other language easily, if they know one language deeply. He explained that ‘high level concepts of the programming languages’ (for example inheritance, abstraction etc) embrace the common concepts of the languages, so it can help programmers to understand and use other languages easier beyond the different syntax from different languages.</p>
<p>I met another engineer from Unity. She has been building the Backend in the company. She came to the conference to learn Microservices for her work. ‘Microservices’ seems a buzzword these days. It is a self contained process that provides a unique business capabilities. With Microservices, it takes the capabilities and put them into the separate processes and it focuses on a single business capability. I had a chance to hear how she started to work on Backend after her graduation from her university. She had done internship and she used Python for her work and she has been using Python for the Backend, since then. It was a good time to talk with her to hear her work & how to grow up as a Backend developer and learn what is ‘Microservice’ which was a new term for me.</p>
<p>I met one girl who joined the conference with a diversity grant. She is a student like me and she also had Rails Girls experiences in Vienna. We talked about the Rails Girls communities in each countries and went to listen talk together. During the break, we had a chance to talk one of the conference speakers, Evelina Gabasova. She told us how she started to give a talk in the conference and how she has worked in the Data Science field. Her passion and curiosity inspired me to get interested in playing with data and visualizing data.</p>
<p>It was a really great time to listen invaluable talks and meet all the inspiring developers. While I listened how they explored their fields and how they improve their work and the world, I felt full of their passion and enthusiasm towards making world a better place, sharing their experiences.
It was a precious and amazing time in Copenhagen.
I am happy to have a chance to share the conference experience with Rails Girls Summer of code communities.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-GotoConfGPH-talk.jpg" alt="Wonderful and Interesting talks" /><br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>There were wonderful and interesting 6 tracks on the first day and 5 tracks on the second day.(Image: HyeSoo)</i></small></font>
<p><strong>@RailsGirlsSoC, @GOTOcph</strong><br />
Thank you so much all these wonderful opportunities. It was truly amazing! :D</p>
<p>For further information on Goto Copenhagen Conference, please visit <a href="https://gotocon.com/cph-2016/">Goto Copenhagen</a>.<br />
<3</p>
And the bits goes on...Geisa Santos and Emma Pinheirohttp://twitter.com/railsgirlsssa2016-10-20T00:00:00+00:002016-10-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/and-the-bits-goes-on<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas_final_board.jpg" alt="Time to clear the board" /><span class="image-credits">Time to clear our board.</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Thinking how to start this post remind us how difficult was to start anything. Some can say that you only have to make the first step, but it’s not so easy and isn’t fits to everything. Sometimes, well, the most of the time, when everyone label you in a category, every single day, it’s hard to believe you can do a first step.</p>
<p>During RGSoC we’re surrounded by inspiring and amazing people from everywhere. Everyday there was not one or two but a lot persons cheering us up. We shared thoughts and feelings with the others fantastic girls.</p>
<p>The credits it was expected to the final but we really want to thanks Ines Coelho, Brena Monteiro and Ana Sofia: thanks to believe in us and helped this amazing experience become reality. <3</p>
<h5 id="speakerinnen-and-our-own-voice"><strong>Speakerinnen and our own voice</strong></h5>
<p><strong>Geisa:</strong>
The first time I invited Emma to get along with me to the applications of Rails Girls Summer of Code, I told her about <a href="https://www.speakerinnen.org/">Speakerinnen</a> and <a href="http://rubymonstas.org/">Ruby Monstas</a>. I don’t remember when or who told me about them, the Rails Girls from Berlin, but definitely was because Rails Girls Salvador. I’d already used their resources to study Ruby. So when we received the news it was shocking: we couldn’t believe it.</p>
<p>We pushed ourselves so much to work and study for hours, even in the weekend. We were so worried to disappoint Ana Sofia and our team (mentors and Ines) that we made some sprints in the first week. Only after talking with them we realized that we forget the most important thing: <strong>learning</strong> having fun. RGSoC is not about work.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas_final_speakerinnen.jpg" alt="Daily meeting" /><span class="image-credits">Sharing ideas and choosing issues at daily meeting.</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p>We could talk here about impostor syndrome but we want to tell you about how/when we started to believe in ourselves. Hearing our own voice. RGSoC is a journey about of knowledge, a journey of self discover and the better part is you don’t have to walk alone. There are a lot of people supporting you in every step. That is most important achievement we get from it: we can do whatever we want to because we are capable of. You don’t have to be 100% or an expert from the beginning, in fact you always will be learning.</p>
<p>So we allowed ourselves to learn and get rid of the labels society imposes on us.</p>
<h5 id="veni-vini-vici"><em>Veni, Vini, Vici</em></h5>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas_final_bdd.jpg" alt="BDD is awesome!" /><span class="image-credits">Learning about <a href="http://rspec.info/">Behaviour Driven Development</a> with Coach Aurium.</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Wow! So many new topics we learned and still learning.<br />
We discovered anothers things we’d loved to work with Speakerinnen project: testing, Security, BDD, how to create gems, Postgres and others.</p>
<p>From now on, Geisa is researching about UX and Design Thinking to collaborate with Speakerinnen’s team. Also she started to study more about Security for applications and Javascript. This year Geisa is organizing the 4th edition of <a href="http://railsgirls.com/salvador">Rails Girls Salvador</a> with others mates.
Emma is improving her skills in Web Design and also returned to tattoo again. And just to refresh: after RGSoC we will continue to <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-08-03-we-are-team-perifericas">contributing with Speakerinnen</a>. :)</p>
<p>Geisa is working remotely for about six years, so she wants to find a remote job in Tech and Emma want both (remote or not).</p>
<p><img src="https://scontent-gru2-1.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-15/s480x480/e35/14726402_179185779197764_8345603914099326976_n.jpg" alt="A beautiful draw by Emma" /><span class="image-credits">One of great works from Emma.</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: See more from at her <a href="https://www.instagram.com/neko_emma/">Instagram</a>)</i></small></font></p>
<h5 id="roll-the-credits"><em>Roll the credits!</em></h5>
<p>We are afraid of forgetting someone, so we prefer to thanks everyone at the orga team <3 (OMGGGGG! You all are amazing!), everyone that dedicated their time helping us on the Help channel and outside that. A huge thanks for Ines Coelho, our incredible supervisor, and for Coach Brena Monteiro: thank you so much for your patient, help and for be there for us full time. <33333</p>
<p>Teamates from all around the world: it was a pleasure! We wish everyone can achieve news goals.</p>
<h5 id="and-the-bits-goes-on"><em>And the bits goes on…</em></h5>
<p><strong>Geisa</strong>:
Last week I was at my first Python Brazil. Something I was planning a year ago.<br />
It was amazing. Going back to beginning of our conversation about beliefs and journeys, I want to share with you one more thing.</p>
<p>Some people asks me why initiatives for diversity are so important. I can name some many <em>whys</em> but I will tell you just two: support and representation. Communities like PyLadies and Rails Girls Summer of Code are so welcoming, supportive, cheers you up, empathic, inclusive. If you be part of a minority and you find a group like yourself, a place you can share your worries, you can cry, you can search for help, you’ll be embraced. You can handle obstacles and any other harm that you have to deal being a girl (or a ‘different’ person) in tech (or other place men think you’re not allowed to be) with more strength and energy. This is what it means to be a PyLady for a year to me. One of this amazing persons that is always cheering for you, engaging the community is Paula Grangeiro. This year she received the Dorneles Tremea Award, an important award for her work and support, not only for PyLadies Brazilian community but for the whole Brazilian Python community. YAYYY!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas_final_pyladies.jpg" alt="Paula Grangeiro and PyLadies organizers from everywhere in Brazil" /><span class="image-credits">PyLadies organizers from Brazil with <a href="https://twitter.com/paulagrangeiro">Paula Grangeiro</a> (in the center, between me and Jessica Temporal, who have injured her foot) at Python Brasil 2016.</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Python Brazil organization)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Doesn’t matter that programming language you prefer or if are in Tech, Science, Arts…I wish you find more people like Paula, like Anika, Ines, Ana Sofia, Brena, Emma, Laura. I wish you find a community like a have in Brazil with the PyLadies, I wish could find more representation and inspiring people. I wish you can become this person for someone or for your community.</p>
<p>And I wish more submissions for Brazil next year. Because I will be there for you, as a Coach cheering you up and helping you improve yourself.</p>
<p>Thanks, RGSoC!</p>
Team kindr3d – Saying Bye!kindr3dhttp://twitter.com/TKindr3d2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:002016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-kindr3d-saying-bye<p>[Content Note: again, many animated gifs]</p>
<p><strong>How much can change in just three months?</strong></p>
<p>Apparently quite a lot. We wanted to tell you how in one summer we became better developers and hopefully better humans as well.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-kindr3d-berlin.jpg" alt="BFFs" /><em>so many memories already!</em></p>
<p>We feel so lucky to have spent those three months learning, communicating and building things. We suddenly became part of a bigger community of people who care about each other and are ready to give their time to help beginners. It is very humbling and empowering to feel surrounded by amazing people. But at the same time we became aware of giving back our gratitude to the this community. Also we learned the value of beginners. Our enthusiasm and drive are valuable and and needed in the world where innovation is the king.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kindr3d-labyrinth-1.gif" alt="labyrinth 1" /><em>beating negativity and self doubt - Source: giphy</em></p>
<p>We’ve also got to work at a big tech agency and look into the life of “real devs” from the inside (spoiler, there is a lot of free food).</p>
<p><strong>Discourse achievement</strong></p>
<p>We spent a lot of time carefully picking our project for the summer. Having worked on Discourse, with a whole feature just by ourselves was challenging, to say the least. Yet it also allowed us a great deal of creative freedom. Our mentor <a href="https://github.com/eviltrout">Robin</a> was so supportive that most times he would encourage us to step out of the road for a while and dig into learning things which were less related to our project just so we would figure out the answers by ourselves.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kindr3d-labyrinth-2.gif" alt="labyrinth 2" /><em>so many winding roads - Source: giphy</em></p>
<p>Building a dashboard for the statistics of a forum is not a simple task and we found ourselves jumping from databases, rails api to d3 to ember, sass and templating engines and trying to make sense out of the connexion between all these elements was probably what took us the most time.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kindr3d-labyrinth-3.gif" alt="labyrinth 3" /><em>waaaaait! - Source: giphy</em></p>
<p>Yet for the first time we were working on the big well organised project, where all perks of best practices were apparent. And it has disciplined us quite a bit.</p>
<p>Because of the visual nature of our project, it was important to have a design in mind, so we tackled a bit of user experience and came up with a visual solution (still very much in progress though). It was a lot of fun brainstorming with paper and scissors.</p>
<p><strong>A week of conferences</strong></p>
<p>Conference “season” felt a bit like field trip for us. We’ve got to be roommates for a while and experience Berlin’s vibrant tech scene while on the project and met many more people involved in the open source community. Everyone was lovely and supportive of us. And we had resources and time to objectively look at our skills and achievements.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-kindr3d-viewsource.jpg" alt="last week of summer weather" /><em>Photo by Fiona Castiñeira</em></p>
<p>We visited two conferences in one week, it was quite an overwhelming experience. But Yay! to learning, meeting tech superstars and a warm Berlin September. The most surreal experience was learning Rust from people who made Rust and were very happy sharing and teaching us.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rustbridge.png" alt="at the first RustBridge" /><em>happy learners at the first RustBridge</em></p>
<p>As we tried to make the most of our trip <a href="https://twitter.com/TKindr3d/status/776495680407932928">we met up with the two awesome RGSoC Berlin teams</a>. On a monday evening, we headed to <a href="http://rubymonstas.org/location.html">Ganz Oben office</a> and joined <a href="https://twitter.com/Teamjoda2016">Team Joda</a> at <a href="https://twitter.com/rubymonstas">Ruby Monstas</a> meetup (they are all just lovely and do wonderful work exploring code and building nice things).</p>
<p><strong>Future</strong></p>
<p>Without this program we probably would not have gained the confidence to keep on learning and building serious careers in tech. It was really enlightening for both of us to find each other’s support as two women passionate about coding. And then because of rgsoc find more people like us out there. (shoutout to <a href="http://railsgirls.com/">Rails Girls</a>, <a href="http://techettes-frankfurt.com/">Techettes</a>, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org">RGSoC</a>, <a href="http://rubymonstas.org/">Rubymonstas</a>…).
Stepping out of isolation and learning together while seeing other people’s works inspire us played a big role in our road to empowerment. Let’s never stop learning from each other, folks!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-kindr3d-summer.jpg" alt="last week of summer weather" /><em>Photo by Veronica Jonsson</em></p>
<p>Right now we are both looking for ways to establish ourselves in tech professionally so we can keep learning and getting better. We had time to learn how to learn, and started building our careers about life-long self-improvement and kindness to others. As far as open source goes, we are totally part of the cult now and hope to continue contributing.</p>
<p>We are no longer living in the same city, but the summer experience keeps us together, we have great things ahead, like a Beyond Tellerrand Berlin Conference in November!</p>
<p><strong>Many Thanks</strong></p>
<p>We are lucky-lucky women who have been surrounded by wonderful people all this summer long. We send love to our patient and supportive supervisor <a href="https://github.com/klappradla">Max</a> and most zen mentor <a href="https://github.com/eviltrout">Robin</a>. Thanks to the coaches for sticking with us and showing us more than we expected to find. But most of all we send love to the community of people who spend their time to make other people’s day brighter. We love you Rails Girls! Keep on being awesome!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kindr3d-labyrinth-4.gif" alt="bright future" /> - Source: giphy</p>
Aloha, Rails Girls Summer of Code and GitHub!Melissa Fabros and Patricia Arbonahttp://twitter.com/HeartRGSoC_sf2016-10-14T00:00:00+00:002016-10-14T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Aloha-Rails-Girls-Summer-of-Code-and-GitHub<h5 id="what-accomplishments-are-you-proud-of"><em>What accomplishments are you proud of?</em></h5>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/hackbrighters_patricia_setup.jpg" alt="Patricia Setting Up her Development Environment at Github" /><span class="image-credits">Patricia hacking away.</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-fabros-5a1b35b">Melissa Fabros</a>)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Overall, we’re very proud of the fact that our team was able to set up and configure integration testing. According to Martin Fowler’s <a href="http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TestPyramid.html">pyramid of testing</a>, integration testing is the hardest and most expensive type of test to write. We tried tackling this because we wanted the challenge of learning the codebase at all levels of the stack. Dealing with deprecated dependencies and un-updated modules to work with PyTest and to configure Travis CI was no small feat! Our team jumped up and high-fived each other the day our build successfully passed Travis CI. We soon discovered that <font color="green">green</font> is a beautiful color. We realize how valuable testing is within a codebase. Good testing helps ensure robust code and provides a form of documentation to guide future developers.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/hackbrighters_build_passing.png" alt="Travis Build Passing" /><span class="image-credits"><font color="green">Green</font> is truly beautiful in the world of testing.</span><br /><font color="grey">
<small><i>(Image Credit: Team Hackbrighters)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Moreover, we ramped up to a new code base quickly. To get a handle on what the code was doing, we had to dive deep into modern Javascript. This meant learning new ES6 syntax and React in addition to learning some new Python concepts.
<img src="/img/blog/2016/hackbrighters_Lektor_whiteboarding.jpg" alt="Whiteboarding Lektor with Armin" />
<span class="image-credits">Whiteboarding Lektor’s React components and widgets.</span><br /><font color="grey">
<small><i>(Image Credit: <a href="https://www.twitter.com/patricia_arbona">Patricia Arbona</a>)</i></small></font></p>
<p>We’re really proud of how scrappy we were about finding resources and people to help us learn. We took advantage of all opportunities available to us and seriously leveraged our network. This included reaching out to our coaches, past managers, the Lektor community, and welcoming Slack communities such as <a href="http://wealljs.org/">WeAllJs</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/hackbrighters_karaoke.jpg" alt="Karaoke with Armin" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Hackbrighters Singing Karaoke with their Project Mentor.</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/doriakeung">Doria Keung</a>)</i></small></font></p>
<h5 id="what-did-you-end-up-learning-that-you-didnt-expect-to"><em>What did you end up learning that you didn’t expect to?</em></h5>
<p>We learned how powerful lower-level languages are. For example, throughout our fellowship, we have learned a lot of UNIX commands, like <code class="highlighter-rouge">top</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">ps</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">kill</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">sed</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">chmod</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">chown</code> and <code class="highlighter-rouge">make</code>. We learned how to use <code class="highlighter-rouge">pushd</code> and <code class="highlighter-rouge">popd</code> in order to navigate directories more efficiently.</p>
<p>We thought we had a solid understanding of git, but we soon realized how challenging git can be! Our team received first-hand experience rebasing, squashing, amending, refloging, reverting, stashing, and much more. Our team definitely feels more confident with git incantations, which will serve us well going into our next software development jobs.</p>
<p>Lastly, we learned about public speaking when we organized a panel to talk about participating in Open Source at Hackbright with <a href="http://www.kytrinyx.com/">Katrina Owen</a> and <a href="http://www.fossygirl.com/">Carol Smith</a>. Katrina Owen, Developer Advocate at Github, is co-author of <em>99 Bottles of OOP</em>, and author of Exercism.io. Carol Smith is currently the Education Partnership Manager at Github, and previously was the Google Summer of Code Program Manager.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/hackbrighters_octocat_lunch.jpg" alt="Chandrika Akar, Patricia, Carol Smith, Wendy Saccuzzo, Melissa, Ximena Cervantes" /><span class="image-credits">Chandrika Achar, Patricia Arbona, Carol Smith, Wendy Saccuzzo, Melissa Fabros, Ximena Cervantes </span>
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Matt Amituanai)</i></small></font></p>
<p>We were flattered to speak alongside Katrina and Carol! Neither of us have had an opportunity like this before. It was a lovely opportunity to share our knowledge and experience with students.</p>
<h5 id="how-do-you-think-youll-apply-your-summer-of-code-and-lektor-experiences-to-future-projects"><em>How do you think you’ll apply your summer of code and Lektor experiences to future projects?</em></h5>
<p>We really felt welcomed by the Rails Girls Community! We’d definitely keep an eye out on how to support the organization and its alumna.<br />
<img src="/img/blog/2016/hackbrighters_mona_lisa.jpg" alt="Patricia, Mona Lisa Octocat, Laura Gaetano, Melissa" /><span class="image-credits">Team Hackbrighters and Laura taking a break with Mona Lisa Octocat.</span><font color="grey">
<br /><small><i>(Image Credit: Michael Schärfer)</i></small></font></p>
<p>It took us at least six weeks to feel comfortable in the Lektor codebase with a lot of help. We took on writing and setting up the most difficult tests to establish a base for other developers so that they can move the codebase forward safely. For Lektor, we introduced end-to-end integration and front-end testing. We now have a real appreciation about how hard tests are to set up and about the need to build features with the idea that features should be testable.</p>
<p>We had a lot of fun building out our new feature with its associated test. In other future projects, we’d probably try to build our knowledge of a codebase more incrementally by picking smaller issues and features. We also learned how to ask informed questions of other developers when asking for help.</p>
<h5 id="what-other-open-source-projects-are-you-interested-in-contributing-to"><em>What other open-source projects are you interested in contributing to?</em></h5>
<p>In addition to keeping an eye on Lektor, we felt confident enough to start exploring other open source projects.
Melissa is exploring learning Ruby and Rails, so she could contribute to <a href="https://classroom.github.com/">Github Classroom</a> and <a href="http://jupyter.org/">Project Jupyter</a>.</p>
<p>Patricia looks forward to contributing to <a href="www.doubleunion.org">Double Union’s</a> open source app <a href="https://www.github.com/DoubleUnion/arooo">arooo (A Room of One’s Own)</a>, and her new favorite text editor <a href="https://github.com/atom">Atom</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/hackbrighters_chihuahua_melissa.jpg" alt="Adorable Chihuahua and Melissa" />
<span class="image-credits">Melissa holding one of the many dogs of GitHub.</span><br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit:<a href="https://www.twitter.com/patricia_arbona">Patricia Arbona</a>)</i></small></font></p>
<h5 id="roll-the-credits"><em>Roll the Credits!</em></h5>
<p>We want to say “Aloha”, which means “goodbye” and “hello”. Although we have to say goodbye for now, we hope that Rails Girls Summer of Code is just the beginning of our journey as developers.</p>
<p>Overall we’re grateful for the opportunity to grow as software developers under the mentorship of the Rails Girls organization and to receive the goodwill of Github’s community and of the San Francisco developer community at large. So many people shared their time, wisdom, and kindness. We’re thankful to have met all of them.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/hackbrighters_coaches.jpg" alt="Team Hackbrighters with Gavin and Seema" />
<span class="image-credits">Team Hackbrighter’s final send-off party with Coach Gavin and Coach Seema.</span> <br /><font color="grey"><small><i>(Image Credit: Leo Miranda)</i></small></font>
<br />
Here are our shoutouts in no particular order:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/eirinikos">Andrea Kao</a></li>
<li><a href="http://lucumr.pocoo.org/about/">Armin Ronacher</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.davidbaumgold.com/">David Baumgold</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.ramencodes.com/">Ramil Nobleza</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.seemaullal.com/">Seema Ullal</a></li>
<li><a href="http://threeplusone.com/gec/">Gavin Crooks</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssstrieu">Samantha Trieu</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/alicetragedy">Laura Gaetano</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/anasofiapinho">Ana Sofia Pinho</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/megabulldog2">Maria Ronacher</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/BinaryMuse">Michelle Tilley</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/kuychaco">Katrina Uychaco</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/nixpad">Nikka Padilla</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/pmn">Pat Nakajima</a></li>
<li><a href="http://2ndrategeniuses.com/">Alex Southgate</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/jonmagic">Jonathan Hoyt</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/agelender">Amanda Gelender</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/isamlambert">Sam Lambert</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/dreww">Drew Woods</a></li>
<li><a href="https://internships.github.com/2016/engineering/saundra-castaneda/">Saundra Castaneda</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/kytrinyx">Katrina Owen</a></li>
<li><a href="https://internships.github.com/2016/engineering/patricia-torvalds/">Patricia Torvalds</a></li>
<li><a href="https://internships.github.com/2016/engineering/max-bernstein/">Max Bernstein</a></li>
<li><a href="https://internships.github.com/2016/product/femi-awomosu/">Femi Awomosu</a></li>
<li><a href="https://internships.github.com/2016/engineering/nicole-daniels/">Nicole Daniels</a></li>
<li><a href="https://internships.github.com/2016/git%20ecosystem/taylor-blau/">Taylor Blau</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/fossygrl">Carol Smith</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/bkeepers">Brandon Keepers</a></li>
<li><a href="https://marktareshawty.com/">Mark Tareshawty</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/tsunamino">Danielle Leong</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/ihavenotea">February Keeney</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/anaisFTW">Anais Gonzalez</a></li>
<li><a href="http://lynn.io/">Lynn Wallingham</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/simonsj">Jon Simons</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/lillianho">Lillian Ho</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/malanramos">Marcos Ramos</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/__LizzHale__">Lizz Hale</a></li>
<li><a href="http://katfukui.com/about/">Kat Fukui</a></li>
<li><a href="http://jeejkang.com/">James Kang</a></li>
<li><a href="http://donokuda.com/">Don Okuda</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamilah-griffin-6190b939">Kamilah Griffin</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/larakowen">Lara Owen</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelqmcginley">Michael McGinley</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/imgonnarelph">Aaron Ralph</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/iolsen">Ian Olsen</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/jamfish728">Jamisha Fisher</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.markistaylor.com/">Markis Taylor</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/biancacreating">Bianca Escalante</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/eveldk">Dustin Kneviel</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/gnawhleinad">Daniel Hwang</a></li>
<li><a href="http://pmn.org/">Paul Nakata</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensenfleming">Jensen Fleming</a></li>
<li><a href="http://corey.chocolatejs.com/">Corey Hobbs</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/alysonlaaa">Alyson La</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/papimenon">Papi Menon</a></li>
<li><a href="http://mattyoho.com/">Matt Yoho</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennieohyoung">Jennie Ohyoung</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/LeftSaidTim">Tim Jarrat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/thejosh">Josh Levin</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/avh4">Aaron Vondehar</a></li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://www.ministryofvelocity.com/team/">Doc Reitzel</a></p>
</li>
<li>Also sending thanks to: Alex, Matt, Leo, Raul, Mint, Monique, AJ, Kevin and Gabriel.</li>
</ul>
<p>This list is in no way comprehensive. We might have missed your name here, but we did appreciate your spirit and your kindness.</p>
Perifericas at conferences!Emma Pinheiro and Geisa Santoshttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSSA2016-10-12T00:00:00+00:002016-10-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/perifericas-at-conferences<p>Can’t believe RGSoC is done.
We’ve experienced three incredible months!</p>
<p>During Rails Girls Summer of Code we had the chance to participate in three events. And that’s what we want to share with you in this post.</p>
<p>Some conferences only me (Geisa) could attend, so you might see comments in first person. >^.^<</p>
<h3>Perifericas at I SECOMTEC 2016</h3>
<p>We’ve been invited to give a talk about Rails Girls Summer of Code and our experience in the tech community at the first edition of <a href="http://secomtec.ml/">SECOMTEC</a>. This was also the first time Emma gave a talk, as a girl, for an audience. Super cool!</p>
<p>There’s a recorded video <a href="https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1635020893495036&id=1587530478244078&fs=5">in portuguese</a>, which, unfortunately, is not complete. You can check the slides from the talk at <a href="http://perifericas.github.io/secomtec16">this link</a>, but it’s in Portuguese too.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-secomtec_Emma.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Emma so happy at the final of our talk. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Our coach X was there too, talking about <a href="https://lampiaosec.github.io/talks/Asm/#/">Assembly</a> and reverse engineering. I mediate a panel with professionals women from Engineering and Tech. It was really great to hear about their experiences and point of views.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-secomtec_X.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Coach X talking about Assembly. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-secomtec_girls.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Geisa and Emma before the talk started. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-secomtec.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Perifericas at I SECOMTEC! (Image Credits: SECOMTEC organizers)</i></small></font></p>
<h3>Perifericas at Jusbrasil Tech Day</h3>
<p>On the 2nd of September, I was at <a href="https://medium.com/@tupydabahia/jusbrasil-tech-day-2-de-setembro-2016-32b56c8b86dd#.rni7glrst">Jusbrasil Tech Day</a>, a comemorative event for the 5 years of Jusbrasil - one of the most promising companies in Bahia and the one of the most accessible <a href="http://www.jusbrasil.com.br/home">legal portals in Brazil</a>.</p>
<p>They support the local Tech community. The first edition of <a href="http://railsgirls.com/salvador201310">Rails Girls Salvador</a> was held there.
It was an opportunity to meet my friends and learn about Docker, Continuous Delivery, project management and others topics, so it was really great.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-jusbraziltd-docker.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Rafael Gomes, Docker Captain BR. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-jusbraziltd-helabs.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Rafael Miranda from HE:Labs, another company that supports Rails Girls Salvador. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<h3>Perifericas at RubyConf Brazil</h3>
<p>Oh, how I loved to be there!<br />
So many great talks, so many friends, so many new people I got to meet. My first <a href="http://www.rubyconf.com.br/">RubyConf Brazil</a>. Yay!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-rubyconfbr_group.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Geisa representing Team Perifericas at RubyConf BR! (Image Credits: Marla Dore)</i></small></font></p>
<p>I was able to watch international talks with President Beef from <a href="http://brakemanscanner.org">Breakman</a> (that coach Brena indicated) and Akira Matsuda about Ruby international community. There are so many tips and tools that I want to share with Speakerinnen’s team and use in future projects.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-rubyconfbr_PBeef.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Justin Collins aka President Beef. Definitely will use Breakman on my next projects. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="https://igcdn-photos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/t51.2885-15/e35/14350445_1060519570735293_7930454733205012480_n.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Three simultaneous talks on the first floor and two more options upstairs! It was hard to pick one. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-rubyconfbr_Akira.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Akira Matsuda talking about Ruby and community. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-rubyconfbr_Akita.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Fábio Akita farewell from RubyConfBr organization. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-rubyconfbr_rgscomark.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>#RGSoC was heeereee!. (Image Credits: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong>Did I mention 3 conferences?<br />
Well, there’s one more! Like a bonus. :)</strong><br /></p>
<h3>Perifericas at VI EnSI</h3>
<p>The last conference we’ve attended was EnSI, a conference about Security.
At <a href="https://ensi.pop-ba.rnp.br/2016/">EnSI</a> we attended some talks about privacy and data, shared point of views with other professionals about how to prevent attacks. It’s a topic that really gets our attention, everyday.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamperifericas-conferences-ensi.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Perifericas talking with Andressa, a Computer Science student at UFBA and participant of Rails Girls Salvador last year! (Image Credits: Edely Gomes)</i></small></font></p>
<p>And now we’ve been back to our activities as community leaders, so there are more conferences coming.</p>
<p>We learned a lot and the opportunity to engage more with the community was really important to us.</p>
<p>Thanks to all organizers! It’s has been a pleasure to talk about RGSoC and meet more professionals in brazilian tech community.</p>
Team Fedex++ Signing OffMansi and Saharhttp://twitter.com/TeamFedex2016-10-11T00:00:00+00:002016-10-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-fedex++-signing-off<p><em>When you do something best in life, you don’t really want to give that up.</em><br />
- <a href="https://twitter.com/rogerfederer" title="Roger Federer"><em>Roger Federer</em></a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++intro.jpg" alt="Team-Fedex++" /> <br />
<em>image taken by Sahar’s Mom when we were working on the project together</em></p>
<p>As appropriately quoted by Federer, when you start with something really good, it becomes so close to your heart that you don’t want to let it go. So is our connection with the RGSoC program and the community. It’s been 4 months since we became a part of it and it seems this journey had just begun a while ago.</p>
<p>It all started with our selection to Rails Girls Summer of Code as a volunteer team to PyDSA project. Eventually, we have come to the stage where the learning process and bond with the community has become so strong that we wish to be connected to it forever. During this journey filled with so many experiences, some moments were so memorable and cherished that now it is really hard to go back and bid our goodbye.</p>
<h3 id="experience-working-in-open-source"><strong>Experience working in open source</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>This was our first proper experience with the Open Source community.</li>
<li>We had primarily taken up the RGSoC project to get exposure to Open Source, to foray into this never ending space filled with excitement, to get to know how to code into an actual live project repo and the feeling when your PR gets merged. We learnt a lot about community bonding, for instance it is not about what you learn but what you return to the community, how even a small change or input from your side may impact someone’s life deeply.</li>
<li>We got to interact with many people as part of conferences (PyCon India) and some very inspirational ladies (PyLadies Pune Chapter)</li>
<li>It is always a challenge to handle your academics along with your passion when you are a student but through the summer program we realised the importance of being a part of the community and what the world of open source can teach you which you might never learn under the bounds of an institute.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++pydsa.png" alt="Team PyDSA" /> <br />
<em>Snapshot of the video call attended by all coaches, mentor and supervisor taken by Mansi</em></p>
<h3 id="what-we-achieved---majorly-web-app"><strong>What we achieved</strong> - Majorly Web App</h3>
<ul>
<li>In the second half of the program, we focussed upon the frontend part of the WebApp of PyDSA.</li>
<li>We explored D3.js, tried some things in it and finally made the visualisation of Bubble Sort Algorithm and Graph Data Structure using it.</li>
<li>Though the PyDSA App is still in development mode, stay tuned for it first official release :)</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++sort.gif" alt="Bubble Sort visualization" />
<em>a gif to show the working of Bubble Sort Visualisation created using D3.js by Sahar Siddiqui</em></p>
<h3 id="key-learnings"><strong>Key Learnings</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>Never be hesitant to ask your doubts. Clarify as soon as possible or else you would be losing your own time.</li>
<li>Consistency matters a lot!</li>
<li>You will find good guides everywhere! However, help comes to people who ask for it! :p</li>
<li>We understood the importance of community involvement as it helps us interact with some great people working in various fields.</li>
<li>Never be scared to try different and new things. You will always find yourself more satisfied after learning about something new everyday :D</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="experience-of-pycon-india"><strong>Experience of PyCon India</strong></h3>
<p>One of the good things that happened in the duration of RGSoC project that luckily for us PyCon India took place in our hometown Delhi. Pycon India was the first major conference we attended. It not only served as a major inspiration to us but also opened the doors of new opportunities. With so many brilliant and enthusiastic people gathered to discuss about the topics which you are passionate about, it definitely boosts up your confidence to further delve into the field as much as possible.</p>
<ul>
<li>Met Andreas Mueller and attended talks by awesome people.</li>
<li>Major Breakthrough - We will soon have our very own PyLadies Delhi chapter!
Go girls! :’)</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++pycon.jpg" alt="With Andreas Mueller" /> <br />
<em>image with Andreas Mueller who was present as a keynote speaker taken by a friend at PyCon India 2016</em></p>
<h3 id="thanks-to-pydsa-team"><strong>Thanks to PyDSA Team</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>On this journey, we met a lot of great people who inspired us at every step and motivated us to push our boundaries and target more.</li>
<li><em>Supervisor ( Vaishali Thakkar and Sophia Takeva )</em> - We got a great support from their side throughout. They were truly an inspiration to us. Vaishali not only guided us but also helped us whenever we required.</li>
<li><em>Mentors ( Amit Kumar and Sanyam Khurana )</em> - They are the first people we met during this journey with Open Source and we are thankful for the guidance they gave us and approaches they taught us throughout the journey.</li>
<li><em>Coaches ( Anuvrat, Saurabh, Ankit and Dr. Rahul )</em> - Anuvrat and Saurabh helped us to realise the importance of community bonding and encouraged us to always learn and try new things. Ankit and Dr. Rahul helped us a lot in understanding the data structures and different models that can be used to implement them in the generic way.</li>
<li>Also we like to thank the entire RGSoC community. They have done a great job in motivating us and keeping up the spirit all throughout.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++mentor.jpg" alt="With Mentors" /> <br />
<em>image taken by Mansi Goel with PyDSA mentors - Amit and Sanyam</em></p>
<h3 id="whats-next"><strong>What’s next?</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>We will be working on the project further and will keep contributing to it.</li>
<li>We will be looking for an opportunity to work on an Open-Source project next summer as well through different programs like Outreachy and GSoC.</li>
<li>Mansi will be continuing her journey of Open-Source in GHC India in December 2016.</li>
<li>With the help of other Python Enthusiasts we met at PyCon India, we have started the PyLadies Delhi Chapter. :D We will work to make it reachable to the community and we are hoping for a meetup soon.</li>
<li>We have already formed a ‘Women in Tech Chapter’ in our institute (IIIT-D) along with the other RGSoC participants and Anita Borg Scholars from our institute.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="last-words---signing-off"><strong>Last Words - Signing Off!</strong></h3>
<p>Some experiences in life leave such a great impact that all you can remember are the positivities and learnings. They encourage you to carry the legacy forward, inspire others and motivate them like anything.
Our journey in RGSoC was one such experience for us so we can happily say that it is not the end here, it’s just the beginning. :D</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++signoff.jpg" alt="Signing Off" /> <br />
<em>image taken by Mansi Goel</em></p>
<h5 id="follow-us-at-"><strong>Follow us at ;)</strong></h5>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/TeamFedex">Twitter</a><br />
<a href="https://github.com/Fedex-Rgsoc16">Github</a></p>
Team l1ghtsab3r signing off...Srishti Sengupta and Soumya Sharmahttp://twitter.com/SenguptaSrishti2016-10-10T00:00:00+00:002016-10-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-l1ghtsab3r-signing-off<p>We can’t believe it’s over! Saying that this was the greatest summer of our lives would be an understatement. When we first applied for RGSoC, we never thought we’d get this far. But we made it till the end, and we are very proud of ourselves and all the amazing teams who were a part of Rails Girls Summer of Code this year!</p>
<h3 id="what-we-achieved-over-the-summer">What we achieved over the summer</h3>
<p>We still remember how we looked for each other and our coaches. All the frantic searching for coaches, selecting a project, understanding it, making our first contribution to it, writing the application, re-reading it a million times! It was one hell of a journey, and an amazing one at that.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-tweets.jpg" alt="Team l1ghtsab3r" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Our initial madness! Finding each other and our project <3 (Credits: Screenshots taken by Team l1ghtsab3r)</i></small></font></p>
<p>We believe we achieved a great deal over the summer. Russell, our mentor sent us a list of issues we could tackle over our summer of code. We accomplished several tasks from that! We started off by completing quite a few operator implementations. These issues were the most basic ones, and gave us a good understanding of the vast codebase that VOC has. After this, we went on to implement methods on standard types. Both these topics were relatively easy and helped us to wade through the codebase and understand it better. After getting through with these issues, we wanted to do something more challenging. Hence began our journey on implementing a stubbed out datatype - <code class="highlighter-rouge">Complex</code>! This took us quite a while, diving deep into the bytecode of VOC. We learned a lot, not just about VOC, but about the internals of Python, and about bytecode too. After we were done with that (phew!), we also worked on supporting a linguistic structure in the VOC compiler. This meant working out how to parse language structures like for/else in Python bytecode, and then generating the equivalent Java opcodes.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-srishti-soumya.jpg" alt="Team l1ghtsab3r" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Out on Srishti's birthday! (Credits: Our dear friend, Shivam Chatuvedi. Fun fact: He taught us Python 3 years back. We probably wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for him)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="what-we-hope-to-do-ahead">What we hope to do ahead</h3>
<p>The summer may be over, but our journey with VOC isn’t over yet! Both of us find this project really interesting and it’s very close to our hearts <3 We want to keep contributing to this project, and want others in our community to do so as well. Currently, we are working on a few larger issues which would take some time and both of us are really enjoying getting our hands dirty with VOC.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-hacknight.jpg" alt="Team l1ghtsab3r" /><font color="grey"><small><i>A picture from the hacknight we organised in our college (Credits: Byld, The Software Development Club, IIIT-D)</i></small></font></p>
<p>We recently organised a “hacknight” in our college campus, for which the theme was <em>“Contributing to opensource software”</em>. Taneea and Vrinda from <em>Team Twiches</em> were also co-organisers. It was a fun session where we taught Git and introduced our opensource projects to the attendees. All of them were very excited to get started on the projects and we feel really happy to be bringing more people into opensource.</p>
<h3 id="our-experience">Our experience</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-with-coaches.jpg" alt="Team l1ghtsab3r" /><font color="grey"><small><i>L to R: Naman, Srishti, Sambhav and Soumya at PyCon, India (Credits: Soumya taking a selfie!)</i></small></font></p>
<p>I don’t think we can sum up our experience in a few words, but we’ll still give it a try. Rails Girls Summer of Code has been one hell of a roller coaster ride. We cannot believe how much we’ve learned over the past three months. We aren’t just better programmers now, but have grown as people as well! Interacting with all the diverse teams across the world was truly a life-changing experience, one we will always cherish.
Apart from learning, we’ve not just contributed to VOC, but have also received the Google Anita Borg Scholarship together, attended PyCon India and even submitted a patch to CPython! If three months back someone had told us that we’d be able to achieve all this (along with handling univ work), we would probably have laughed it off. We didn’t even know we were capable of all this! Last three months have been the best three months of our life, where we learned how to work with a team (remotely!!) and juggling a million tasks together.</p>
<h3 id="people-who-made-it-possible">People who made it possible</h3>
<p>We couldn’t have made it till the end without all the amazing people involved in our journey. We wish that we can meet each one of you some day. RGSoC has been the way it is, all because of you.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Russell Keith-Magee</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>This wouldn’t have been possible without you. You have been truly supportive of us all along! We couldn’t have asked for anything more from a mentor. Both of us just wish that we could hop onto a plane to Australia to meet you! Every time we came to you with a question, you were always there, ready to help. No matter how silly the question was. You’ve guided us and supported us every step of the way, thank you for that :)</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Natalie Volk</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>We loved talking to you on Tuesday nights :D and miss every bit of it now. You kept us motivated all along and gave us really awesome advice on how to proceed with issues and managing time.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Maria and the RGSoC orga</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Maria, thank you for letting us know about all the awesome conferences <3 You were also our supervisor for a short period of time when Natalie went on her vacation. It was amazing to get to know you. Ana, thank you for that beautiful video, it literally brought tears to our eyes :’) RGSoC orga, thank you for having this summer of code for women. Both of us hope that we too can inspire other women some day the way you have.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Our amazing coaches - Chiang, Manish, Anuvrat, Naman and Sambhav</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>You were always there, literally! Whenever we were stuck and need help, one of you was there to help us out of the mess. All we had to do was ping you, and you stopped everything you were doing and made us your priority. Without you, we would probably <em>STILL</em> be stuck at our first task. Thank you for pushing us to do things and to achieve all we’ve achieved. Even when we were extremely bogged down, a simple reply from any of you, telling us what direction to proceed in, how to solve our problem was enough to get us adrenaline pumped and raring to go again.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Other wonderful teams!</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Thanks to all the amazing teams out there who were also our support system. We learned so much from you all, more than we ever could have imagined :D</p>
<h3 id="our-key-learnings-and-advice-to-rgsoc-17-aspirants">Our key learnings and advice to RGSoC ‘17 aspirants</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<p><em>Communication is the key.</em> Never hesitate to ask questions to your mentor, coaches or supervisor. They are all there for you. Remember, no question is a silly question!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Once you’ve learned something, make sure you help another person out.
<img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-helping.gif" alt="Team l1ghtsab3r" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Diversify Tech! B) (Credits: Giphy)</i></small></font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>You can do it, don’t ever think that it’s not the right time, because it IS. There will always be that little voice in your head which will tell you that you’re probably not ready for this. You know what, chuck that voice. ;) Go ahead and be awesome!
<img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-motivationalpenguin.gif" alt="Team l1ghtsab3r" /><font color="grey"><small><i> Just listen to the penguin (Credits: Giphy)</i></small></font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>We love the party parrot <3
<img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-partyparrot.gif" alt="Team l1ghtsab3r" /><font color="grey"><small><i> Party Parrot ROCKS!!! (Credits: Giphy)</i></small></font></p>
</li>
</ul>
Team Reactives CommencementHuynh Van Tu An & Shwetha Ravihttp://twitter.com/TeamReactives2016-10-09T00:00:00+00:002016-10-09T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-reactives-commencement<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Team_Reactives.jpg" alt="Team Reactives" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Reactives with Sonic Pi Mentor - Joseph Wilk, supervisor - Ana, coaches - Arrchana, Vanchi & Stewart! (Image Credits: Our awesome supevisor: Ana)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="its-just-the-beginning">It’s just the beginning</h3>
<p>Our Participation in the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 started our contribution to the open source. Three months has passed, but the impact and community of this year program will last long into our future.</p>
<p>Our project has ended with a functional application that supplements the usage of the Sonic Pi software for visually impaired users. After the first test with the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped, we have gathered quite detailed feedback and will continue to re-iterate and improve our software for future tests. This is indeed the start of our new collaboration with a beneficiaries in this co-creation process.</p>
<h3 id="whats-our-plan">What’s our plan?</h3>
<p>Besides improving our project, we look forward to widening our technical skills and open source involvement during this year Hacktoberfest and completing our university study. For Tu An, she hopes to actively apply and hone skills after RGSoC in her internship in front-end web development. Shwetha will continue to explore hardware and software engineering fields in NUS before embarking on a year-long internship of the NUS Overseas College Program.</p>
<h3 id="our-last-words">Our last words</h3>
<p>We can’t express enough gratitude towards our amazing mentor, coaches and supervisor throughout this program. We learned technical skills, project management and inter-personal communication, made new friends and honed our character. The lessons about appreciation of one another, timely and transparent communication will remain our key takeaways regardless of our career in the future.</p>
<p>We really hope that RGSoC and other similar programs will multiply and widen their impact all over the world. Inspirational women and supportive men from these initiatives will continue to advocate for more inclusive and fair education and job opportunities in tech industries.</p>
“Sometimes there's only one thing left to say - P.S. We Loved It... ”Taneea S Agrawaal and Vrinda Malhotrahttp://twitter.com/Team_Twitches2016-10-06T00:00:00+00:002016-10-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/twitches-say-goodbye<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/twitches-birthday.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Twitches at BBQ Nation! (Image Credits: Taneea's Sister)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="as-long-as-we-dont-die-this-is-gonna-be-one-hell-of-a-story"><em>“As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”</em></h3>
<p>We didn’t and it was. Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 is an experience we’re going to carry in our hearts till we’re plagued by old-age memory loss.</p>
<p>To say we have come far from what we were as programmers and individuals would be an understatement. When we first applied for RGSoC, we never imagined the wealth of knowledge or experience or memories that we would accumulate during these three months. From late night calls with our supervisor, Ramon, to basically being bullied into reading docs by our coach, Kuldeep, to stalking people on GitHub, we tried it all. We learned to work together - not just plan together, but to program as a pair too. We learned that recognising that you don’t know something or don’t understand something is the most important step of learning.</p>
<p>This summer gave a new meaning to try-till-you-succeed for us. Because yes, there were a lot of obstacles. Sometimes we fought over trivial things or couldn’t solve a problem no matter how much we tried and were just frustrated at the end of the day and didn’t want to update our log. But then, there was that pesky little mail that we received the next day about updating our daily log, and we just had to go back and give it another try! With the help of our mentors and coaches, we kept trying to work things out and we’re positive that all this learning and the figure-it-out attitude is going to take us far in life.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team_twitches-last-call.png" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Last Team Call of the Summer! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="ive-learned-that-home-isnt-a-place-its-a-feeling"><em>“I’ve learned that home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.”</em></h3>
<p>Coming to the most important part, we’d like to thank the following people (in no particular order of preference):</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>Ramon Huidobro:</strong> Thank you for being quirky, fun, chilled out, not-nagging, hating the organizational stuff, being supportive ALWAYS, and THANK YOU for being YOU. You were a supervisor (bad choice of word), mentor, coach, and friend ALL AT THE SAME TIME. This summer wouldn’t have been the same without your smiling face staring up at us every weekend of this past summer, and we definitely wouldn’t have made it through without your support.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Simon & Rory:</strong> You both have been the sweetest, kindest, and the MOST supportive project mentors anyone in this world has ever had. EVER. We appreciate all the guidance and the help that you both gave us throughout the summer, without fail. Simon, thank you for listening to our rants about Hound being annoying, and Rory, you know you’re picture perfect! We have loved every minute of contributing to OpenFarm and we hope to keep contributing for a very very long time.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Kashyap, Kuldeep, Sadiksha, Ankur and Akshay (our coaches):</strong> From late night Hangout calls to answering our queries while you were at work, you people have done it ALL. And that’s why you’re the best! Seriously, though we just couldn’t have done it without you responding to our SOS calls (“Please save me from Angular!”) and wouldn’t have been able to come this far without you explaining every tiny concept to us in detail. Thank You. So Much! Kashyap, you really do rock with Angular even if you think it’s rusty. Kuldeep, thank you for being there when nobody else was. (Literally, you were online at the oddest of hours!). Sadiksha, you were our first coach and you have been there for us every step of the way - from helping us with our applications to helping us find a place to stay in Berlin! Ankur, thanks for teaching us that the simplest solution is always the best solution - we know we can always rely on you and your advice! And finally, thank you Akshay, for teaching us to think about every aspect of the problem before finding a solution for it.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/twitches_coaches.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Twitches out for tacos! (Image Credits: Taco Bell Server)</i></small></font></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>Fellow RGSoC Teams:</strong> Thank you, ladies for being our involuntary support systems when we were feeling low. We have learned more from interacting with you than we could ever imagine. We love every song on our customized RGSoC playlist and we hope to keep adding onto that list. Do keep in touch, because we really will miss all of you!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Last but not the least, the RGSoC organisers:</strong> You were amazing. Ana, you make beautiful videos! We wish we could make them half as well as you do! Maria, thank you so much for sticking with us and telling us about all the possible conferences! Laura, getting those first few mails from you was life-altering and we hope you deliver as much joy to other teams in the future as you did to us. And thank you, Anika, for starting this wonderful initiative of getting more women into open source. We hope to continue what you’ve started in our own city!</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="shoot-for-the-moon-even-if-you-fail-youll-land-among-the-stars"><em>“Shoot for the moon, even if you fail, you’ll land among the stars”</em></h3>
<p>By working with such a diverse community - our own team consisted of people from three different continents and four different countries - we learned to appreciate the little things in life, like when that one hound comment that is haunting you finally gets resolved or that simple ‘well done’ from your mentor or simply being up all night, trying to work but mostly just laughing about random things with your friends. We learned to aim high while still being practical. These are not things anybody can teach you - these are realizations that come from within and strike you like lightening, but stay with you forever (sort of like Flash’s powers).</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/twitches-dance.gif" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Twitches dancing! (Image Credits: Giphy.com)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="key-learnings">Key Learnings:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Try, try and try till you succeed!</li>
<li>OpenFarm’s Hound lacks “practicality” (Simon’s words!)</li>
<li>Nothing is unachievable. It’s us who make it so.</li>
<li>Pair programming is fun and entertaining.</li>
<li>Never go at war with Angular. You won’t make it out alive.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="be-brave-take-risks-nothing-can-substitute-experience"><em>“Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.”</em></h3>
<font color="#D82222"><small>Disclaimer: A special thanks to John Green, Cecelia Ahern and Paolo Coelho for being amazing writers and providing us with quotes that we'll carry with us till the end of time.</small></font>
After RGSoC is Before RGSoCLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-10-05T00:00:00+00:002016-10-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/after-rgsoc-is-before-rgsoc<p>Last week, teams around the world celebrated their very last day of RGSoC 2016. While we were all sad to see the Summer of Code end, we also know that for most of us this isn’t an end — it’s a new beginning! But before diving into the future, let’s take a look at what happened in the past three months…</p>
<h3 id="some-stats-about-the-summer">Some stats about the summer</h3>
<p>We foster an environment of learning during our program, which is why we don’t compare teams with each other. Every team is different, and because of the different types of projects all work on, their summer will lead to bigger or smaller code contributions. But since we do love statistics of all kind, we kept track of some numbers for everybody’s enjoyment. Here they are:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/after-rgsoc-stats.png" alt="RGSoC 2016 Stats" />
<span><font color="grey"><small><i>Look at all the things that happened! (Image: Laura Gaetano)</i></small></font></span></p>
<h3 id="were-changing-lives-thanks-to-you">We’re changing lives thanks to you</h3>
<p>This year has been an amazing one — and after receiving a Ruby Award from the community last May, we are realising just how many lives have changed through Rails Girls Summer of Code. This change would not be possible if it wasn’t for you. <strong>Thank you so much to all of you</strong>—to every single person who was involved in making this summer unforgettable for 20 participating teams. We are so grateful to <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">all the sponsors</a> who supported our students financially — a special thank you goes to our partners <a href="http://travis-ci.com/">Travis CI</a> and <a href="http://github.com/">GitHub</a>, our platinum sponsor <a href="https://developers.google.com/open-source">Google Open Source</a> and our gold sponsors: <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/">GitLab</a>, <a href="https://basecamp.com/">Basecamp</a>, <a href="http://www.malwarebytes.org/">Malwarebytes</a>, <a href="https://www.honeybadger.io/">Honeybadger</a>, <a href="https://compose.io/">Compose</a> and <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/">Mozilla</a>. A giant thank you also to the individuals who donated what they could to support our program, to the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/coaching-companies/">coaching companies</a> who hosted our teams this summer, the coaches and mentors who gave their time and expertise to help our participants daily, the supervisors who helped keep all the students focused on their goals, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/conferences/#conferences">the conferences</a> that donated tickets for our teams, and the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/code-of-conduct/#contact">trust committee</a> for offering an ear to anyone who needed help. Last but not least, <strong>an enormous thank you to <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/team/">all the volunteers</a> who make RGSoC happen every year</strong>. It’s a gigantic team effort, and we rely on so many amazing people for their design skills, development powers, organisational abilities, and communication know-how. So to Ana, Anika, Carsten, Emi, Ines, Katrin, Lieke, Linda, Lucas, Maria, Markus, Max, Natti, Ramon, Vaishali: Thank you for being there, and for making this program run as smoothly as it could have run. <strong>You’re the best!</strong> <3</p>
<h3 id="the-very-last-day-of-rgsoc-in-twitter-moments">The very last day of RGSoC in twitter moments</h3>
<p>To finish it all off, we’ve collected all of the tweets about the celebrations around the world, thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/i/moments/781856123217448960">Twitter Moments</a>. Look at these many happy faces!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/after-rgsoc-tweet.png" alt="Excerpt from Twitter Moment: celebration at SoundCloud" />
<span><font color="grey"><small><i>End-of-Summer celebration at SoundCloud (Image: Anika Lindtner)</i></small></font></span></p>
<h3 id="whats-next">What’s next?</h3>
<p>After the summer is before the summer! In October, we will tie all loose ends and, believe it or not, start working on the 2017 edition of RGSoC. We’re getting most of the team together in Portugal, after <a href="http://rubyconf.pt/">RubyConfPT</a>, to talk about our future plans: improving the program to make the experience for every one even better next year. If you happen to be around in Braga on October 27–28, come say hi! We’d love to chat.
We’ll also be looking for volunteers, organisers, and anyone who wants to lend a hand. If this is something that interests you, <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">drop us a line</a>.</p>
<p>Have a wonderful autumn, and see you next year!</p>
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KaUlah Team says GoodbyeKatarzyna and Ulahttp://twitter.com/KaUlah_Team2016-10-04T00:00:00+00:002016-10-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/kaulah-end-of-rgsoc<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code is over. It was very intensive, with ups and downs time, but thanks to our whole team it was also very successful. For the all summer we were working on GitLab Community Edition which provides Git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. We would like to share our experience gained during RGSoC project, what have we learnt, what have we done. This is a short summary of our summer.</p>
<h3 id="what-have-we-learnt"><em>What have we learnt</em></h3>
<ul>
<li>Contribute to Open Source Project.</li>
<li>Working with Git, which looks quite different in project with 1000 contributors than a project which has only one contributor.</li>
<li>About remote work - organizing time, scheduling tasks, self discipline.</li>
<li>How to write clean code in Ruby, code refactoring, new methods, new approach.</li>
<li>Rspec - tests, tests and more tests, which gave you more confidence and are very important because allow you to achieve better understanding of what you do.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-have-we-done"><em>What have we done</em></h3>
<p>During these three months we have opened 21 merge request, 17 was merged and opened one Issue. We were doing frontend and backend Issues. From creating tabs, editing views, updating gems to more complicated tasks like editing functionality of merge request or writing an API. Full list of our Merge Requests that we have written and in other ways we have contributed to during GitLab project you can find below:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kaulah_kradydal_mr.png" alt="GitLab dashboard" /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kaulah_ubudzisz_mr.png" alt="GitLab dashboard" />
<span><font color="grey"><small><i>Our merge requests opened, closed, merged during three months. (Source: gitlab.com)</i></small></font></span></p>
<p>We couldn’t have make it without a lot of amazing people, it was inspiring to see how they work and we hopefully someday we can help to others, same as they did. Many thanks goes to:</p>
<p><strong>Coaches:</strong> Grzegorz, Piotr, Tomasz and Tomasz for all your patience, support and knowledge when we stuck in code.</p>
<p><strong>Mentor:</strong> Yorick, who let us to work in different kinds of issues, who was coaching us and helping on daily basis.</p>
<p><strong>GitLab team:</strong> Remy, Douwee, Annabel, Phil, Faith, Kamil, Zj and others for your advices, code reviews, spelling checks and many more.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kaulah_codemotion.jpg" alt="Codemotion Warsaw" />
<span><font color="grey"><small><i>With our coaches from GitLab. (Source: KaUlah)</i></small></font></span></p>
<p>Also we would like to thanks to our supervisor Lucas, who always remembered about organizing things and RGSoC Organizers and Sponsors for selecting us and making this summer possible.</p>
<h3 id="codemotion"><em>Codemotion</em></h3>
<p>On 15th - 16th September we attend the Codemotion Warsaw 2016 Conference. This was a special event for us, not only because of talks but also we meet our remote coaches from GitLab and talk with RubyCats Team and people from Rebased. For a warm-up we’ve listen to keynote hosted by James Weaver “Navigating all the knowledge”, where we saw how to use programming to find connections between people, things, etc. Conference programme included wide range of interests like TDD techniques, Internet of Things, Machine learning, Agile manifesto, JS, Regex, Continous Integration, Communication and so on. Thanks to RGSoC we spent ispiring time.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kaulah_codemotion_conference.jpg" alt="Conference Codemotion Warsaw" />
<span><font color="grey"><small><i>Source: KaUlah</i></small></font></span></p>
<h3 id="what-are-our-plans"><em>What are our plans</em></h3>
<p><strong>Ula:</strong> I’ve left my job before starting the Summer of Code, so now I’am looking for a new one, or an internship. I hope after RGSoC it will be easier to change my career path.</p>
<p><strong>Kasia:</strong> I’ve got an job offer as a Junior Ruby on Rails Developer what is great especially that two years ago I didn’t even known what is Ruby. I know that without RGSoC and contributing to GitLab CE it wouldn’t be possible.</p>
XYZ team sailing offVeronika and Dariahttp://twitter.com/xyzcoode2016-10-01T00:00:00+00:002016-10-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/goodbye-xyz<p>Trees are changing colours of their leaves, kids have started school again and coffee chains are once again selling pumpkin flavoured coffee. That’s a clear sign that the summer is now officially over, and so is our Rails Girls Summer of Code experience.</p>
<h2 id="what-have-we-done">What have we done</h2>
<p>We feel like we have made a significant progress during our Rails Girls Summer of Code.
Here’s the list of features we have written and other ways we have contributed to the KeystoneJS project:</p>
<ul>
<li>Wrote <code class="highlighter-rouge">max</code> characters option for the Text field</li>
<li>Came up with <code class="highlighter-rouge">min</code> characters option for the Text field</li>
<li>Implemented smooth scrolling after updating an item in Admin</li>
<li>Wrote <code class="highlighter-rouge">complexity</code> option for the Password field</li>
<li>Added <code class="highlighter-rouge">max</code> characters option for the Password field</li>
<li>Reviewed and edited existing documentation, moving it back to the main repo</li>
<li>Added missing documentation for <code class="highlighter-rouge">numberArray</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">dateArray</code> and <code class="highlighter-rouge">geoPoint</code> fields</li>
<li>Documented the features we had written</li>
<li>Wrote <code class="highlighter-rouge">twitter</code> field type</li>
<li>Wrote a user guide for creating a blog with KeystoneJS</li>
<li>Designed and coded the list visualization for the Admin</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/xyz-work.jpg" alt="xyz-work" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Images by Team XYZ)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="what-have-we-learned">What have we learned</h2>
<p>We have become much more comfortable working with git. We both had some limited experience with it already, but contributing to an open source project is a whole different use case, so we gained some priceless insights and learned many useful commands (and practiced using them every day).</p>
<p>We are also a lot more confident about JavaScript; there were lots of lines of code that we have explored, analyzed, copy-pasted and, of course, also written from scratch.</p>
<p>Beside plain JavaScript and Node.js, we have also learned about ReactJS, Redux and Mongoose, by means of coaching sessions, reading documentation, working through online tutorials and self study.</p>
<p>Last but not least, we have exercised our patience, perseverance and determination when we were overcoming difficult and frustrating moments.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/xyz-coaches.jpg" alt="xyz-coaches" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Images by Team XYZ)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="what-are-our-plans">What are our plans</h2>
<p>Daria will now go back to her freelancing activities, but she will try to work on more challenging projects with the aim to transition into JavaScript frontend development.</p>
<p>Veronika had left her customer service job just before starting the Summer of Code, so now she is on a lookout for a new job, or possibly an internship opportunity. Hopefully she will find something soon and will continue on her path to becoming a better programmer.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/xyz-us.jpg" alt="xyz-us" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Images by Team XYZ)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="thank-you">Thank you</h2>
<p>We would like to use this opportunity to extend our warmest thanks to all the people who supported us.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Our coaches</strong>: Jano and Josef, you are the best coaches we could have! We are immensely grateful for all your help.</li>
<li><strong>Our mentors</strong>: Max and Jed, it has been a real pleasure working with you! It is inspiring to see how deep your knowledge and expertise is, and we hope one day we can get at least half way where you are.</li>
<li><strong>Our supervisor</strong>: Sofia, thanks for all your support, for sharing your own RGSoC experience with us, and for being always there when we needed you.</li>
<li><strong>RGSoC Organizers</strong>: Thank you for selecting us to be part of the programme and giving us this incredible opportunity!</li>
<li><strong>RGSoC Sponsors</strong>: Thank you for making it possible for us to ditch everything else for three months and dive full-time into learning!</li>
<li><strong>Our friends and community</strong>: Thank you for bearing with us and supporting us while we were engaged in our RGSoC project. Women in Tech Prague, we value your support and feedback, and we can’t wait to get back to our organizer duties and reconnect with all of you!</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/xyz-community.jpg" alt="xyz-community" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Images by Team XYZ)</i></small></font>
The end of an amazing summer(winter) of code.Ramyahttp://twitter.com/ramya6902016-09-30T00:00:00+00:002016-09-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/The-end-of-an-amazing-summer(winter)-of-code<p>The Rails Girls Summer of Code is one of the best things that happened to me. After finishing my course at the university I got an opportunity to take part in the program representing the Melbourne team.
I was very happy and excited by the fact that I will be contributing to an Open source project for 3 months under the guidance of all the coaches and <a href="https://twitter.com/kytrinyx">Katrina Owen</a> as a mentor. And yes, it was kicked off on 1st of July!</p>
<p>I worked on the project <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism</a> and contributed to both x-api and its web client and following summarizes the skills that I have gained over the past three months.</p>
<p><strong>Ruby</strong>: Prior to this, I had worked on other object oriented programming language like Java. The biggest challenge for me was picking up Ruby and writing clean and elegant ruby code. Thanks to all coaches I got improved by the end of the program.</p>
<p><strong>GIT</strong>: I learnt many useful techniques about GIT like squashing the commits, cherry pick the commits, rebasing and more. It was useful to know how important to write meaningful commit messages, titles and descriptions for PR especially when working on open source projects.</p>
<p><strong>Test driven development</strong>: I learnt Minitest testing framework when working on different issues. Writing tests first helped me understand what I really want from the code. It ensures changes and new code don’t break the expectations of existing code. I had a good fun writing code to pass tests and then refactor the code and see if it still passes my test.</p>
<p>Working with people geek company like Culture Amp I learnt many things. Attending their culture x design was very useful. Few take away points:</p>
<ul>
<li>Stay positive at the work, including with the people that are working with us.</li>
<li>Treating coworkers with respect and do our best to see issues from
their point of view.</li>
<li>Being open to feedback can give us an awareness of blind spots, help us to learn, and become better at what we do.</li>
</ul>
<p>It was a great pleasure working with these amazing minds.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/goodbye-from-vegemite.jpg" alt="Team Vegemite" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Ramya (Image: Team Vegemite)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Overall it was a great program once again! Setting the personal goals and working towards them was the only key I followed. At the end, I am employed as a full-time software engineer. I would like to thank Rails Girls Summer of Code for giving me this opportunity and each and everyone who have helped and supported me during this journey.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/vegemite-farewell.jpg" alt="Team Vegemite" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Ramya (Image: Team Vegemite)</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong>Whats next?</strong></p>
<p>I am happy to help other women who want to take part in the program next year. Well, I liked contributing to open source projects where you get the opportunity to work with so many amazing people. So I will be keep trying and learning new things and keep having fun.</p>
RubyCats at Codemotion Warsaw and EuRuKo!Iza & Kingahttp://twitter.com/RubyCatsTeam2016-09-29T00:00:00+00:002016-09-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rubycats-at-codemotion-warsaw-and-euruko<h2 id="span-classcolor-redcodemotion-warsaw-2016-conferencespan"><span class="color-red">Codemotion Warsaw 2016 Conference</span></h2>
<p>On 15-16 September we had a chance to participate in an awesome event – Codemotion Warsaw 2016 Conference. Many interesting talks and people! But let’s start from the beginning.</p>
<p>We started with keynote by James Weaver about “Navigating all the knowledge”. It was fascinating to see how we can look for what particular records, e.g. people, genes etc., have in common. One of exercise case was what Michał Pazdan and Robert Lewandowski have in common ;)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-weaver.jpg" alt="James Weaver" /><font color="grey"><small><i>James Weaver (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Next we went to “Understanding legacy untested code via Exporatory TDD technique” by Oleksii Fedorov (Pivotal Labs). We were told what a mutation is, how to test the code step by step, what to do when we face big refactories.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-fedorov.jpg" alt="Oleksii Fedorov" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Oleksii Fedorov (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Alina Gnerre (Class-it) presented “Use of gamification techniques in app UX for smart cities projects” showing some success stories and examples like iCity and NotiCity. We also learned about gamification and smart cities concepts.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-Gnerre.jpg" alt="Alina Gnerre" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Alina Gnerre (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Iryna Nezhynska (Visual Designer) in her talk “Beyond product features: how to get noticed by early adopters” taught us about emotional and psychological aspects of customer positioning and tying the customer with the product.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-nezhynska.jpg" alt="Iryna Nezhynska" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Iryna Nezhynska (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Florin Patan (YouView TV Ltd.) convinced us, why we should consider “Getting started with Go”. He mentioned many pros of Go, editors, users, libraries and resources.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-patan.jpg" alt="Florin Patan" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Florin Patan (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>“Agile used to be really cool” by Wojtek Erbetowski (Growbots) was a set of important notices about working with other people and some time for breathing deeply while meditating.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-Erbetowski.jpg" alt="Wojtek Erbetowski" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Wojtek Erbetowski (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>“The first fifteen lives of a software engineer” were described with humor by Nikos Zinas (Workday). The speaker took us on a journey through different stages in dev’s life. He told us what went good, what went wrong, what’s the best environment to grow.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-zinas.jpg" alt="Nikos Zinas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Nikos Zinas (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The first Codemotion Warsaw 2016 day ended with a nice afterparty, where you could talk to interesting people in a comfortable atmosphere.</p>
<p>Having a very positive experience from the first day we came for the second. And we weren’t disappointed :)</p>
<p>“Reverse engineering the clean code” by Jakub Marchwicki (108 creations) was a really thought-provoking speech about i.a. implementation patterns, UX mistakes, design incl. API design etc. and memory model.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-Marchwicki.jpg" alt="Jakub Marchwicki" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Jakub Marchwicki (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Then we went through “Google Dataflow: The new open model for batch and stream processing” thanks to Robert Kubis (Google UK Ltd.), who talked about different dataflow options and changes in time.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-kubis.jpg" alt="Robert Kubis" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Robert Kubis (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>“Nobody likes working with you” by Luis G. Valle (Novoda) was a funny, but also very thought-provoking and important talk about rules of good communication and cooperation.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-valle.jpg" alt="Luis G. Valle" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Luis G. Valle (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>In “Breaking Bad with GitLab CI” Ivan Nemytchenko (Developer Advocate – GitLab) told that one of bad habits is not automatizing the routine tasks. Bad habits may be caused by fear of CI system, of installing, configuring, learning and using new tool.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-nemytchenko.jpg" alt="Ivan Nemytchenko" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Ivan Nemytchenko (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>“Regex fundamentals” was explained by Juliette Reinders Folmer (Advies en zo) in a very engaging and positive way. We learned about regex usage, users, result types, engines, terminology, syntax and testing.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-codemo-Folmer.jpg" alt="Juliette Reinders Folmer" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Juliette Reinders Folmer (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Codemotion Warsaw 2016 was not only extremely interesting, but also so well organized that we were surprized to hear it was the first Codemo in Warsaw ever. We both were lucky to catch Codemotion Warsaw t-shirts at the ending ceremony. Yes, CATCH because they were thrown in the air! :D We were also happy to have another chance to meet with KaUlah Team again. And we couldn’t wait for EuRuKo and meeting Team Joda there :) And we’re looking forward to another Codemotion conference!</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redeuruko-2016span"><span class="color-red">EuRuKo 2016</span></h2>
<p>On the 23-24th of September we were happy to attend EuRuKo 2016 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. It was our first time in this city and of course at EuRuKo. And we were to give our first lighting talk in front of such a big audience.</p>
<p>What we noticed just after /or even before ;)/ our plane landed, Sofia is a beautiful place, with an original atmosphere and surrounded by mountains.</p>
<p>We had luck to be hosted by Adam Niedzielski, a programmer from Poland now living in Berlin, supporting Rails Girls Summer of Code and active in our helpdesk channel.</p>
<p>We came to Sofia on the 22nd of September in the early afternoon. EuRuKo organizers came up with the idea of having pre-event gathering this day at CowOrKing Space by Puzl. It’s a very nice, quite a new place for co-working in Sofia. We had the opportunity to chat with some nice people before the official start of the conference.</p>
<p>EuRuKo took place in a cool venue – National Palace of Culture /NDK/ with a beautiful panoramic view of the city.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-venue.jpg" alt="NDK" /><font color="grey"><small><i>NDK (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-view.JPG" alt="View from NDK" /><font color="grey"><small><i>View from NDK (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>It started with a Keynote by Yukihiro Matsumoto, who told about Ruby development plans and what we can expect from Ruby 3. And when ;) And about reducing our brain consumption. ;)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-matz1.JPG" alt="Matz" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Matz (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Then Xavier Noria in his “Little Snippets” talked about making good quality code and good quality social relations e.g. how to discuss different approaches to solving the problem and that the greatest quality the programmer can have is empathy /for maintainers of our code/.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-noria.jpg" alt="Xavier Noria" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Xavier Noria (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>“Rules, Laws and Gentle Guidelines” were presented by Andrew Radev. It was i.a. about the law of Demeter, not making commits at 3 a.m. and that for some devs for some reasons it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-radev.jpg" alt="Andrew Radev" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Andrew Radev (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Amazing blue hat wearer, rubykaraoke & Rails Girls supporter Terence Lee showed us how to work with Kafka logs, events and streams in ”Simplifying Logs, Events, and Streams: Kafka + Rails”.</p>
<p>And then subject of “GraphQL On Rails” was covered in detail by Marc-Andre Giroux.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-giroux.jpg" alt="Marc-Andre Giroux" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Marc-Andre Giroux (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Gorgeous Grace Chang talked about how Yammer went from having a single person as an on-call engineer, to a team that satisfies customer needs in “Herding Cats to a Firefight: The evolution of an engineering on-call team”.</p>
<p>The last speech of the first day was about “How Sprockets Work” by Rafael Mendonça França.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-franca.jpg" alt="Rafael Mendonça França" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Rafael Mendonça França (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>So we came to the Lightning Talks. Ours was the third, just after Team Joda’s. We talked about how it is to be a total newbie in the world of programming by the example of our own histories – from our coding beginnings to Rails Girls Summer of Code. You can see our slides <a href="http://slides.com/rubycats/deck">here</a>. We had some positive feedback after our LT, for which we are very grateful.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-lt1.JPG" alt="LT list" /><font color="grey"><small><i>LT list (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-lt2.jpg" alt="RubyCats' LT" /><font color="grey"><small><i>RubyCats' LT (Image thanks to Team Joda)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The evening was for social events. First we had a supper with Team Joda, our coach Basia and some other friends. After that we went to EuRuKo official afterparty in the Mixtape5 club. We took part in voting for EuRuKo 2017 hosting city. We voted for Budapest and it won, having just a few votes more than Rome! And then there was a lot of dancing and trying to chat with people /it wasn’t easy to hear each other ;)/. We want to thank all of you, who approached us with some kind words about our lightning talk!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-voting.jpg" alt="Budapest won!" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Budapest won! (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The second day of EuRuKo started with another programming language creator’s speech – with “Idioms For Building Distributed Fault-Tolerant Applications With Elixir” by José Valim. The speaker provided a lot of information about Elixir and technological challenges like a need to use all cores when doing anything with computers.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-valim.jpg" alt="José Valim" /><font color="grey"><small><i>José Valim (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Advanced developers got instructions on “How To Begin To Develop Ruby Core” by Hiroshi Shibata /incl. merging, testing, reporting bugs/ .</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-shibata.jpg" alt="Hiroshi Shibata" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Hiroshi Shibata (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Carina C. Zona gave an amazing speech about “Consequence Of An Insightful Algorithm”. She showed how important it is to use a proper algorithm, as there’s a risk of harming people imposed on it. We listened to it with bated breath.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-zona.jpg" alt="Carina C. Zona" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Carina C. Zona (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Anton Davydov in his “Viewing Ruby Blossom” presented us the charming Hanami framework.</p>
<p>Ivan Nemytchenko explained “What Have I /has he ;)/ Learned From Organizing Remote Internship For Ruby Developers”. He presented us the requirements for interns, their needs and what they can get from internship. The speaker talked also about common mistakes made by interns and problems that can occur in a team. Then about what went wrong and what went right during his “experiment” and what are the conclusions. Another interesting parts was a graph of usefulness showing the real progress in time, advantages of contributing to open source and how to reconcile the needs of different team members, including seniors and juniors. And lots of cool drawing as usual :)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-nemytchenko.jpg" alt="Ivan Nemytchenko" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Ivan Nemytchenko (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>André Arko showed us advantages of having paid project team instead of only volunteers. He also told us what is planned about development of Bundler and Gemstash, as well as about the Ruby Together community.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-arko.jpg" alt="André Arko" /><font color="grey"><small><i>André Arko (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Nick Sutterer made us aware of thinking restrictions caused by MVC obssession and what API changes are needed.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-sutterer.jpg" alt="Nick Sutterer" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Nick Sutterer (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>And guess what – there was another afterparty in the evening ;)</p>
<p>What we strongly liked about EuRuKo and especially miss now was the people side of the event. We met and talked to many nice people. We fulfilled our dream of meeting Matz in person. Unfortunately we didn’t catch José Valim, but maybe it will be possible even in Poland :) We also have new cat-friends in Sofia, met during lunches near NDK.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-matz2.jpg" alt="RubyCats with Matz" /><font color="grey"><small><i>RubyCats with Matz (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats-euruko-cat.jpg" alt="RubyCats and one of new cat-friends" /><font color="grey"><small><i>RubyCats and one of new cat-friends (Image: RubyCats Team)</i></small></font></p>
<p>We’re very sad that wonderful EuRuKo is over and look forward to EuRuKo 2017 in Budapest!</p>
Almost done jammin'Jeena Lee and Malisa Smithhttp://twitter.com/rgsocJaM2016-09-28T00:00:00+00:002016-09-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/almost-done-jammin<p>Summer is over! Sadly this means our summer of code is also coming to an end.</p>
<h3 id="what-have-we-accomplished-so-far">What have we accomplished so far?</h3>
<p>First of all, we learned <em>a lot</em> about <strong><em>everything</em></strong>! If we were to categorize the technical things we learned, it would be:</p>
<ul>
<li>computers (the heap and stack, garbage collection, unicode)</li>
<li>internet and things (DNS, IP, HTTP, web browser engine, JS engine)</li>
<li>Rust (memory-safe language that’s also easy to use!)</li>
</ul>
<p>As a bonus, we learned about what makes a good project good, how to motivate people to learn, and how to motivate ourselves to continue learning.</p>
<p>In terms of project related accomplishments, we have implemented the Headers, Request, and Response APIs. We have also added support for the Fetch method, and hopefully we are almost done with implementing Body mixin methods! Throughout this journey, we also discovered ambiguous wording and bugs in the Fetch spec. These improvements have come in the form of submitting 17 pull requests to <a href="https://github.com/servo/servo">Servo</a> and opening 5 issues at <a href="https://github.com/whatwg/fetch">WHATWG</a>. How exciting! A lot of the groundwork was already done (thank you Servo contributors!), which made our project so much more tangible and productive.</p>
<h3 id="fetch-in-action">Fetch in action!</h3>
<p>Below is a simple example of fetch usage in locally built Servo.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-jam-fetch-example.gif" alt="Go fetch!" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Watch Servo making fetch happen! (gif: Team JaM)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="going-to-conferences">Going to conferences</h3>
<p><strong>RustConf</strong>
<br />
We attended the first ever <a href="http://rustconf.com/">RustConf</a>. We were so lucky that it happened to be in our city, Portland, OR. We had a great time meeting other people who like Rust and learned a lot from the informative talks! Many thanks to RustConf organizers for granting us a day full of fun and learning.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://jeenalee.com/2016/09/23/rust-conf.html">Jeena’s blog post about RustConf</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Strange Loop</strong>
<br />
We also went to <a href="http://thestrangeloop.com/">Strange Loop</a> in St. Louis, MO!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-jam-strange-loop-silly.png" alt="Strange Loop 2016" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Having fun at the City Museum in St. Louis! X) Also featured: Ore from Team B'More Stunners and our coach Nick! (photo: Team JaM)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Strange Loop was a large conference; this year, there were over 1000 attendants and 5 talks going on at once. We learned about many concepts that we were unfamiliar with, such as lambda calculus, turing machines, scheduling algorithms, and computational origami. We came back with a long list of things we want to learn deeper, which made us happy. We are grateful to Strange Loop and Rails Girls Summer of Code for the opportunity to learn new things!</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://jeenalee.com/2016/09/27/strange-loop.html">Jeena’s blog post about StrangeLoop</a></li>
<li><a href="http://hellomalisa.me/2016-09-20/rustconf-and-strange-loop.html">Malisa’s blog post about RustConf and StrangeLoop</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="many-many-thanks-to">Many <em>many</em> thanks to…</h3>
<ul>
<li>Our mentor, Josh Matthews (aka jdm). Thank you, jdm, for your boundless patience while we learned the ropes, and for your easily digestable explanations of how Servo works! We asked a LOT of questions. jdm also gave a great talk about <a href="http://www.joshmatthews.net/oscon16/">Optimizing Open Source Projects for Contribution</a>! By the way, we’re half-convinced jdm has both a crystal ball and a time machine at his disposal.</li>
<li>Our supervisor, <a href="http://scottontheinter.net/">Scott Kobewka</a>. We always finished our weekly video calls feeling better about how much we’ve accomplished, even when we sometimes felt like we were moving at a snail’s pace! Only one more call left ;( ….</li>
<li>Our coach <a href="https://twitter.com/fitzgen">Nick</a>. Nick was our go-to person for Rust questions and had our back whenever we (the front-line) were battling with the borrow-checker. As a Mozilla employee, he also knows a lot about Servo design, which was super helpful. Thanks, Nick!</li>
<li>Our coach <a href="https://twitter.com/datahipster">Stefan</a>. We went to Stefan for all things git and web-related. Even when we sort of knew <em>how</em> to implement fetch, we were confused about <em>why</em> we were implementing fetch. Stefan helped clear that up for us!</li>
<li>Tons of people from the Servo and Rust communities! Everyone on IRC and github was so responsive and helpful, we feel so warm and fuzzy all over. :) Thanks to <a href="http://manishearth.github.io/">Manish</a> for taking time to help us with tricky Servo questions, even with the wacky time-zone situation. Thanks also to <a href="https://annevankesteren.nl/">annevk</a> for helping us understand the <a href="https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/">Fetch Spec</a>, <a href="https://github.com/seanmonstar">seanmonstar</a> for help with <a href="http://hyper.rs/">hyper</a>, <a href="https://github.com/KiChjang">KiChjang</a> for his feedback and Rust tips, and many, many more people…!</li>
<li>And, of course, a giant thank you to everyone at Rails Girls Summer of Code who made this summer possible! <3 <3</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="so-whats-next">So, what’s next?</h3>
<p>We hope to have implemented a large chunk of the Body mixin by end of this week. After that, well, we both liked contributing to Servo so much that we plan on continuing to contribute. We’re really proud of what we’ve accomplished in the last three months. Now that we know what we’re capable of, nothing can stop us from trying and learning new things!</p>
“At an end your [summer] is, and not [long] enough it was!”Johanna Lang and Dayana Mickhttp://twitter.com/Teamjoda20162016-09-26T00:00:00+00:002016-09-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-joda-says-goodbye<p>It has been a summer full of some happy coincidences and one we have just discovered is that apart from having a <em>Star Wars</em> related name like the <a href="https://twitter.com/code_padawans">Coding Padawans</a>, we, <a href="https://twitter.com/Teamjoda2016">Team Joda</a> are writing our blog exactly two years after they published <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/code_padawans-2014">it</a> 😉 and are getting ready to end our coding journey as <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> students.</p>
<h3 id="role-models">Role Models</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-joda-amazing-women.jpg" alt="Amazing Role Models" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Amazing Role Models (Image: Team joda, Technique: Collage)</i></small></font></p>
<p>This has been a very cool journey indeed, through which we got to meet many inspiring women and learn about their coding journeys as well. We shared our stories and motivated each other: We had lunch several times at SoundCloud with team <a href="https://twitter.com/loadtocode">LoadtoCode</a> and we also met team <a href="https://twitter.com/TKindr3d">Kindr3d</a>, when they came to Berlin for a couple of conferences. Then, we even got to meet the <a href="https://twitter.com/RubyCatsTeam">RubyCats</a> during <a href="http://euruko2016.org/">EuRuKo 2016</a>. Furthermore, Ellen (one of our coaches), Duana and Tam (our mentors) and Nynne (a RGSoC alumna, who worked last year on the same project) have been incredible role models that continuously embolden us throughout our coding paths.</p>
<h3 id="our-project-and-lessons-learned">Our Project and Lessons Learned</h3>
<p>As we mentioned in our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-07-14-team-joda-says-hello">first post</a>, our project is <a href="http://sounddrop.audio/">SoundDrop</a>. By working on this project closely together and having a great team of supporters, we acquired and improved both our technical, as well as our communication skills: We learned to ask more precise questions, to research better for solutions, to try things out from different perspectives and to talk about our problems and boundaries to be able to get along throughout the summer. Working on a project so closely can be very challenging: It is like having a travel companion with which you do everything together and with whom you have to talk often, to make sure you are not stepping on each others’ toes. So even if our communication is not always perfect, we put a lot of effort and achieved the goals we had for the summer:</p>
<ul>
<li>We learned about APIs and could design and implement one for our project</li>
<li>We revamped the landing page with an embedded map in which you can see the drops that have been added</li>
<li>We added tags, so users can categorize their drops</li>
<li>Johanna made it possible for users to search drops according to tags</li>
<li>Dayana created a “My Drops” Page where users can see their drops on a map and a count of them.</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course this is work in progress and there is still much work to be done, but we’re satisfied with the results and looking forward to code more. Throughout this process we learned a lot about programming languages, servers and memory allocation among other topics and also began using awesome debugging tools such as Pry and Chrome’s developer tools. We also had to understand, and sometimes even refactor legacy code.</p>
<h3 id="conference-euruko-2016">Conference: EuRuKo 2016</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-joda-euruko.jpg" alt="euruko2016" /><font color="grey"><small><i>EuRuKo 2016 (Image: Team joda, Technique: Collage)</i></small></font></p>
<p>On September 23rd and 24th, we were able to attend our first international Ruby conference, <a href="http://euruko2016.org/">EuRuKo</a>, which was taking place this year in Sofia, Bulgaria (Thanks again to EuRuKo for providing free tickets!). Not only was EuRuKo our first big international conference, it was also the first one where we gave a lightning talk. We became quite nervous, when we realized in front of what a large audience we would speak and what famous and well known developers were attending. But the EuRuKo staff supported us very well and we quite enjoyed standing on stage, sharing our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> experience wrapped up in 5 minutes. We received a lot of positive feedback and people liked that we announced to be looking for jobs after Summer of Code ;)</p>
<p>Attending EuRuKo meant experiencing diversity in many different ways: The talks were both technical and non-technical. One talk that deeply impressed us was “Consequences of an Insightful Algorithm” by Carina C. Zona. She warned about negative impacts that errors in algorithms can have on people’s’ lives, e.g. when an automated tagging system categorizes a picture of a concentration camp as “playground” or when Facebook reminds you of a day you always wanted to forget. We were also impressed by José Valim talking about how and why he created <a href="http://elixir-lang.org/">Elixir</a> and to hear about the accomplishments of the awesome <a href="https://rubytogether.org/">Ruby Together</a> community that maintains some of the most important Ruby Gems (in their free time! Thanks!). During the breaks and the after party on Friday we got to meet a lot of Ruby enthusiasts from many different countries and backgrounds, e.g. our fellow RGSoC Team from Warsaw: The <a href="RubyCatsTeam">Ruby Cats</a>, some Rails Girls Sofia organizers with whom we could exchange experiences from putting together beginner workshops and - last but not least - we met Matz, the creator of the Ruby programming language!</p>
<p>In a nutshell, we had an amazing experience with many interesting people in a pulsating city and we are looking forward to EuRuKo 2017 in Budapest!</p>
<h3 id="what-comes-next">What Comes Next</h3>
<p>Now the last week of RGSoC has started and of course we are sad that these three months of intensive learning are soon to be over. But we are also looking forward to new challenges: continue contributing to SoundDrop (updating it to Rails 5 \o/), working on our own projects and applying for developer jobs. Or, as Yoda would put it:</p>
<p><em>“If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.”</em></p>
Amazing summer journey from RGSOC 2016 team Rookies :DHyeSoo and Tehetenahttp://twitter.com/hoodierookies2016-09-25T00:00:00+00:002016-09-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Amazing-summer-journey-from-RGSOC-2016-team-Rookies<p>Hey, we are Team <a href="https://twitter.com/hoodierookies">Rookies</a>. Our summer story begins with great excitement and our adventure is almost ending with happy memories. For 3 months, we have delved into JavaScript world, learning from the front-end to the back-end to make a Hoodie desktop application. We have learned how to handle events, how to make API, how to split the code efficiently with Riot.js and how to connect our project to the Hoodie server with Node.js and how to wrap the project with Electron Framework. When we look back our summer, it was not only about learning technologies but also about positive mindsets and enthusiastic attitudes. There were many important lessons and we were happy to achieve a lot of progress in our project. This growth of ours was impossible without kind supports and helps from RGSoC, Hoodie, mentors, coaches and supervisor.<br />
And,,,,, Now, are you ready to listen our amazing & exciting summer journey? :D</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-SummryJourney.jpg" alt="Summary of our Hoodie-RGSoC summer journey" /><br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>This is a visualization of our Hoodie-RGSoC summer journey. (Image: HyeSoo)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="positive-mindset--take-an-action">Positive mindset & Take an action</h2>
<p>It has been a happy summer for us to grow up and make progress in our <strong>Hoodie desktop application project</strong>. We have learned an invaluable mindset towards approaching the problems and taking an action. These days, IT industry is flooded with a lot of new technologies and we might feel overwhelmed sometimes. When we talked about this issue with the mentor and coaches, we learned a <strong>positive attitude</strong> from them. Instead of trying to cover all must-know new technologies, we can think of how we can move towards problems first and use the technologies as a tool to solve the problems. With this approach, we can have an open mind on challenges and required technologies than getting overwhelmed.<br />
We also have been wondering how we can write a clean and efficient code and how we can broaden our horizon as a developer. While we were talking with the mentor and coaches, we learned an important lesson. If we just read lots of books and do not <strong>take an action</strong> to make an application, we are likely to forget what we have read/studied. But if we practice what we read by getting our hands dirty by making actual applications, we can grasp more concrete concepts by experiences. We are happy that we can approach current/future projects with a positive mindset and walk through them in a better direction.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-Monthlycall.png" alt="2nd Monthly call with a mentor, coaches and a supervisor" /><br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Tehetena is in the center, from the bottom left are Esko, HyeSoo, Omid, Pilar and Gregor. (Image: Gregor)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="improvements-and-progress-of-team-rookies-project">Improvements and progress of Team Rookies’ project</h2>
<p>We also have made lots of changes to the code we made in the first month. First, we have learned lots of new concepts in <strong>JavaScript</strong>. We made 8 different kinds of event handlers to create/edit/update/cancel/delete/go back/start/stop applications. When we had the first response by clicking button with handlers, we were so happy. We also learned how to debug using ‘debugger’, ‘breakpoint’ and ‘watch’ in the browser from Gregor. With these methods, we were able to observe the code flow and expressions and find where an error comes from. There are no perfect applications and most of times, we try to improve our application by <strong>debugging</strong> or adding more features. They became very useful tools for fixing problems in our project.<br />
While implementing several features for our project, we used ‘event.preventDefault’ to make our custom event. For sorting the apps in the app list, we used ‘Array.prototype.filter()’ and for looking through the application, we used ‘Array.prototype.forEach()’, and ‘Array.prototype.map()’.<br />
We also learned two advanced JS topics. One is ‘promise’ and ‘closure’. We both have never worked with promise and closure before. It took us a while to grasp the concepts. Thanks to Gregor’s helpful tutorials, we have managed to work with promises for making our API work asynchronously and closure for our API safer from the scope of the anonymous function with a private variable.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-code.png" alt="Promise and Closure" /><br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>This is an example of our API which with promise and closure. (Image: Tehetena)</i></small></font>
<p>When we reviewed the code feedback done by Gregor, we learned how to clean up our current code and how to make an uniform format with a standard style throughout our code.<br />
The other important thing we have learned this month was working with APIs. In the beginning our application main.js file contained all its logics and methods on one long JavaScript file. Now we have tried to split the code into several different tags, using <strong>‘Riot.js’</strong>, so that we can manage our code more efficiently. <a href="https://github.com/gr2m/riot-router-example">Gregor’s example code</a> was very helpful to understand how to divide our application into several tags that will show and hide according to the routing.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-Hoodie-desktop-app.png" alt="The prototype of Hoodie Deskop Application" /><br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>This is the first prototype of Hoodie Desktop application. (Image: HyeSoo)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="our-plan-for-the-last-part-of-our-journey">Our plan for the last part of our journey</h2>
<p>Lastly, this month is our <strong>last part of our RGSoC journey</strong>. Time flies. We cannot believe we are already looking at the end of our journey.;D We have grown day by day compared to our beginning. In July, we did not know how to make event handler, API and how to clean up the code etc. But now we are more confident that we can implement interactive web pages and handle API to talk with server and retrieve data.<br />
In the monthly call, we planned our last month with Hoodie mentor Gregor, our coaches Omid & Esko and our supervisor Pilar. While we taught ourselves Riot.js, Gregor worked on the guidance of how to use Riot.js for our project to speed up our project. We tried to understand how Riot.js works for our project with coaches’ helps for several weeks. Since last week, we have studied Node.js and Electron framework to make our project interact with the real Hoodie server side and wrap up our current code with Electron framework. We hope that our <strong>first prototype of Hoodie Electron desktop application</strong> can be ready by the end of September.
We also talked about what we can do after this month in the monthly call. If it is possible, we would like to work as a contributor for the current project, so that if someone who is interested in this project have a question, we can help him/her and if there are errors or bugs, we want to try to solve the issues together in the future.<br />
Everyday we have felt so thankful for RGSoc, Hoodie mentor Gregor, coaches(Omid, Esko, Musse) and supervisor Pilar who have helped us a lot and supported us all the time. <strong>Thanks to their great encouragements and helps, we did not lose our confidence during the 3 month journey and we were able to move our steps forwards day by day.</strong><br />
‘Our last journey’ does not mean we will end our stories. We would like to continue working on our project after these happy and invaluable three months. If it can be helpful or interesting to someone, we also would like to share our stories with RGSoC communities.<br />
Thank you so much for the great opportunities and kind helps. We will not forget our 2016 amazing summer with RGSoC.<br />
Best wishes for all of us and RGSoC. cheers! ;D</p>
<p>For further information on repository of Hoodie desktop application, please visit team Rookies’ <a href="https://github.com/Rookies-RGSOC2016/hoodie-electron-app">repository</a> and for Hoodie, visit <a href="http://hood.ie/">hood.ie</a>.</p>
<p><3</p>
A Universe of Creativity and CuriosityMelissa Fabros and Patricia Arbonahttp://twitter.com/HeartRGSoC_sf2016-09-23T00:00:00+00:002016-09-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/github-universe<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/universe.png" alt="GitHub Universe Flag" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by Patricia Arbona</i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="and-so-day-one-of-github-universewwwgithubuniversecom-begins">And so Day One of <a href="www.githubuniverse.com/">Github Universe</a> begins!</h2>
<p>Github’s CEO Chris Wanstrath, also known as <a href="https://github.com/defunkt">defunkt</a>, commenced Github Universe by unveiling exciting, <a href="https://github.com/blog/2256-a-whole-new-github-universe-announcing-new-tools-forums-and-features">new features</a>.
Some of these new features included a refreshed redesign of Github’s profiles, unveiling the GraphQL API, and the project management tool Github Projects.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/octocat-on-top-of-warehouse.jpeg" alt="Octocat on Warehouse in Dogpatch" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by Patricia Arbona</i></small></font></p>
<p>Github Universe was located in a warehouse district near San Francisco’s Pier 70. On top of this warehouse was a giant Octocat!</p>
<p>In the main entrance of the conference, a majestic balloon Octocat strikes your eye.</p>
<p>We had came across Githubber Nikka Padilla.
<img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/octocat_nikka.png" alt="Posing with Nikka in front of Balloon Octocat" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/elom-gomez-2899162a">Elom Gomez</a></i></small></font></p>
<p>All throughout Github Universe, our team periodically kept running into friends, colleagues, and mentors.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/kraken.png" alt="Patrica Arbona and Emma Koszinowski" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/bekkamurphy">Rebekkah Murphy</a></i></small></font></p>
<p>In front of the Git Kraken, Patricia met <a href="https://twitter.com/emkosz">Emma Koszinowski</a>, one-half of San Francisco’s Rails Girls Summer of Code team from 2015…</p>
<p>…to later find the second-half of San Francisco’s RGSoC 2015 team, <a href="https://twitter.com/kisabelyogi">Karla Sandoval</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/karla-group.jpeg" alt="Karla and group" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by <a href="https://twitter.com/databyte">David Sommers</a></i></small></font></p>
<p>As fellows currently going through the program now,
it was valuable to hear about Karla’s and Emma’s challenges and successes with their Rails Girls project.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/hoodie-exercism-maintainers.jpeg" alt="Open Source talk" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by <a href="https://www.twitter.com/qh_murphy">Quinn Murphy</a></i></small></font></p>
<p>Our team attended the informative Open Source panel <em>Pains and Gains: Five Short Stories</em>, facilitated by <a href="https://github.com/kytrinyx">Katrina Owen</a>.
Each panelist illuminated upon a particular challenge they faced in Open Source, and what strategies they employed to go about solving their unique challenges.
After the panel, our team was fortunate enough to speak with two Rails Girls Summer of Code Project Maintainers,
<a href="https://twitter.com/kytrinyx">Katrina Owen</a>, author of <a href="exercism.io">exercism.io</a> and <a href="https://github.com/gr2m">Gregor Martynus</a>,
Chief Dream Officer of <a href="http://hood.ie/">Hoodie</a>.
Both Project Maintainers were welcoming, approachable, and humble in regards to their amazing accomplishments.</p>
<p>At the Heroku booth, our team was thrilled to meet up with an previous programming instructor, <a href="https://twitter.com/cdueltgen">Cynthia Dueltgen</a>.
Cynthia is currently having a fantastic experience as a Customer Solutions Architect at Heroku.
Our team thanked her for giving us foundational software development skills. Her patience teaching us difficult programming concepts was pivotal in our growth as software developers.
Cynthia was ecstatic to hear about our experiences in the world of Open Source!
<img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/cynthia-heroku-octocat.jpg" alt="Hanging out with Cynthia at Heroku" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/bekkamurphy">Rebekkah Murphy</a></i></small></font></p>
<p>We ended a jam-packed day with a Big-Bang Benefit Concert, with proceeds going to <a href="http://www.blackgirlscode.com/">Black Girls Who Code</a>.
Common’s lyrics and rhymes were powerful! Common has an amazing stage-presence. His lyrics were very politically-aware.
<img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/common-zoomed-out.jpeg" alt="Common rapping 2" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by Patricia Arbona</i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="on-day-two-of-github-universewwwgithubuniversecom">On Day Two of <a href="www.githubuniverse.com/">Github Universe</a></h2>
<p>Team Hackbrighters came across <a href="https://twitter.com/agelender">Amanda Gelender</a>, Senior Manager of Github’s Social Impact team.
Amanda made it possible for our team to be hosted by Github for the duration of our fellowship. We are extremely grateful for Amanda and the Social Impact team’s time and generosity.
Thank you for supporting women in Open Source!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/amanda-geller.jpeg" alt="Amanda Geller" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/bekkamurphy">Rebekkah Murphy</a></i></small></font></p>
<p>At lunch, our team met former GitHubbers <a href="https://www.twitter.com/bnferguson">Brandon Ferguson</a> and <a href="https://www.twitter.com/rachelmyers">Rachel Meyers</a>.
Brandon currently works at Travis CI, and Rachel was a Rails Girls Coach in 2015 and is founder of <a href="www.opsolutely.com">Opsolutely.com</a>.
Both imparted to us thoughtful advice in terms of how to grow professionally as a software developer.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/travis-ci-and-rachel-meyers.jpeg" alt="Brandon and Rachel" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by <a href="https://www.twitter.com/LynnWallenstein">Lynn Wallenstein</a></i></small></font></p>
<p>Our team attended an interesting Electron talk <em>Making Electron Development Simpler, More Pleasant, and More Productive</em> by Slack Desktop Engineer,
<a href="https://twitter.com/mnquintana">Machisté Quintana</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/machiste-electron.jpeg" alt="Electron talk" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Photo taken by Patricia Arbona</i></small></font></p>
<p>Machisté highlighted throughout his talk how there exist
unique challenges when working with Electron, a cross-platform framework for desktop apps.</p>
<p>We also came across Travis CI foundation’s booth.
Here we spoke with <a href="https://twitter.com/konstantinhaase">Konstantin Haas</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/roidrage">Mathias Meyer</a>,
and <a href="https://twitter.com/j2h">Josh Kalderimis</a> co-founders of Travis CI.
Past and current Rails Girls fellows thanked the Travis foundation for creating and funding our fellowship.
After intimately configuring and debugging Travis CI on <a href="https://www.github.com/lektor/lektor">Lektor</a>,
our team gave input as to how to improve the continuous integration system.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Github Universe/travis-ci-foundation-alumna.jpeg" alt="Travis CI foundation with current and past RGSoC alumna" /> <font><small><i>Photo taken by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/bekkamurphy">Rebekkah Murphy</a></i></small></font></p>
<p>Thank you Travis foundation for supporting past, current, and future women in Open Source.</p>
5 project management tipsMariahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-09-22T00:00:00+00:002016-09-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/5-project-management-tips<p>It’s so hard to write a post about project management which wouldn’t make people say: ‘Hey, this is obvious!’. Still obvious solutions to problems are often the right ones and <em>at the same time</em> difficult to follow-through on. Most management tips may sound logical and even familiar to you, yet so many project problems arise not because of technical failures but rather due to mismanagement.</p>
<p>Project management will look very different from company to company and from project to project. Here I would like to stress just a few things which <strong>make a difference</strong> whatever you do in a team.</p>
<h3 id="span-classcolor-red1-talk-with-your-teammatesspan"><span class="color-red">1. Talk with your teammates</span></h3>
<p>Tech people tend to underestimate the importance of communication, and yet most problems in projects appear as a result of insufficient communication, or lack of transparency in communication. Sometimes you may think that things are obvious without discussion when, in fact, team members have different opinions on them. Examples could be:</p>
<ul>
<li>project mission and values (why you do something);</li>
<li>expectations and motivation (what you want to do, in which way and what result you expect);</li>
<li>actual meaning behind vague task titles (e.g. improving UI may mean reworking design or cleaning up markup);</li>
<li>etc.</li>
</ul>
<p>There are many communication techniques which may come handy and efficient: issue trackers, wiki, project management tools, not to mention emails and chats. And at the same time, <strong>talking to people is still indispensable</strong>, because it helps you not just to understand each other, but also to <strong>reveal communication gaps</strong>. Please, find your time to talk to each other.</p>
<p><br />
<img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-09-22-management-tips-1.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">
Photo by Anika Lindtner
</div>
<h3 id="span-classcolor-red2-ask-for-helpspan"><span class="color-red">2. Ask for help</span></h3>
<p>Often students don’t ask for help. The reasons may be different:</p>
<ul>
<li>I don’t want to look not smart/capable enough;</li>
<li>I don’t want to bother others;</li>
<li>I want to deal with this challenge myself!</li>
</ul>
<p>The latter might make sense up to a certain degree, however, try also to think of <strong>what is good for the project</strong>. You can spend a week on a one-day task and finally nail it, but ask yourself first: Is it an efficient way to spend time? Doesn’t it hinder the project instead?</p>
<p><strong>Ask people for help if you feel like you’re stuck.</strong> You might even set a “rule of one day”: if I spent one day on a particular problem, searched everywhere I could (I really did!) and didn’t find a solution, I ask my teammates for advice. It doesn’t have to be one day, of course; try to find a period which would be comfortable for your team. It’s always about balance.</p>
<h3 id="span-classcolor-red3-share-progress-and-set-deadlinesspan"><span class="color-red">3. Share progress and set deadlines</span></h3>
<p>Even if things are going well at your side, <strong>don’t disregard sharing your progress with the team</strong>. It’s really easy to forget about it when you:</p>
<ul>
<li>do something monotonous;</li>
<li>work on one task for a long time;</li>
<li>dive too deep into technical details…</li>
</ul>
<p>But even then, providing your team with updates will not only <strong>get the team on the same page</strong>, but may also be beneficial — be it actual help from your teammates or just them <strong>pushing you forward</strong> :)</p>
<p>One of the best ways to make sure you move in a good pace is to <strong>set deadlines</strong>. Everybody is used to setting deadlines to big tasks. Sometimes it is useful to set deadlines to smaller tasks, too. If you’re stuck with a task or not sure which solution to choose, break the task into smaller pieces and eat your elephant one bite at a time: you can plan to talk to someone ‘by Wednesday’ and make a decision ‘by Friday’. This will help you keep moving.</p>
<p><br />
<img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-09-22-management-tips-2.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">
Photo by Anika Lindtner
</div>
<h3 id="span-classcolor-red4-dont-rely-on-your-memoryspan"><span class="color-red">4. Don’t rely on your memory</span></h3>
<p>Whenever you have a meeting where you discuss things and especially make decisions, a good thing would be to <strong>write a short summary and share it</strong>. It could be as simple as: “Today is DD.MM.YY, participants are Alice and Bob, we agreed on <em>this</em> and <em>that</em>”.</p>
<p>Often you might feel that it’s not necessary because:</p>
<ul>
<li>the meeting was short;</li>
<li>it wasn’t official enough;</li>
<li>nobody demands notes from me, so why would I lose precious time writing them;</li>
<li>and my personal favorite: we <em>won’t forget</em> this anyway.</li>
</ul>
<p>Time goes, things change. Sometimes it’s very useful to <strong>refer to history</strong>, whether you want to understand why things went the way they went, need facts to argue with someone, or want to give a quick update on the project to someone who wasn’t there with the team for some time.</p>
<h3 id="span-classcolor-red5-stay-in-touch-with-the-project-maintainerspan"><span class="color-red">5. Stay in touch with the project maintainer</span></h3>
<p>Whenever you have a customer, a product owner or an OSS project maintainer — a person who is interested in developing a project — it’s good to keep them in the loop. Show them what you have accomplished every once in a while, even if it’s not a big piece of software and even if you send pull requests anyway.</p>
<p>Don’t take it the wrong way, I don’t mean you should spam your project maintainer with emails (maintainers are usually busy after all!). The point is the following: if you work on a project regularly and try to make major contributions, it’s good to give the person on the other side <strong>an overview of what you were/are up to</strong>. This will not only help you <strong>get feedback</strong> and learn if you are doing the right thing or not, but it will also ensure transparency and <strong>shape your future plans</strong>.</p>
<p><br />
That’s it. No silver bullet, right? Hope you still found it useful. Good luck!</p>
BufferingThea Amanda Kupler and Marie-Luise Kochsiekhttp://twitter.com/loadtocode2016-09-21T00:00:00+00:002016-09-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Buffering<h2 id="span-classcolor-redso-the-rails-girls-summer-of-code-will-come-to-an-endspan"><span class="color-red">…so the Rails Girls Summer of Code will come to an end!</span></h2>
<p>Two months ago we blogged about our start — about us being <a href="/blog/2016-07-21-start-of-loadtocode">loaded to code</a>. Now, having some time passed, which seems to go faster day by day, there is this constant feeling of loading, loading knowledge to code or rather buffering — buffering all the knowledge we received those last months. We not only received great coding teaching but also valuable business knowledge. We reached out to the amazing SoundCloud-People surrounding us and mentioned that we are a little bit lost in our learning freedom and not having a structure set from top-down. We saw the problem, reached out and found solutions — creating our own structure. BOTTOM(S)-UP.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-09-21-KANBAN.gif" alt="LoadtoCode KANBAN" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>READY, STEADY, PUSH, DONE: Our KANBAN-Board in movement! (Image: Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font><br /></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redsharing-is-caring-is-3-is-rgsocspan"><span class="color-red">Sharing is caring is <3 is RGSoC!</span></h2>
<p>With this newly created structure of walking the (KANBAN-)board in the morning, we were able to have more awareness on the tasks and reach out to our amazing coaches more effectively. Speaking of it, when RGSoC taught us one thing then it was for sure support and patience. We were lucky and had those qualities in person: Duana, Remy and Sergio. Having the “I’m learning so much!”-attitude, as all of our coaches had, is the best present in the world to us newbies. Newbies, having no clue at all and asking how it works over and over again. Having passionate supporters which are fighting for a world without stupid questions is the most valuable RGSoC experience. Next to the great coaches in the SoundCloud-Office the #helpdesk-rgsoc-channel was always there when we needed it. <a href="https://github.com/">GIT</a> almost became our friend — ALMOST.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-09-21-ninja-power.png" alt="#Helpdesk LOVE" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>#Helpdesk LOVE (Image: Screenshot of RGSoC-#Helpdesk-Slack by Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font><br /></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redfailing-is-coding-toospan"><span class="color-red">Failing is coding, too!</span></h2>
<p>Speaking of all those achievements it’s time to also mention failures. We worked on <a href="https://leap.se/">LEAP</a> and we quickly realized that it is bigger and more complex than we could imagine! To make sure that we don’t get lost in LEAP-specific knowledge and tasks we told ourselves to split the day, start the day with plain Ruby-/Rails-learning and end the day with coaching and working on our LEAP-task. We tried but we regularly failed with this goal. We read more than we coded, trying to understand the <a href="https://github.com/sferik/twitter">twitter ruby gem</a> and the <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public">twitter requirements</a>. In the end we achieved less than we wanted, know more about twitter than we probably ever gonna need again, but we learned to keep on coding and asking AND were able to find a secure way to put some twitter content on the <a href="https://github.com/leapcode/leap_web">LEAP Web-App</a>. So after 2,5 months RGSoC the day came we were waiting for so long and we were able to <a href="https://twitter.com/loadtocode/status/775988841425559553">tweet to the world</a> that our PR was merged. The Providers using LEAP will from now on have the possibility to connect their Twitter account within LEAP to easily inform users about releases or bugs.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-09-21-LEAP-Web-App.png" alt="Twitter Feature within Leap-Web-App" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>Twitter Feature within Leap-Web-App (Image: Screenshot of Twitter Feature within LEAP by Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font><br /></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redoooooooooooooooooomspan"><span class="color-red">Oooooooooooooooooom</span></h2>
<p>Having all about programming was fun, even on our #rgsocdayoff we didn’t stop programming. Instead of programming on our computers we preferred to connect with an IT-monk in Thailand and program on our minds on that special day.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-09-21-rgsocdayoff.png" alt="#rgsocdayoff" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>Programming our minds on the #rgsocdayoff (Image: Screenshot of <a href="https://twitter.com/starkcoffee/status/766562289084489728">Duana's Tweet</a> by Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font><br /></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redwhats-nextspan"><span class="color-red">What’s next?</span></h2>
<p>At the beginning we couldn’t imagine that this Rails Girls Summer of Code would end somehow someday… Now that there are only a few days of it left, we can actually see the end coming /o\ ! However, we know that this Summer of Code is meant to be a start of something bigger and not only a short & intense moment of coding in our lives. So we are preparing ourselves to keep working on code and watch out for internship opportunities. Excitingly, we will be able to share our journey by attending conferences (yes, you’ve read it right, conferenceS(!) ) and hopefully meet many of the RGSoC people in real life! So to help us keep going, meeting more Ruby-enthusiasts and getting more into conference world of code, we are invited to
* <a href="https://rubyconf.pt">RubyConfPt</a> in Braga/Portugal at the end of October and to
* <a href="https://gotocon.com/berlin-2016/">GOTO Berlin</a> in Berlin/Germany in the middle of November.
Please ping us, if you are also attending one of these, we are happy to chat about #RGSoC, the <a href="https://leap.se">Leap Project</a>, Rails, Ruby and permaculture principles or feminisms!</p>
The MiracleNada Ashraf and Mayar Alaahttp://twitter.com/RubysSecretteam2016-09-19T00:00:00+00:002016-09-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/The-Miracle<p>The Miracle <3</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-09-19-RGSoC-dayoff.jpg" alt="Ruby's Secret Team" /> <font color="grey"><small><i>taken by us @RGSoC-dayoff @ Cairo Tower</i></small></font><br /></p>
<p>Learning Ruby on Rails and working on some applications, we thought we became experts, till the very first week of July… Suddenly, we found ourselves sailing on a very small boat, on a deep ocean, stuck in a very bad storm, not having any supplies to survive except hope, perseverance and determination. Day by day, we started to enjoy this adventure between the waves. Together we decided to fight these rough waves, the waves of ignorance. We discovered that we still have a lot to learn.<br />
In our first call with our beloved supervisor Linda, she asked us a question: “what are your expectations after the RGSoC experience?” Our answer was mainly focused on the technical experience that we would gain, but now, after two and a half months we discovered that not only our technical background was enriched but also our non-technical.<br />
We gained so many nice friends. We learned that the most passionate person needs motivation and appreciation from time to time. We also found that it’s important to ask questions but after doing some research. Finally, we decided that we should offer our help whenever we can.<br />
Regarding the technical background, turned out working with gems is much harder than apps, simply because there are not much resources on gems and every gem has it own unique features and codes it’s a bit harder to understand its source code.Minitest:Unit is nightmare for a beginner in testing, simply because we can barely find any documentation for it, on the other side, you can find tons of information on Rspec. We’ve learned it the hard way, but it was worth it as we gained so much knowledge that will help us in the future.</p>
<p>Never in our wildest dreams have we thought that we would be where we are today. Preparing to attend a conference in Braga, Portugal and also giving a talk about our experience in RGSoC. There are lots of preparations for the conference, from visa appointment to booking hotels and flights and doing the trip planning, then the conference experience itself, we are really excited for this opportunity as it is a great chance to learn so much more about Ruby on Rails and meet lots of new people and most importantly Rails Girls organizers and Team LoadtoCode, we’re so happy that we’ll get to meet them finally. We’re very thankful for the opportunity given to us by RGSoC organizers and Rubyconf organizers, we do believe that this will be a life changing experience to both of us.</p>
<p>Our next step? Well, We’re totally looking forward improving our RoR knowledge and if we’re lucky enough we may get an internship to keep learning and gain more experience. Also, we want to share our experience and the knowledge we gained with other girls, we want to see more teams from Egypt get into RGSoC next year, it was a life-changing experience to us, for me “Nada”, I would keep calling it “the Miracle”.</p>
More conferences 2016Mariahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-09-08T00:00:00+00:002016-09-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-conferences-part2<p>Remember how <a href="/blog/2016-08-10-conferences-part1">we promised to announce more conferences</a> supporting Rails Girls Summer of Code? We keep our word.</p>
<p>Many new conferences from Europe, America, Africa and Asia Pacific said <strong>Yes</strong> to our call and granted tickets to our students. Some conferences even offered their help covering travel costs. We could not be more grateful!</p>
<p>Besides just attending a conference of their interest, many teams got the opportunity to give a lightning talk there. For some of them, it will be their first public talk ever. As scary as it might be, this is also a unique experience, and we are happy to help — be it with a <a href="/blog/2014-07-29-talk-tips">practical advice</a> or just words of support. We also believe that lightning talks are a great chance to share RGSoC stories with the world and inspire more women to make the first step towards the career of their dreams.</p>
<p>We are saying a huge <strong>Thank you!</strong> to all the conference organizers who share our values and team up with us.</p>
<p>And now, <strong>the conference tickets go to</strong>…</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpgithubuniversecomgithub-universeaspan----bteam-hackbrightersb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://githubuniverse.com/">GitHub Universe</a></span> – <b>Team Hackbrighters</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://githubuniverse.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/github-universe-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>September 13-15, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>San Fransisco, US <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/githubuniverse">@githubuniverse</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpwarsaw2016codemotionworldcomcodemotion-warsawaspan----bteam-rubycatsb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://warsaw2016.codemotionworld.com/">Codemotion Warsaw</a></span> – <b>Team RubyCats</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://warsaw2016.codemotionworld.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/CodemoWarsaw-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>September 15-16, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Warsaw, Poland <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/CodemoWarsaw">@CodemoWarsaw</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting 20% off promo code.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsjsfooin2016jsfooaspan----brgsoc-communityb"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://jsfoo.in/2016/">JSFoo</a></span> – <b>RGSoC Community</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://jsfoo.in/2016/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/jsfoo-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>September 15-16, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Bangalore, India <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/jsfoo">@jsfoo</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpszapyconorgpycon-zaaspan----bteam-echob"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://za.pycon.org/">PyCon ZA</a></span> – <b>Team Echo</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://za.pycon.org/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/pycon-za-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>October 6-7, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Cape Town, SA <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/pyconza">@pyconza</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpberlin2016codemotionworldcomcodemotion-berlinaspan----bteam-xyzb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://berlin2016.codemotionworld.com/">Codemotion Berlin</a></span> – <b>Team XYZ</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://berlin2016.codemotionworld.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/codemoberlin-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>October 24-25, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Berlin, Germany <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/codemoberlin">@codemoberlin</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting 20% off promo code.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsbeyondtellerrandcombeyond-tellerrandaspan----bteam-kindr3db"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://beyondtellerrand.com">Beyond Tellerrand</a></span> – <b>Team kindr3d</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://beyondtellerrand.com">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/beyond-tellerrand-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>November 7-9, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Berlin, Germany <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/btconf">@btconf</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsgotoconcomberlin-2016goto-berlinaspan----bteam-loadtocodeb"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://gotocon.com/berlin-2016/">GoTo Berlin</a></span> – <b>Team LoadToCode</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://gotocon.com/berlin-2016/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/goto-berlin-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>November 14-16, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Berlin, Germany <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/gotober">@gotober</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting 10% off promo code or getting involved as a conference volunteer.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpwwwdotjsiodotjsaspan----bteam-xyzb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://www.dotjs.io/">dotJS</a></span> – <b>Team XYZ</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://www.dotjs.io/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/dotjs-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>December 2, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Paris, France <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/dotJS">@dotJS</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttprubyconfindiaorgrubyconf-indiaaspan----bteam-twitchesb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://rubyconfindia.org/">RubyConf India</a></span> – <b>Team Twitches</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://rubyconfindia.org/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/rubyconf-india-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>January 27-29, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Le Meridien, Kochi, India <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/RubyConfIndia">@RubyConfIndia</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttp2017fossasiaorgfossasiaaspan----bteam-reactivesb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://2017.fossasia.org/">FOSSASIA</a></span> – <b>Team Reactives</b></h4>
<div class="conference-table">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://2017.fossasia.org/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/fossasia-logo.png" /></a>
</td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>March 17-19, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Singapore <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/fossasia">@fossasia</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting 50% off promo code.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<p>As you might guess, the story doesn’t end here. Our students will share their experience attending the conferences over next several months, so stay tuned and follow our blog updates!</p>
Students 2016Mariahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-08-29T00:00:00+00:002016-08-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/students-2016<p>This year we have 20 amazing teams: 40 students from all over the world of different age and origin, with different backgrounds and skills. Imagine this: <a href="/blog/2016-06-24-more-teams-aye">11 countries on 6 continents</a> (Bummer! Haven’t got any applications from Antarctica this year!); we can’t help enjoying this feeling of the united world.</p>
<p>The students are more than 65% through the program. They have already experienced a lot, really. It’s not just about programming (that, obviously, too!), it’s also about getting along with a team, sharing fun moments and conflict solving, celebrating achievements and coping with frustration. Sometimes it feels like you are facing a problem which shouldn’t have come up on the program, and that you / someone else must be doing something wrong. That’s absolutely ok, we all deal with such issues regularly at work, and the best we can do is to learn and may be share solutions with others.</p>
<p>Yet so much to come. Our students will attend <a href="/blog/2016-08-10-conferences-part1">conferences</a>, some of them will give their first talks. Wooo, we are so excited!</p>
<p><strong>Click on the pictures to read students’ stories!</strong></p>
<section class="students-image-map-4x5">
<div>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-08-29-students-2016-4x5.jpg" />
<a href="/blog/2016-08-07-team-Rookies-happy-coding-story" title="Team Rookies" class="row1 col1"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-07-11-we're-finally-revealing-our-secret" title="Team Ruby's Secret" class="row1 col2"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-24-hello-from-team-Crackers" title="Team Crackers" class="row1 col3"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-02-we-are-team-vegemite" title="Team Vegemite" class="row1 col4"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-10-introducing-KaUlah-team" title="Team KaUlah" class="row2 col1"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-07-20-team-twitches-says-hello" title="Team Twitches" class="row2 col2"></a>
<a href="/blog/introducing-team-echo-2016" title="Team Echo" class="row2 col3"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-07-25-time-for-rubycats-meowww" title="Team RubyCats" class="row2 col4"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-13-introducing-team-l1ghtsab3r-india" title="Team l1ghtsab3r" class="row3 col1"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-07-19-team-kindr3d-saying-hi" title="Team kindr3d" class="row3 col2"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-07-27-team-hackbrighters" title="Team Hackbrighters" class="row3 col3"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-08-hello-team-jam" title="Team JaM" class="row3 col4"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-03-we-are-team-perifericas" title="Team Perifericas" class="row4 col1"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-15-hello-from-team-xyz" title="Team XYZ" class="row4 col2"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-12-Intro-Team-Reactives" title="Team Reactives" class="row4 col3"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-07-21-start-of-loadtocode" title="Team LoadToCode" class="row4 col4"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-17-Introducing-Team-Fedex++" title="Team Fedex++" class="row5 col1"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-07-14-team-joda-says-hello" title="Team joda" class="row5 col2"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-08-05-B-More-Stunners-puts-Hello-World" title="Team B'More Stunners" class="row5 col3"></a>
<a href="/blog/2016-07-18-team-mitpal-getting-it-started" title="Team MitPal" class="row5 col4"></a>
</div>
</section>
<div class="image-credits">
RGSoC Students 2016 (images: Students 2016; collage: Ana Sofia Pinho)
</div>
<p>As always, we would like to say big <strong>Thank You</strong> to <a href="/about/team">all the people</a> who help our students participate in the program: sponsors, donors, coaches, coaching companies, mentors, supervisors, organizers and volunteers. Without you we wouldn’t see these happy faces and wouldn’t read their inspiring stories.</p>
<p>Want to get fresh updates from our students? Check out these Twitter lists: <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/lists/rgsoc-2016-teams">RGSoC Teams 2016</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/lists/rgsoc-2016-students">RGSoC Students 2016</a>. Stay tuned!</p>
RGSoC in a Coaching Company - Part 2Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-08-25T00:00:00+00:002016-08-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/coaching-companies-part-2<p>Now that you saw a bit where Echo, RubyCats, LoadToCode, Vegemite and KaUlah work (if you missed it, the blog post is <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-08-18-coaching-companies-part-1">here</a>), it’s time to show you the rest of the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/coaching-companies/">coaching companies</a>’ spaces!</p>
<p>Thank you so much for being part of the program! <3</p>
<h2 id="hackbrighters-and-githubhttpwwwgithubcom">Hackbrighters and <a href="http://www.github.com">GitHub</a></h2>
<p>(San Francisco, USA)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_hackbrighters-github.png" alt="Hackbrighters at GitHub" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Patricia and Melissa at GitHub! (Image: Patricia and Melissa)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="patricia-and-melissa">Patricia and Melissa</h3>
<p><em>“Our Coaching Company is Github, located in San Francisco’s South Beach neighborhood, close to San Francisco’s AT&T stadium. The best part about being hosted at a Coaching Company for RGSoC is to be surrounded by fellow software developers. Being immersed in an environment where we’re able to discuss and learn from other developers is priceless to our growth as software engineers. Githubbers have been so warm and welcoming! Githubbers are so willing to lend their expertise. To illustrate, our team gets impromptu seminars from Sam Lambert (https://twitter.com/isamlambert) about distributed systems. We’ve spoken to <a href="https://twitter.com/iancolsen">Ian Olsen</a> about JavaScript and ES6, as well as <a href="https://twitter.com/__LizzHale__">Lizz Hale</a> about Ruby on Rails. Both <a href="https://twitter.com/BinaryMuse">Michelle Tilley</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/kuychaco">Katrina Uychaco</a> have assisted us with learning React. Overall, it’s been a wonderful experience to jumpstart our careers.</em></p>
<p><em>As coding apprentices, the technical help and support we’ve gotten has been incredible. The senior engineers also have been really open about how to navigate the culture of the tech industry. They all sympathize with how hard it is to break into industry without a CS background from a fancy school. But they’ve been really helpful with advice about how to meet and introduce yourself to people, as well as point us toward different meetup groups. This is information and insight that you can’t get online or in a classroom. Being explicitly welcomed by a coaching company goes a long way toward feeling welcomed by the industry.”</em></p>
<h2 id="joda-and-absolventahttpswwwabsolventade">joda and <a href="https://www.absolventa.de/">ABSOLVENTA</a></h2>
<p>(Berlin, Germany)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_joda-absolventa.png" alt="joda at ABSOLVENTA" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Dayana and Johanna at ABSOLVENTA! (Image: Dayana and Johanna)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="dayana-and-johanna">Dayana and Johanna</h3>
<p><em>“You don’t necessarily need a coaching company to learn how to code but if you have one, you get a lot of insights you wouldn’t otherwise: You can experience how those coding skills you learn are applied in every day work life. For us, it is very motivating to see that professional developers work in a similar way as we do (of course much faster ;)</em></p>
<p><em>We learn a lot of useful terminology, but most importantly how a day in a programmer’s professional life really looks like: In stand-up-meetings, you overhear and observe a lot which tools, frameworks and programming languages the professionals are using and thus get an idea of the manifold problem solutions there are.</em></p>
<p><em>Apart from having this great environment, we of course are very lucky to have such supportive coaches, which are ready to jump in when we are stuck or when we don’t know how to continue.”</em></p>
<h3 id="carsten-from-absolventa">Carsten from ABSOLVENTA</h3>
<p><em>“The learning curve is steep at the beginning of the summer: There’s new lingo left and right, a project whose complexity might be intimidating, there’s lots of new people, and the team has to find their own workflow. But as the weeks pass, mysteries dissolve into knowledge and the once foreign codebase has not only lost its scariness, but feels a bit like home. Three months of working on Open Source builds a tremendous amount of developer self-confidence!”</em></p>
<h2 id="kindr3d-and-namicshttpnamicscom">kindr3d and <a href="http://namics.com">Namics</a></h2>
<p>(Frankfurt, Germany)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_kindr3d-namics.png" alt="kindr3d at Namics" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Elvina and Micaela at Namics! (Image: Elvina and Micaela)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="elvina-and-micaela">Elvina and Micaela</h3>
<p><em>“It wasn’t easy for us, team kindr3d, to find coaches in Frankfurt, but when we did we lucked out big time and scored an entire coaching company. They provide us with safe space and technical support, but also allow us to be close to our coaches, hence we resolve most of the issues directly on the ground, which allows us to be self-sufficient and low-maintenance within RGSoC. We find office environment rather motivating, since we have enough free space, quiet and meeting rooms where we can isolate ourselves and use white boards, projectors etc.</em></p>
<p><em>Namics has daily fruit delivery, unlimited coffee and drinks, so there is enough fuel to go through a hard day’s work. But there are also leisure areas, kicker table and sofa, where one can wind down and experience a home-like environment.
We also had a chance to observe real-life team software development (agile style) in progress with its shortcoming and advantages. Seeing a team from the inside gives us confidence, that there is a place in a team for a junior, apprentice, and that fresh perspective and enthusiasm are assets worth rewarding in IT.”</em></p>
<h2 id="perifericas-and-raul-hacker-clubhttpswwwfacebookcomraulhackerclub">Perifericas and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/raulhackerclub">Raul Hacker Club</a></h2>
<p>(Salvador, Brasil)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_perifericas-raul-hacker-club.png" alt="Perifericas at Raul Hacker Club" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Emma and Geisa at Raul Hacker Club! (Image: Geisa)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="emma-and-geisa">Emma and Geisa</h3>
<p><em>“The best part of having a coaching company during RGSoC is to learn directly from professionals who are running projects all the time and share with us mistakes they made so we can learn from that too.</em></p>
<p><em>We choose the <a href="http://raulhc.cc">Raul Hackerspace</a> as our host not only because we’re members, but also because RaulHC is a place that embraces diversity. Since the beginning we knew we wanted to work during RGSoC here. There’s a kitchen, so we can prepare our food and snacks, and the best part is the dazziling view.</em></p>
<p>*As seniors, coaches are helping us to thrive in this path. Rather than giving us the solutions right away, our coaches are giving us tips and advice, guiding us and enabling us to find the answers by ourselves.</p>
<p>Brena Monteiro is the co-founder of <a href="http://www.upriseit.com/">UpriseIT</a>, a software company based in Gov. Valadares in Minas Gerais state. She has large experience in software projects and development with Ruby and Rails. Daniela Feitosa and Aurélio A. Heckert are from <a href="http://colivre.coop.br/">Colivre</a>, a cooperative service company that supplies solutions for Internet, development and consultancy in free software. Victor Flores aka User_X, a senior development represents <a href="https://lampiaosec.github.io/">LampiãoSec</a>, a security research group.*
“*</p>
<h2 id="mitpal-and-elevator-factoryhttpwwwelevatorfactorycom">MitPal and <a href="http://www.elevatorfactory.com/">Elevator Factory</a></h2>
<p>(Atlanta, USA)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_mitpal-elevator-factory.png" alt="Mitpal at Elevator Factory" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Sherri and Anitha at Elevator Factory! (Image: Sherri and Anitha)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="sherri-and-anitha">Sherri and Anitha</h3>
<p><em>“The support that we have received in RGSoC and the Coaching Company is invaluable. We have an amazing team that has donated time and resources to help us be successful during RGSOC. Our co-working space was donated by the Elevator Factory, which has allowed us to come in and work together every day. Our coaches, Pamela Vickers and Pete Holiday, have given countless hours of their own time to help us work through any issues that we may be having. Without this support system in place, learning and accomplishing all that we have would be difficult at best. Our skill set along with our confidence continues to grow, and we know that our career goals are definitely within our reach.”</em></p>
Hello from Team Crackers!!Nikita and Nishthahttp://twitter.com/Team_Crackers2016-08-24T00:00:00+00:002016-08-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/hello-from-team-Crackers<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamCrackers1.jpg" alt="Team Crackers" /> <br />
<em>image taken by Nikita Bhagat</em></p>
<p>Hello everyone!!
This is team Crackers. We are nikita and nishtha from Gandhinagar, India.<br />
We study at DA-IICT. We are in same batch and we have a fine tuning due to which we decided to apply for rails girls summer of code. Earlier we used to team up for coding competitions held online as well as in our college. We got to know about rails girls summer of code from one of our seniors and from then we looked out for coaches, teamed up with them and applied for this. This is our first time in open source community and our project is WeCare.</p>
<h4 id="nishtha"><strong>NISHTHA</strong></h4>
<p>I like to define myself as an hyperactive, happy go lucky, borderline geeky, your friendly neighbourhood foodie. Intrigued often with more than how a phone looks, I like to keep up with consumer electronics, and the strides and fads of developer communities. However, my knowledge and love for technology was not more than skin deep back when I started my undergraduate studies as B.Tech in ICT at DA-IICT. I like being a proactively communicative and contributing member of the communities that I am a part of.<br />
Being in a close-knit community, surrounded by technology enthusiasts, and talented developers, these two years have given me immense exposure and driven me to expand my horizons in many dimensions. From sweating when asked to print the fibonacci series on the console, to have successfully written data based Android apps, and I like to see my journey as a good one. However, it has a long way to go. In fact, I am currently pursuing a nanodegree program on Udacity, supported by a scholarship from Google and Tata Trusts.</p>
<h4 id="nikita"><strong>NIKITA</strong></h4>
<p>I am currenty studying in 3rd year(undergrad) for the course Information and Communication Technology. I started coding with basic C and HTML since my high school. Later I got to know about web development, attended various workshops and discussions which acted as an ignition to working with web applications. Then I started studying various online courses and making informal projects. Later last summer I had my internship on educational web applications where I met very great people who taught me advance techniques in this field which is quite helpful for the project. In my free time I go out and play football with my team or fiddle around arts and crafts. Also I like travelling and mountain hiking.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamCrackers2.jpg" alt="Team Crackers" />
<em>image taken by Nishtha Boda</em></p>
<h3 id="about-our-project"><strong>ABOUT OUR PROJECT</strong></h3>
<p><a href="https://github.com/hkasera/WeCare">WeCare</a> is a digital platform that will help NGOs to get onboard with technology to promote their campaigns. It will also help people in discoverability of various campaigns as well as provide detailed information about them. Volunteers can also contribute towards ongoing campaigns, run by different NGOs, via this platform. The best part about the platform is the ease of use and its effectiveness so that anyone can easily promote and market their campaigns to increase their visibility. It is a free service. We plan to create a console for NGOs once they register on the website to manage their campaigns.</p>
<h3 id="what-we-have-achieved-so-far"><strong>WHAT WE HAVE ACHIEVED SO FAR?</strong></h3>
<p>During initial days there was a bit miscommunication between the team and the mentor, as she was a bit into travelling and we were taking some time in understanding the project. But once she was back, we arranged calls every week discussed on 2-3 issues and how should we approach them. Our first issue was which we decided to take a basic one is login/signup page. First we made it having two different pages but then we planned the structure and layout of the whole website nd figured out that merged tabular look would be much better with passport in its back end part. Second task which we are working on is a console or portal type where the NGOs can register their website or add upcoming campaigns for other people in world to view them or publish new information they get. For addressing this issue we went through some advance topics in node and also we planned out a layout for console. We are done with a parrallax style home page for WeCare, added an “About Us” page to it with its content and partially done with console task.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-our-future-goals"><strong>What are our future goals?</strong></h3>
<p>Our present focus is on console task as it cannot afford to bring or have any sort of error because that would result in problems in publishing any information live. Later we will focus on following tasks provided by mentor:</p>
<ul>
<li>Update API Documentation</li>
<li>Add validation on user input</li>
<li>Use service workers in the website to improve performance</li>
<li>make a map which will pin point locations of NGO/campaigns that are registered</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="follow-us-at-"><strong>Follow us at :)</strong></h4>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Team_crackers">Twitter</a><br />
<a href="https://github.com/TeamCrackersRgsoc">Github</a></p>
RGSoC in a Coaching Company - Part 1Ana Sofia Pinhohttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-08-18T00:00:00+00:002016-08-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/coaching-companies-part-1<p>Every year, our students work from the most varied places: university campuses, coworking spaces or coaching companies… Even though you can work on RGSoC from anywhere, coaching companies not only provide the space for our students to work, but also coaching support. We could be here talking about all the benefits from being a coaching company or a student at a company, but we thought it would be best for you learn from the students’ and the coaching companies’ own words. And to make things more interesting, there are pictures of the workspaces too! :)</p>
<p>Before we jump into that, we just wanted to announce our new <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/coaching-companies/">Coaching Companies</a> page on our website. This is the least we can do to show them how much we appreciate their support. Thank you!</p>
<p>And now, time for the sneak peek! :)</p>
<h2 id="rubycats-and-codequesthttpcodequestcom">RubyCats and <a href="http://codequest.com">CodeQuest</a></h2>
<p>(Warsaw, Poland)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_rubycats-codequest.png" alt="RubyCats at Code Quest" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Iza and Kinga at Code Quest! (Image: Iza and Kinga)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="iza-and-kinga">Iza and Kinga</h3>
<p><em>“There are some nice work spaces in Warsaw, for example Google Campus, which we truly admire, but none of them could compare to the coaching company. And we are honored to have an amazing one - Code Quest!
It’s not only about having a desk to sit at and coaches nearby. It’s a boost of energy in the morning, when you meet all of the amazing people, that are a part of Code Quest. It’s a chance to see, how a software house works. It’s an amazing opportunity see everything from the inside, not just look in from the outside.
Thank you, Code Quest!”</em></p>
<h3 id="magda-from-codequest">Magda from CodeQuest</h3>
<p><em>“We love Rails community and we’re proud to be a part of it. That’s why at codequest we support events like Rails Girls workshops and Rails Girls Summer of Code. Next to open source collaboration, such events are our small brick to build awesome environment we are working in. And it’s a pleasure to work with such people as RubyCats Iza and Kinga!”</em></p>
<h2 id="loadtocode-and-soundcloudhttpssoundcloudcom">LoadToCode and <a href="https://soundcloud.com/">SoundCloud</a></h2>
<p>(Berlin, Germany)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_loadtocode-soundcloud.png" alt="LoadToCode at SoundCloud" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Thea and Marie at SoundCloud! (Image: Thea and Marie)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="thea--marie">Thea & Marie</h3>
<p><em>“Being part of a Coaching Company means: <br />
- Having real-life support <br />
- Seeing and being surrounded by rolemodels (on the way to being a programmer, being surrounded by programmers). Also, you are surrounded by so many experts and you can find them all over the work place! :) <br />
- Having structure and a well separated work/learning and living-place for more effective learning. This makes a big difference concerning motivation and for a better work life balance. <br />
- Contacts (having small or longer talks in the cafeteria with people from Soundcloud is not only inspiring but also a way to get to know more people working in the field). <br />
- Best possibility to check whether you really want to spent your days like this, even though 3 months is a little short, it is good enough to find out if you like what you are doing. <br />
- What could only be better? having a RGSoC-3-month-Hackathon instead of a coaching company ;)”</em></p>
<h3 id="duana-from-soundcloud">Duana from SoundCloud</h3>
<p><em>“RGSoC is a way for us to address diversity issues in our industry, contribute to open source and sharpen our mentoring skills-but the biggest reward is seeing how people from such different backgrounds can thrive in code and help us forge a more inclusive and diverse tech culture.”</em></p>
<h2 id="echo-and-the-innovation-villagehttpinnovationvillagecoug">Echo and <a href="http://innovationvillage.co.ug/">The Innovation Village</a></h2>
<p>(Kampala, Uganda)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_echo-the-innovation-village.png" alt="Echo at The Innovation Village" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Naggita and Joannah at The Innovation Village! (Image: Naggita and Joannah)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="naggita-and-joannah">Naggita and Joannah</h3>
<p><em>“Coaching companies undoubtedly play a big role for the teams doing RGSOC. They give teams the right visibility, mentorship to jump start their career , guidance on the projects they are working on and help them to easily reach the technology community because they already have avenues to great tech meetups , gatherings and communities.
The innovation village Kampala has given us incredible visibility in Kampala and without doubt Africa as a whole, we have appeared on one of their TV stations, ( IdeaT V), talking about our involvement in RGSoC and community outreach . We also have access to a tech community that inspires us to jump start our development.
We have been introduced to a very significant network of very inspiring people. These people have given us ideas, encouraged us and mentored us. Some have inspired us to chase our dreams and become better engineers.
It has helped us in becoming better speakers by giving us a platform to speak at an event. They have given us for all events we want to do as a team. It has really bent its programs to accommodate our suggestions on possible tech gatherings and involvements so that we can fully achieve one of our goals for RGSOC, community involvement.”</em></p>
<h3 id="japheth-from-innovation-village">Japheth from Innovation Village</h3>
<p><em>“Supporting the RGSoC defines why we set up The Innovation Village as a destination of ideas. Supporting RGSoC becomes a perfect opportunity for us to collaborate globally with partners who have significant experience that we can customize locally as we give an opportunity to brilliant girls to bless the world with their ingenuity.</em></p>
<p><em>All beginnings have the potential of immense possibilities. As we interact with the RGSoC, it might appear as if they are benefiting from us and yet we are benefiting more from them by giving them an environment they can bring ideas to life. Out of a simple conversations with the the ladies I could see possibilities of a series of projects they could bring to life with the proper mentorship.</em></p>
<p><em>The best thing about being part of RGSoC is being in the presence of possibilities. My experience so far is this is about raising to challenges through viable solutions driven by tech. Being part of RGSoC brings the best opportunity for this given it allows the global perspective to local talent who can be inspired to become local change-makers to everyday issues.”</em></p>
<h2 id="kaulah-and-rebasedhttprebasedpl">KaUlah and <a href="http://rebased.pl/">Rebased</a></h2>
<p>(Warsaw, Poland)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_kaulah-rebased.png" alt="KaUlah at Rebased" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Ula and Katarzyna at Rebased! (Image: Ula and Katarzyna)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="katarzyna-and-ula">Katarzyna and Ula</h3>
<p><em>“We meet our coaches every day, not only when we need some advice, but also
just to say hi. Thanks to that we can learn not only from our experience
but also by watching real developers at work. We have our own working
space, with our desks, whiteboard and some fun stuff. We can see how IT
company works from inside, how everyday job looks like. Moreover, we can
take part in companies internal trainings which is very insightful.”</em></p>
<h3 id="piotr-from-rebased">Piotr from Rebased</h3>
<p><em>“Rebased is super happy to be an RGSoC coaching company for the third
year running; we strongly believe in helping underrepresented people
find their way in tech and fostering diversity in open source. Being
able to help a team discover the joys of programming in a welcoming,
non-stressful atmosphere on a worthwhile project (and shipping
the code to production!) is always a great experience.”</em></p>
<h2 id="vegemite-and-culture-amphttpswwwcultureampcom">Vegemite and <a href="https://www.cultureamp.com/">Culture Amp</a></h2>
<p>(Melbourne, Australia)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc-2016-coaching-companies_vegemite-culture-amp.png" alt="Vegemite at Culture Amp" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Ramya and Kylie at Culture Amp! (Image: Ramya and Kylie)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="ramya-and-kylie">Ramya and Kylie</h3>
<p><em>“The best part of having a coaching company is that we get to experience
working in a professional environment. We’ve had the opportunity to pair
program with coaches, which helps with understanding the requirements of
what we’re working on, and how to make code more efficient. Our coaches
have such amazing brains, we’re wondering when do we start thinking like
that?</em></p>
<p><em>How Rails Girls Summer Of Code helps us to learn to code is that it is not
just about learning code, it’s about having best practices such as daily
standups, test driven development, well maintained code, and elegant
solutions. One of the things that we love about Culture Amp is that they’re
big on fostering community - the people who work here organise, take part
in and speak at events. Culture Amp have been very welcoming, and we’ve
taken part in their Conference Culture X Design, which was the first
conference Ramya has ever been to.</em></p>
<p><em>Culture Amp have helped us jumpstart our career in software development by
challenging us to ask the right questions in order to get the answers we
need, and to learn how to find essential information. Their lunchtime Brown
Bag sessions on tech topics such as Github and Docker have given us real
world education in issues that affect them. We’ve also noticed that our
open source contribution graphs on Github are so much greener! It’s been a
great opportunity for networking and meeting people within the company, and
finding out about the culture of a company that cares greatly about what
culture is.”</em></p>
<h3 id="jo-cranford-coach-from-culture-amp">Jo Cranford, coach from Culture Amp</h3>
<p><em>“Diversity is a huge issue in technical teams - women are generally
underrepresented, particularly in engineering roles. Our research shows
that more diverse teams not only perform better, but are more inclusive and
generally nicer places to work. In our own teams, we are very conscious of
what we can do to create an inclusive work environment for everybody, and
we also carry out research into diversity and inclusion across other
companies. It’s a really important issue for us, and one that we actively
work on!</em></p>
<p><em>As an organisation, Rails Girls is making a real difference - one of our
engineers got her start in Ruby at a past Rails Girls event. We have
sponsored Rails Girls events in Australia over the last eighteen months,
and our engineers are encouraged to join both the local events and summer
of code as coaches, and supported in doing so. We have also supported other
local events including SheHacks. As a company we are continuing to look for
opportunities to support and help encourage diversity within the community.”</em></p>
Introducing Team Fedex++Mansi and Saharhttp://twitter.com/TeamFedex2016-08-17T00:00:00+00:002016-08-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Introducing-Team-Fedex++<h1 id="team-fedex"><strong>Team Fedex++</strong></h1>
<p><em>Play in pain, Play in problem and Play in all sorts of conditions.</em><br />
- <a href="https://twitter.com/rogerfederer" title="Roger Federer"><em>Roger Federer</em></a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++1.jpeg" alt="Team-Fedex++" /> <br />
<em>image taken by Sahar Siddiqui</em></p>
<p>Die hard Roger Federer Fans, our team name itself reveals our first common interest to join hands together to form a team in the first place.
We are <a href="https://twitter.com/mansigoel79" title="Mansi Goel"><em><strong>Mansi Goel</strong></em></a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/sahar_siddiqui" title="Sahar Siddiqui"><em><strong>Sahar Siddiqui</strong></em></a> from IIIT-Delhi, India, in our 3rd year of Undergrad School and ready to take this journey of learning something new for the benefit of society with full energy and enthusiasm.</p>
<p>Our first exposure to the Rails Girls Summer of Code was when a team from our institute (Jayasi Mehar and Megha Arora) got selected for it.
To us, it seemed like a great achievement that you get to work with one of the finest developers in open source. Frankly, we couldn’t really understand the real essence of ‘Open Source’ until we got affiliated to the development society of IIIT-Delhi i.e. Byld.
Our seniors became our mentors and guided us through all the terms. This way we realised the enthusiasm within ourselves to code for the community.</p>
<p><em><strong>Mansi</strong></em>: When I first heard that the application process is going to begin soon, first and last person to cross my mind was Sahar. There just couldn’t have been anyone else for this.<br />
<em><strong>Sahar</strong></em>: I was introduced to RGSoC by Mansi herself. I’ve always been interested in taking up challenging tasks but at the same time hesitant in applying for some. And Mansi asking me to pair up for RGSoC’16 was just a blessing in disguise.</p>
<p>We both knew it is going to be tough considering the academic workload we have in the Institute. But the desire within us to learn something and the fact that we would be working with people all over the world who will guide us superseded all our fears.</p>
<h3 id="why-pydsa"><strong>Why PyDSA?</strong></h3>
<p>Project ‘<a href="https://github.com/pydsa/pydsa" title="PyDSA">PyDSA</a>’ is an Open Source Python Library for the implementations of various Data Structures and Algorithms. Along with this, it provides a visualisation tool for beginners to have a deeper understanding of working of Algorithms.<br />
We are Python lovers. We get a problem and the first way that comes in our mind to solve it is through Python. Choosing PyDSA over any other project was comfortable for us and at the same time challenging considering our ardent love for Algorithms and Python. We have got to give it our best :p</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++2.jpg" alt="Team PyDSA" /> <br />
<em>All images have been taken from Rails Girls Team App with permissions</em></p>
<h5 id="first-pydelhi-conference"><strong>First Pydelhi Conference</strong></h5>
<ul>
<li>We attended our first ever conference in March when we found out that one of biggest PyDelhi conferences was happening very close to our institute.</li>
<li>Amongst most amazing talks on latest tools and technologies, we realised that participation of women is drastically low in these kind of events.</li>
<li>We were so disappointed by the fact that there is such low awareness amongst women and we realised the importance of initiatives like RGSoC to promote girls into this environment.</li>
<li>It also happened to be the place where we first met our Mentor, <a href="http://iamit.in/" title="Amit Kumar"><em><strong>Amit Kumar</strong></em></a> who also introduced us to two of our coaches, <a href="http://anuvrat.in/" title="Anuvrat Parashar"><em><strong>Anuvrat Parashar</strong></em></a> and <a href="https://saurabh-kumar.com" title="Saurabh Kumar"><em><strong>Saurabh Kumar</strong></em></a>.</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="coaches-mentors-and-supervisors"><strong>Coaches, Mentors and Supervisors</strong></h5>
<ul>
<li>We got introduced to our mentor in the PyDelhi Conference who did an amazing job at encouraging us to apply for RGSoC. He even helped us find out coaches.</li>
<li>We found another coach amongst our friends, <a href="https://ankitsultana.me" title="Ankit Sultana"><em><strong>Ankit Sultana</strong></em></a> and the other one being our professor at IIITD, <a href="https://www.iiitd.edu.in/~purandare/" title="Dr. Rahul Purandare"><em><strong>Dr. Rahul Purandare</strong></em></a>.</li>
<li>All our Coaches form a highly enthusiastic group of programmers who never fail to encourage us, are available 24/7 for help and are more than willing to motivate us to continue our journey in Open Source that we have started with RGSoC.</li>
<li>We have been fortunate enough to have <a href="http://vthakkar1994.github.io/" title="Vaishali Thakkar"><em><strong>Vaishali Thakkar</strong></em></a> and <a href="http://soff22.github.io/" title="Sophia Takeva"><em><strong>Sophia Takeva</strong></em></a> as our amazing supervisors throughout this journey of RGSoC.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++3.jpeg" alt="Team-Fedex++ at Work" /> <br />
<em>image taken by Sahar Siddiqui</em></p>
<h3 id="what-we-have-achieved-so-far"><strong>What we have achieved so far?</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>We designed the basic draft of PyDSA visualisation website. Link to wireframes : <a href="https://goo.gl/8paaNx">https://goo.gl/8paaNx</a></li>
<li>We learnt about Pep8 format, Python Tests, Travis CI and a few issues and their solutions.</li>
<li>We set up a Django server and made a Test App in it.</li>
<li>As guided by our coaches, we started learning more about d3.js library and tried to code a few visualisations in it.</li>
<li>We learnt how does the interaction between the frontend and backend works using d3.js in frontend and Django framework.</li>
<li>We learnt about classes and objects in Python and Design Patterns that should be implemented in order to structure the PyDSA library.</li>
<li>Completed the list of algorithms mentioned in the list of algorithms required for the first official release.</li>
</ul>
<p>In the process, we have reviewed some Pull Requests made by others and we have sent a few of them ourselves.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/pydsa/pydsa/issues/107" title="Issue #107">Created issue #107 to resolve the issue #80</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/pydsa/pydsa/pull/116" title="Counting Inversions">PR for Counting Inversions algorithm</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/pydsa/pydsa/pull/120" title="Longest_Increasing_Subsequence">PR for Longest Increasing Subsequence algorithm</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/pydsa/pydsa/pull/116/commits/3d4e52114e89eae33310a379f6031a955b9d19d2" title="Shell Sort">PR for Shell Sort algorithm</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/pydsa/pydsa/pull/124" title="Docs for BFS">PR to update the documentation of BFS algorithm</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="our-goals-for-the-future"><strong>Our Goals for the Future</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>To set up the official web app on Django platform.</li>
<li>To implement all the basic visualisation algorithms using d3.js.</li>
<li>To complete the documentation of the algorithms such that they are easily understandable.</li>
<li>To prepare further algorithms in such a way that the code is reusable in the Open Source Community.</li>
<li>Keep helping others and spreading the word about Open Source :D</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/TeamFedex++4.jpg" alt="With Love" /> <br />
<em>image taken by Mansi Goel</em></p>
<p>We are so glad to be a part of Rails Girls Summer of Code’16 and Open Source itself and really hope this journey doesn’t end with the Summers. We wish to contribute to the community as much as we can! :)</p>
<h5 id="follow-us-at-"><strong>Follow us at ;)</strong></h5>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/TeamFedex">Twitter</a><br />
<a href="https://github.com/Fedex-Rgsoc16">Github</a></p>
Hello from Team XYZVeronika and Dariahttp://twitter.com/xyzcoode2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:002016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/hello-from-team-xyz<h3 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h3>
<p>We are Daria and Veronika, from Prague, Czech Republic, and together we form Team XYZ.</p>
<p>We met at the Prague Women in Tech meetup in July 2015. Daria was already part of the group since it started, and Veronika had just returned to Prague after living abroad for three years, and she was looking for a support study group to continue her learning. Eventually, we both became involved in organizing meetups and coding sessions, and we decided to apply for Rails Girls Summer of Code together.</p>
<p>Why XYZ? Well, we put that name into our application as a placeholder, and we thought we would come up with something a little catchier later on. But we got used to it and we kind of grew to like this name, so we decided to keep it.</p>
<p>We are working on <a href="http://keystonejs.com/">KeystoneJS</a>, an exciting open source framework for developing websites, applications and APIs. Our project is mainly built using JavaScript based technologies - Node.js, Express.js, ReactJS and MongoDB.</p>
<p>We, students, get immense support from our coaches Jano and Josef, for which we are eternally and endlessly grateful. Our mentor Max, one of KeystoneJS core contributors, patiently answers all our questions and provides valuable feedback. We are supported and supervised by last year’s RGSoC participant Sofia from sunny Sofia, Bulgaria.</p>
<h3 id="this-is-our-team">This is our team:</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-xyz.jpg" alt="Team-XYZ" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Images in this collage were provided by the respective team members)</i></small></font>
<p>Daria’s journey to software development started with working as content-manager or simply copy-paster of content into CMS and e-shops. She realized she actually wants to learn the “behind-the-scenes” technology, so she started with creating simple HTML/CSS webpages then continued into modifying WordPress themes, and in the end got her first job as WordPress developer for a small marketing agency. Since smaller scale web development doesn’t necessarily mean actual programming, she kept postponing learning any language seriously and concentrated on learning tools instead. After landing accidently on a big project as frontend developer, she had to quickly get the basics of modern frontend tooling and realized how badly she lacked decent Javascript (or any other language) knowledge. She is really grateful to RGSoC and Keystone for such amazing opportunity to work on dynamically developing open-source project and learn a lot about react, node.js, mongodb, git and many other exciting technologies.</p>
<p>Veronika comes from Moravia, specifically the Zlín region, which is a part of Czech Republic right next to the border with Slovakia.
Her background is in traditional linguistics - she studied English and Italian Linguistics and Literature.
She became interested in programming and related technical disciplines at the time when she was working in customer service and wanted something new and exciting to learn. JavaScript and Python seemed very well suited for a novice learner, so at first, she was browsing tutorials and online courses - it became her hobby to solve simple programming puzzles, just like other people like to do sudoku or crossword puzzles in their free time.
She was hooked, and later on she decided to take this hobby to the next level and started attending various workshops and intensive courses, which eventually lead to the decision to take a plunge, enroll into Summer of Code and get involved full-time in a real project.</p>
<p>Here we are at work, apparently very busy and focusing on something important:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/xyz-team-working.png" alt="Team-XYZ" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Picture by Fred)</i></small></font>
<h3 id="what-we-have-achieved-so-far">What we have achieved so far</h3>
<ul>
<li>Became better at JavaScript (crossing fingers)</li>
<li>Built password complexity API and min/max options for text field</li>
<li>Implemented smooth scrolling in the admin UI</li>
<li>Reviewed existing docs and moved them to KeystoneJS repo</li>
<li>Learnt git magic: fetch, merge, stash, rebase, pull requests, solving merge conflicts</li>
<li>Used npm for package management and running local environment for Node.js</li>
<li>Wrote our own unit tests</li>
<li>Learnt basics of deployment to Heroku</li>
<li>Built blog with KeystoneJS</li>
<li>Tried out ReactJS</li>
<li>Learnt many other small things (jade, markdown, basics of jsx…)</li>
<li>Tried out working in a coworking space</li>
</ul>
<p>This is the view from our office:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/prague-coworking.jpg" alt="Office view" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Photo by Veronika)</i></small></font>
<h3 id="tips-we-would-like-to-share">Tips we would like to share</h3>
<ul>
<li><strong>Don’t get discouraged by difficulties!</strong> Programming is not easy, it is actually very challenging, and that’s what is so exciting about learning it. In fact, pick difficult tasks! It will push you further.</li>
<li><strong>Community is important!</strong> Get adopted by your programming family and you will get endless support in hard moments.</li>
<li><strong>Take regular breaks!</strong> Refresh and gather new energy in your free time. It is important to relax.</li>
<li><strong>Take care of yourself!</strong> It is easy to get lost in time while you’re fully immersed into coding. Keep yourself hydrated and don’t forget to eat your lunch :)</li>
<li><strong>Strengthen your theoretical knowledge as well!</strong> Nurture your curiosity to find out how things work behind the outer layer.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="our-next-steps-within-the-project">Our next steps within the project</h3>
<ul>
<li>Make own Twitter field for Keystone</li>
<li>Build a visualization of available lists in Keystone’s Admin UI</li>
<li>Submit a “How to build a blog with Keystone” article for Keystone documentation</li>
<li>Learn more about React</li>
<li>Become fluent in JavaScript (one can only hope)</li>
</ul>
Introducing Team l1ghtsab3r IndiaTeam l1ghtsab3rhttp://twitter.com/SoUmmYaah2016-08-13T00:00:00+00:002016-08-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-team-l1ghtsab3r-india<h3 id="about-us">About Us</h3>
<p>Hi! We are <a href="https://twitter.com/soummyaah">Soumya Sharma</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/SenguptaSrishti">Srishti Sengupta</a> from New Delhi, India. This is our first time participating in an open source program. We are very excited to be associated with it and working for our project. Our project is VOC and is a part of the PyBeeWare community.</p>
<h3 id="meet-our-team">Meet our team</h3>
<center>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-team.png" alt="The l1ghtsab3r team!" style="width: 600px;" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Image: Team l1ghtsaber</i></small></font>
</center>
<p>This is our complete team above:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Nattivolk">Natalie Volk</a> is our supervisor.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/freakboy3742">Russell Keith-Magee</a> is our mentor.</p>
<p>Our coaches are: <a href="https://twitter.com/cflee">Chiang Fong Lee</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/bhanuvrat">Anuvrat Parashar</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/ManishEarth">Manish Goregaokar</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/darkryder_s">Sambhav Satija</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/namanspace">Naman Gupta</a>.</p>
<center>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-soumya.png" alt="Soumya" style="width: 300px;" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Image: Team l1ghtsaber</i></small></font>
</center>
<p><strong>Soumya:</strong> I am a final year student at IIIT-Delhi who absolutely loves Star Wars! I love working in the tech industry and especially spending my weekends at hackathons learning new technology and making innovative things. I have varied interests which include curling up with a book and going on exciting hikes.</p>
<center>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-srishti.png" alt="Srishti" style="width: 300px;" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Image: Team l1ghtsaber</i></small></font>
</center>
<p><strong>Srishti:</strong> I am 21, currently residing in New Delhi, India and am pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIIT-Delhi. I loved to tinker around with computers since childhood, and have always wanted to work in the field of computer sciences in the future as well. This very thought has fueled my desire to become a computer science engineer and use my knowledge to make a change. Other than programming, I have several hobbies which include playing the piano, graphic designing, and reading books. I am a trained western solo pianist and have completed till Grade 5 of the solo piano course offered by Trinity College, London. I started learning piano in 2003 and have been addicted to it ever since.</p>
<center>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-soumyasrishti.png" alt="Soumya and Srishti" style="width: 300px;" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Image: Team l1ghtsaber</i></small></font>
</center>
<p>We (Soumya and Srishti) have known each other since the last three years and have done several course projects together in our institute. We’ve been roomies for a long time now and are BFFs! <3</p>
<h3 id="more-about-our-project">More about our project</h3>
<p>VOC is a transpiler that converts Python bytecode into Java bytecode. In this, a .py file will be converted in a .class file that can be executed in a Java Virtual Machine. This is useful for writing Android applications or writing web applications for situations where JavaEE is the only available deployment platform. The documentation for this project can be found here: https://voc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/</p>
<h3 id="what-have-we-achieved-so-far">What have we achieved so far?</h3>
<p>The first few days were spent in understanding the vast code base. RGSoC kickoff started with a call with our mentor, our supervisor and all our coaches. We had an amazing time talking to them. It was highly enriching and all of us got to know more about the project we’ll be working on (i.e. pybee/VOC).
We started with working on setting up the test suite. Slowly, we progressed onto working on some datatypes, looking at their inbuilt methods. We worked on the float, bool, string datatypes. By the end of these two weeks, we had 2 PRs submitted and merged! :D</p>
<h3 id="what-we-plan-on-doing-ahead">What we plan on doing ahead?</h3>
<p>This time, for us has been about getting into the groove for coding, getting to know the codebase, becoming familiar with the internal datatype objects.
For the next few weeks, we plan to write tests for those datatypes which don’t have tests written for them yet. Since this is a new thing for us, we are taking the help of our mentor and coaches for the same. Apart from this, we are trying to finish writing the code for as many datatypes as we can each week.</p>
<p>Signing Off</p>
<p>Team l1ghtsab3r</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/l1ghtsab3r-heart.png" alt="goodbye!" style="width: 300px;" /></p>
Reactives - Bond For a Bang ☼.☼!Shwetha & Tu Anhttp://twitter.com/TeamReactives2016-08-12T00:00:00+00:002016-08-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Intro-Team-Reactives<h1 id="our-team">Our Team</h1>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-reactives-coaches.jpg" alt="Team Reactives" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Reactives with coaches Vanchi (left-most) &Arrchana (right-most). Image taken by Arrchana</i></small></font><br /></p>
<h2 id="who-we-are">Who We Are</h2>
<p>Hello, everyone! We are Team Reactives: Shwetha and Tu An with our coaches Arrchana and Vanchi. All of us are in Singapore and living in the same university campus. Being 2 undergrads and 2 Ph.D. student, we haven’t worked together before this and probably wouldn’t have if not for the summer of code. We two met each other as fellow guitar players for our university’s guitar orchestra and found our coaches through the Rails Girls website. This programme has brought us closer as we encounter and overcome obstacles together.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-reactives.jpg" alt="Team Reactives" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Tu An (left) & Shwetha (right). Image taken by Arrchana</i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="shwetha">Shwetha</h2>
<p>Hi, I’m in year 2 of computer engineering at the National University of Singapore. I have had a passion for coding since my parents are coders and they first introduced me to GW-Basic back in middle school.</p>
<h2 id="tu-an">Tu An</h2>
<p>Yo! I’m a mostly self-learning coder, who started out due to the mythical fear of programming prior to joining my engineering major two years ago. It’s a wonder for me to discover my fondness in coding (& weirdly long hours of debugging) after plowing through basic C programming course as a year 1. Currently, I’m still sticking with my biomedical engineering major as an undergrad, but I really hope to pursue further studies in computer science disciplines. As a junior, I’m figuring out my most interested IT field. I have been eyeing a few after two years of exposure to basic levels of computer graphics, web development, and testing automation.</p>
<p>The best thing in my learning journey so far is extending my abilities beyond myself and sharing my knowledge regardless of how little it seems. Besides coding and exploring other technologies, I really love guiding younger ones (like teenagers) as they pick up coding - the new literacy skill for present & future generations. Moreover, I hope to help others enjoy programming as much as I do despite the crazily deep & lonely valley of the learning curve for newbies as I’m there now and hoping to get through it soon.</p>
<h2 id="our-project-">Our Project ♪♫</h2>
<p>We are working on the Open Source (Duh!) Project <a href="http://sonic-pi.net/">Sonic Pi - The live Coding Music Synth for Everyone.</a> Our mentor is Joseph Wilk, a long-term contributor to Sonic-Pi, coding and music enthusiast.</p>
<h1 id="what-weve-learnt-so-far">What we’ve learnt so far</h1>
<p>We have learnt a ton together. From beefing up our Unix command line skills to picking up Ruby and Rails. We learnt about working in a team: that communication is critical for productivity. It might be tempting to take a crack at it on your own but if just 1 mind working on the issue is not working out for days on end, more heads just mathematically improve the odds of solving the issue.</p>
<p>And of course Git!!! It has been extremely useful for us to keep multiple versions of our old codes and avoid random bugs since we can revert them at no memory costs (at least locally).</p>
<p>Also, we got to learn about accessibility design principles. It was an eye-opening for our team to know about the multiple screen readers across various major platforms such as Orca for Ubuntu, NVDA & Jaws for Windows, VoiceOver for OSX. Many considerations which are required for designing web apps & pages with accessibility have never crossed our minds before beginning this project. Awesome features that we took for granted like dropdown menus, scrolling bars, hidden cards, tabs all turned out to have highly demanding logic implementation behind if made accessible,especially for the visually impaired.</p>
<h1 id="what-weve-achieved">What we’ve achieved</h1>
<p>We had a major hiccup in our progress at the very start in installing and building our project so we decided to work with the latest release for now. Working with that version, we have managed to build a basic prototype to test server communication.</p>
<p>We also experimented other technologies such as JS, Reactjs + Webpack + Babel + Electron for cross-platform applications. We made a super simple prototype with these technologies to quickly try out our ideas for accessibility design on the view layer. Our plan for this prototype is to implement the MVC, connect the application with the local server and package it for Sonic Pi.</p>
RGSoC Day Off 2016Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-08-11T00:00:00+00:002016-08-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-day-off<p>We’re almost halfway through the summer, which as every year can only mean one thing: It’s time for the official RGSoC Day Off!</p>
<p>What’s the RGSoC Day Off, you say?<br />
Every year, we encourage our participants to take a day off to decompress, relax, and come back to work ready for the second half of the program; this ensures that they have some time they can spend away from the computer and do anything they feel like doing on that weekday. This year, our official RGSoC day off will take place on <strong>August 19th</strong>.</p>
<p>For some students, the Day Off just means “not coding”; for others, it’s the possibility to try doing something new and exciting or to spend the day outdoors and with friends. If you need some ideas on what to do on your very own day off, we’ve collected some <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-day-off">here</a>; our teams in the past have gone swimming, hiking, baked cakes, or just hung out with their family. However, you can really just do whatever you want: The sky is the limit!<br />
The only rule is: no work, no commits, no learning code for that single day. We know it’s difficult, but we also hope you can follow through ;)</p>
<p>If you want to document your day off, you can use the <strong>#rgsocdayoff</strong> hashtag and post tweets or pictures of your day. But hey, you don’t have to — it <em>is</em> a day off after all.</p>
<p>On this note: We wish you a lot of fun on your official RGSoC Day Off!</p>
Conferences 2016Mariahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-08-10T00:00:00+00:002016-08-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-conferences-part1<p>It’s amazing to see how many people all over the world support Rails Girls Summer of Code.
Sponsors, coaches, mentors, supervisors decided to play a part in bringing diversity to IT and help us make our program work. But it doesn’t stop there. <a href="/blog/2015-07-21-conferences">Many tech conferences</a> have a hand in RGSoC too.</p>
<p>We encourage our students to attend conferences as part of their scholarship program. We believe that a novice coder can benefit a lot from a good conference, be it learning new things, making new contacts or getting in touch with a larger community.</p>
<p>This year we decided to experiment and don’t make a <a href="/blog/2015-07-28-raffle-results">conference raffle</a>; instead we asked students about conferences they were most interested in and tried to make their wishes come true.</p>
<p>We are very grateful to the conferences and their amazing organizers, who support us this year. It takes lots of efforts to organize a good conference and make it accessible to everyone. We appreciate this a lot!</p>
<p>Here are some of the conferences which generously granted <strong>free tickets</strong> to our students this year.</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpwarsaw2016codemotionworldcomcodemotion-warsawaspan----bteam-kaulahb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://warsaw2016.codemotionworld.com/">Codemotion WARSAW</a></span> – <b>Team KaUlah</b></h4>
<table style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 40px">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://warsaw2016.codemotionworld.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/CodemoWarsaw-logo.png" style="width:200px" /></a>
</td>
<td style="width: 20px"></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>September 15-16, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Warsaw, Poland <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/CodemoWarsaw">@CodemoWarsaw</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting 20% off promo code.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpwwwthestrangeloopcomthe-strangeloopaspan----bteams-jam-and-bmore-stunnersb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://www.thestrangeloop.com">The StrangeLoop</a></span> – <b>Teams JaM and B’More Stunners</b></h4>
<table style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 40px">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://www.thestrangeloop.com">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/strange-loop-logo.jpg" style="width:200px" /></a>
</td>
<td style="width: 20px"></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>September 15-17, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>St. Louis, MO, US <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/strangeloop_stl">@strangeloop_stl</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpeuruko2016orgeurukoaspan----bteams-rubycats-and-jodab"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://euruko2016.org/">EuRuKo</a></span> – <b>Teams RubyCats and joda</b></h4>
<table style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 40px">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://euruko2016.org/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/euruko-logo.png" style="width:200px" /></a>
</td>
<td style="width: 20px"></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b>September 23-24, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b>Sofia, Bulgaria <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/euruko">@euruko</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttprubyconfbrcfpcombrrubyconf-brazilaspan----bteam-perifricasb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://rubyconfbrcfp.com.br/">RubyConf Brazil</a></span> – <b>Team Periféricas</b></h4>
<table style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 40px">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://rubyconfbrcfp.com.br/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/rubyconf-br-logo.png" style="width:200px" /></a>
</td>
<td style="width:20px"></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> September 23-24, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b> São Paulo, Brazil
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpsgotoconcomcph-2016goto-copenhagenaspan----bteam-rookiesb"><span class="color-red"><a href="https://gotocon.com/cph-2016/">GoTo Copenhagen</a></span> – <b>Team Rookies</b></h4>
<table style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 40px">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="https://gotocon.com/cph-2016/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/goto-cph-logo.png" style="width:200px" /></a>
</td>
<td style="width:20px"></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> October 3 - 6, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Copenhagen, Denmark <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/GOTOcph">@GOTOcph</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference too? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting 10% off promo code or getting involved as a conference volunteer.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttpconnect-jscomconnecttechaspan----bteam-mitpalb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://connect-js.com/">Connect.Tech</a></span> – <b>Team MitPal</b></h4>
<table style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 40px">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://connect-js.com/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/connect-tech-logo.png" style="width:200px" /></a>
</td>
<td style="width:20px"></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> October 20-22, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Atlanta, US <br />
<b>Twitter: </b><a href="https://twitter.com/connect_js">@connect_js</a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttprubyconfptrubyconf-portugalaspan----bteams-rubys-secret-and-loadtocodeb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://rubyconf.pt/">RubyConf Portugal</a></span> – <b>Teams Ruby’s Secret and LoadToCode</b></h4>
<table style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 40px">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://rubyconf.pt/">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/rubyconf-pt-logo.png" style="width:200px" /></a>
</td>
<td style="width:20px"></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> October 27-28, 2016 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Braga, Portugal <br />
<b>Twitter: </b> <a href="https://twitter.com/rubyconfpt">@rubyconfpt</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for getting a promo code.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reda-hrefhttprubyconforgau2017rubyconf-australiaaspan----bteam-vegemiteb"><span class="color-red"><a href="http://rubyconf.org.au/2017">RubyConf Australia</a></span> – <b>Team Vegemite</b></h4>
<table style="margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 40px">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://rubyconf.org.au/2017">
<img src="/img/blog/2016/conferences/rubyconf-au-logo.jpg" style="width:200px" /></a>
</td>
<td style="width:20px"></td>
<td>
<b>Date: </b> February 9-10, 2017 <br />
<b>Location: </b> Melbourne, Australia <br />
<b>Twitter: </b> <a href="https://twitter.com/rubyconf_au">@rubyconf_au</a> <br />
<small>Interested in attending this conference, contributing to the diversity ticket fund or giving a talk? <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> for more details.</small>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>Didn’t find yourself in the list? Exhale! This is not the whole story yet. More conferences are coming soon! <img src="/img/blog/2016/tada.png" style="width:20px" /></p>
Meet Team KaUlahKatarzyna Kobierska and Ula Budziszewskahttp://twitter.com/KaUlah_Team2016-08-10T00:00:00+00:002016-08-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-KaUlah-team<h3 id="who-are-we"><em>Who are we?</em></h3>
<p>We are <a href="https://twitter.com/kradydal">Kasia</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/KaUlah_Team">Ula</a> from Warsaw, Poland. We met on Ruby on Rails basic weekend course organized by Coders’s Lab in November 2014.
When we finished it, we started to think what we should do next. We decided to apply for RGSoC 2015 but we weren’t chosen as a team. We didn’t give up and applied for 2016 edition and that’s how <a href="https://twitter.com/KaUlah_Team">KaUlah</a> team was born :)
You probably may guess how we created our team’s name, but we’re going to explain it anyhow. First two letters are from Kasia’s name and remaining part is from Ula’s name. Some of you may tell that it sounds similar to known Mexican coffee liqueur „Kahlua”. It was our inspiration and finally occurs that both words are anagrams :)</p>
<h3 id="our-team"><em>Our team</em></h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kaulah-team-with-coaches.jpg" alt="KaUlah Team" />
<span><font color="grey"><small><i>KaUlah Team with coaches. From left: Tomasz, Kasia, Ula and Piotr. (Photo: Piotr Stachewicz) </i></small></font></span></p>
<p><strong>Ula:</strong> I was a financial specialist and then one day I encountered coding, started to work on it, learn, research and met a lot of fantastic people who helped me.
I am involved into Geek Girls Carrots meet-ups, coordinate Python and mentoring SQL courses, and I go deeper and deeper into it. So in my free time I am helping others to run into IT, also I like traveling, mountain hiking and watching old episodes of TopGear.</p>
<p><strong>Kasia:</strong> I started programming two years ago at home and then on Coder’s Lab RoR course. Before programming I was occupied by PhD studies in chemistry. Finally, it turned out that programming is not so different from chemistry, you research, experiment, learn and at the end get results.
In my spare time I pet my two lovely cats (Janusz & Grazynka) or play handball.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kaulah-gitlab-team.jpg" alt="Gitlab Team" />
<span><font color="grey"><small><i>From left: Yorick (mentor), Grzegorz and Tomasz (coaches), Lucas (supervisor). (Source: gitlab.com and Lucas Pinto twitter account)</i></small></font></span></p>
<p>Above you can see pictures of great developers who are helping us during this summer: <a href="https://twitter.com/chastell">Piotr Szotkowski</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/_tomash">Tomasz Stachewicz</a> from <a href="https://rebased.pl/">Rebased</a> (first picture, they are joining RGSoC for third time!) and from GitLab <a href="https://twitter.com/TomaszMaczukin">Tomasz Matczukin</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/GrzegorzBizon">Grzegorz Bizon</a> (first time coaches). Our mentor is <a href="https://twitter.com/YorickPeterse">Yorick Peterse</a> (who was a coach last year) and our supervisor - <a href="https://twitter.com/medk_">Lucas Pinto</a> (who is a newbie as we are).
We are working at coaching company office so we meet Tomasz and Piotr everyday. With others we communicate via slack channel and Discussion section under issues.
So far we’ve mentioned our team but on our slack channel there are more people who support us - other GitLab employees.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-we-working-on"><em>What are we working on?</em></h3>
<p>When we saw the list of projects available for RGSoC <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/">GitLab Community Edition</a> became our number one right away. Previously we developed our small apps into GitHub. And now working on GitLab CE give us amazing opportunity to see how repository system is build and how it works. GitLab is an application to code, test, and deploy code together. It provides Git repository management with fine grained access controls, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds, wikis, and continuous integration. Contributing to GitLab CE is an amazing experience and fun.</p>
<h3 id="what-tips-do-we-want-to-share-about-our-journey"><em>What tips do we want to share about our journey?</em></h3>
<ul>
<li>Always check your branch.</li>
<li>Tests are very important.</li>
<li>Be patient - ask, check, read before you push.</li>
<li>Remember to rebase and squash.</li>
<li>Don’t miss empty lines.</li>
<li>Learn and learn - it’s great!</li>
<li>You can improve your code.</li>
<li>Issue is almost always more complicated then you thought.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-will-we-do-next"><em>What will we do next?</em></h3>
<ul>
<li>Finish all issues in progress.</li>
<li>Find issues, features and bugs for the next weeks.</li>
<li>Write more code.</li>
<li>Learn as much as we can.</li>
</ul>
Hello World from JaM!Jeena Lee and Malisa Smithhttp://twitter.com/rgsocJaM2016-08-08T00:00:00+00:002016-08-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/hello-team-jam<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-jam.png" onmouseover="this.src='/img/blog/2016/team-jam-funny.png';" onmouseout="this.src='/img/blog/2016/team-jam.png';" /><font color="grey"><small><i>We are silly sometimes! Left: Jeena. Right: Malisa. (photo: Malisa/Jeena)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Hello World! We are Team JaM: Jeena and Malisa from beautiful Portland, Oregon, USA. We are two biologists who met each other while studying bioinformatics, the child of biology and computer science. This summer, we are working on <a href="https://servo.org/">Servo</a>, the parallel web browser engine written in <a href="https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/">Rust</a>, and we cannot be having more fun! <a href="https://twitter.com/lastontheboat">Josh Matthews</a> is our project mentor, <a href="https://twitter.com/datahipster">Stefan Novak</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/fitzgen">Nick Fitzgerald</a> are our coaches, and <a href="http://scottontheinter.net/">Scott Kobewka</a> is our supervisor.</p>
<h3 id="more-about-us">More about us!</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-jam-jeena-malisa.png" alt="Debugging Cats" /><font color="grey"><small><i>On our recent trip to a cat cafe. Jeena debugging next to a cat, and Malisa debugging a cat. (photo: Malisa/Jeena)</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong>Jeena</strong>:
I spent about half of my life in South Korea, and the other half in the West Coast, USA. I studied genetics in college because I was amazed by how DNA with only 4 letters could translate into so many different flavors of life, ranging from salmonella to elephants. After college I worked at <a href="https://boltthreads.com/">BoltThreads</a> for a few years, where I programmed yeast to make spider silk. I recently realized that programming computers is similar to programming genomes with DNA, and I decided to study bioinformatics. The more I learn programming, the more I realize how fun it is! Maybe it is no surprise that I find programming fun because I like to make things, including ceramics, cooking, and knitting.</p>
<p>I always welcome learning opportunities, so please reach out to me through my <a href="http://jeenalee.com/">blog</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/theJeenaLee">twitter</a>!</p>
<p><strong>Malisa</strong>:
I’ve spent most of my life in Seattle and Pennsylvania, with bits here and there in Long Island, New Zealand, and Japan. I really love Portland so far! I majored in Biology as an undergrad, but I’ve always wanted to study more computer science because of its emphasis on problem solving and algorithms. To that end, a little over a year ago I decided to get my Master’s in bioinformatics, and since then I’ve been coding full-time. I’m super excited to have an opportunity to broaden my programming skills this summer with RGSoC.</p>
<p>In my free time I enjoy the following in large quantities: eating, reading, cuddling with cats, swing dancing and ballet, and exploring different Portland-area neighborhoods.</p>
<p><strong>Stefan and Nick</strong>
<img src="/img/blog/2016/team-jam-coaches.png" alt="JaM Coaches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Our coaches pretending to be not so silly... Left: Stefan. Right: Nick. (photo: Malisa/Jeena)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Stefan works at Oregon Health and Science University, helping researchers and doctors share data. Though he may not admit, he is also a pinball master!</p>
<p>Nick works at Mozilla, where he hacks on Firefox Developer tools and Spider Monkey. On the weekends, you can find him playing bike polo.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-rust-and-servo">What are Rust and Servo?</h3>
<p><a href="https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/README.html">Rust</a> is a systems-level programming language that was started in 2010 by an employee at Mozilla. It is a compiled language, so creating executable code is slow, but runtime is fast. It is also memory safe, so pointers will only point to things that actually exist. Lastly, it is designed for concurrency and parallelism on multiple cores. You might consider using it for projects where you would otherwise write C++ code. Plus we think Rust is easier to read and write than C++.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-jam-rust-servo.png" alt="rust-servo-doge" /><font color="grey"><small><i>(photo: www.rust-lang.org/en-US/, www.servo.org)</i></small></font></p>
<p><a href="https://servo.org/">Servo</a> is also Mozilla’s baby. It is a parallel browser engine, and it is written in Rust! We are working on Servo this summer.</p>
<p>…what is a browser engine anyway? To generalize, a browser engine takes a URL and displays the document that corresponds to it. Every web browser has one. For example, Firefox’s current browser engine is called Gecko and is written in C++. Mozilla’s long-term plan is to replace bits of Gecko with bits of Servo. You can read more about browser engines <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser_engine#Technical_operation">here</a>.</p>
<h3 id="our-project">Our Project</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-jam-make-fetch-happen.jpg" alt="fetch" /><font color="grey"><small><i>(photo: www.slate.com. edited by: Malisa)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Within the vast codebase that is Servo, our task is to implement the Fetch API. The Fetch API sends an HTTP Request, <a href="https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/introduction-to-fetch">similar to XMLHttpRequest</a>. We are writing the Fetch API in Rust and connecting it to the JavaScript task.</p>
<p>Sending an HTTP Request via the Fetch API involves a request and a response. Our task is to follow the class templates for Request, Response, Headers, and Fetch, which are specified by the <a href="https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/">WHATWG standards for the Fetch API</a>. We’re lucky to have very specific instructions and goals for our project. ;)</p>
<h3 id="what-have-we-achieved-so-far">What have we achieved so far?</h3>
<p>So far we have implemented the Headers API and the Request API. We started out pair programming (which really revealed some of the differences in the way we think and approach programming), but then we moved onto independent tasks.</p>
<p>One cool thing is that because our code is so dependent on the rest of Servo and the WHATWG specifications, over the past month we have had to modify other parts of Servo’s codebase to add additional functionality that our code depends on. We’ve also filed issues with WHATWG where the Fetch spec requires clarification. This has helped us realize “hey, what we’re doing actually affects the rest of the world, and we’re in it for real!”</p>
<p>Probably even more exciting is the influence that this project has had on <em>us</em>.</p>
<ul>
<li>The Rust and Servo communities are both really awesome, and since we started working with them our standards for human interaction have gotten higher. ;P</li>
<li>Coming into this project, we had no experience with low-level languages. We were both used to writing lots of one-off scripts in Python. Working with Rust has really forced us to think about what’s going on in <a href="https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/the-stack-and-the-heap.html">the stack and the heap</a> and what happens in memory when you create or copy an object. It is tough but rewarding.</li>
<li>On a related note, working on such a big project with such an unfamiliar codebase and lots of contributors is a very valuable experience. Good documentation and collaboration etiquette is appreciated by everybody.</li>
<li>Plus this is the first time we’ve even heard that web browser engines exist!</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-tips-do-we-want-to-share">What tips do we want to share?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Document your daily learnings with TIL (“today I learned”). When you feel like you’re not making progress, go through your TILs and realize how far you have come!</li>
<li>Be vocal about your thoughts, especially when pair-programming. Other people sadly cannot read your mind.</li>
<li>Asking questions is the fastest way to becoming less dumb <strong>fast</strong> – <a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/755020037979856896">Julia Evans</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-will-we-do-next-for-the-project">What will we do next for the project?</h3>
<p>You can see our goals on <a href="https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/11894">Servo’s issue page</a>. Our next steps are to address the remaining components of the Fetch API, which means:
- Finish the Request API implementation
- Finish the Response API implementation
- Implement the fetch method
- Implement Promise in Servo
- Refine the Request, Response, and Headers APIs</p>
<p>This fall, we are attending <a href="http://thestrangeloop.com/">Strange Loop</a> and <a href="http://rustconf.com/">Rust Conf</a>, so come say hi! If you happen to be in Portland, OR, drop us a line, and we’ll take you to our favorite cafe :)</p>
<p>Thanks for reading, and visit our <a href="https://rgsoc-jam.github.io/">blog</a> for daily updates and in-depth discussions (coming soon)!</p>
“Happy coding story from Team Rookies”HyeSoo and Tehetenahttp://twitter.com/hoodierookies2016-08-07T00:00:00+00:002016-08-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Happy-coding-story-from-team-Rookies<h2 id="team-rookies-and-hoodie-project-with-rgsoc">Team Rookies and Hoodie project with RGSoC</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies.jpg" alt="Team Rookies, Tehetena and Hyesoo" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>We're team Rookies, Tehetena and HyeSoo! (Image: Tehetena Masresha and HyeSoo Park)</i></small></font>
<p>Hei, we are <a href="https://github.com/titay2">Tehetena</a> and <a href="https://github.com/flyjwayur">HyeSoo</a> from team <a href="https://twitter.com/hoodierookies">Rookies</a>. We named our team ‘Rookies’ because we wanted to keep our beginner’s mind throughout the RGSoC journey. We live in [Helsinki, Finland]. We are studying Information technology, and we love to learn new technologies. We learned about RG last year and we are happy to be part of RGSoC 2016.
We chose <a href="http://hood.ie/">Hoodie project</a> as our RGSoC project. Hoodie is a framework for frontend web applications that abstracts away the backend. Simply, Hoodie is a no-Backend technology! Hoodie is entirely written in JavaScript. It has been an amazing experience, since we have started working on the Hoodie desktop application project. For the project, we have been working on UI/UX part of the application and learning how to use Git, Node, localStorage and API to implement functionalities.
<a href="https://twitter.com/gr2m">Gregor</a> is our project mentor. <a href="https://twitter.com/orfjackal">Esko</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/omidfi">Omid</a> and <a href="https://github.com/mussebekabil">Musse</a> are our coaches, and <a href="https://twitter.com/Althaire">Pilar</a> is our project supervisor.</p>
<p>This is a greeting from us :D Click here to check our video<a href="https://youtu.be/tn7UmasvaKU">video</a> greeting.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-kickoffcall.jpg" alt="Kick-off meeting with mentor, coaches" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Rookies team in the main, at the bottom-right corner, from the left, are Esko, Gregor, Omid and Pilar. (Image: Pilar Huidobro)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="were-team-rookies">We’re team Rookies!!!</h2>
<p>You can check out more stories about team Rookies’ activities from our <a href="https://rookies-2016rgsoc.rhcloud.com/">blog</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Tehetena</strong>: I am a second year student at metropolia UAS majoring in Mobile solutions. I have attended couples of meetings organized by the Rail Girls community in finland. All the meetings have helped me meet new people and learn from their priceless knowledge. Our team even ended up having a volunteer coach we met at the those events. I would not dare to call myself a very sociable person before, but now I have developed my skills of communication. I am sometimes scared to ask questions or explain things in my head the way I wanted, but during this summer I can say that I have completely avoided all those bad behaviours and became more confident and happy.
I have studied different programming languages at school. This summer I actually get to test and teach myself way more than I have even expected.</p>
<p><strong>HyeSoo</strong>: I study Information Technology student focusing on Mobile Solution. I worked at an online retail company as a web designer in South Korea. While I was working as a web designer, I wanted to learn how to build an application using the images I had designed. Soon after, I was able to come to Finland to study IT. I met many friends from all over the world and was able to learn many new technologies and IT concepts while working on hands-on practices. This year, I worked on several school projects such as making Android chat app, Android RSS reader app, media sharing application and IOS indoor positioning app as part of my mobile solution curriculum. It was fun to learn how to come up with creative ideas as a team. While I was working on the school project, I realized my interest lies in making an interactive, creative fun web application and mobile application.<br />
Thanks to the Rails Girls coach’s invitation, I was able to join Helsinki Rails Girls meetup last year at the first time. In 2015, I attended the Rails Girls workshop. It was an exciting chance to meet like-minded people, to share and expand our knowledge and experience. I also met one of our coaches from the RG Helsinki meetup.<br />
It has been an amazing summer with working on Hoodie desktop application with mentors and coaches. I have been learning not only the programming, but also the passion and wisdom from them. The supports from RGSOC community, mentors and coaches encouraged me to move on the next step of the project. In this summer, I would like to learn more and grow as a person while contributing to the project.</p>
<h2 id="what-weve-achieved-so-far">What we’ve achieved so far</h2>
<p>When we started the project, we had low self confidence. Even though we have taken classes on different programming languages, when it comes to working with it we always thought that we did not have all the knowledge it took to complete the task. Now we have understood that every working experience is a great opportunity to teach ourselves new things every day.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>The very first lesson we learned was Git. We have done several school projects that we have managed to save and clone project repositories on Git, but after we have started working on the hoodie desktop application, there have been many challenges. At first, we did not know how to propose issues, pull request, fetch from remote, rebase and so on, and we were confused with the concept between local and remote. With our mentor Gregor’s help and many trials & errors, we now have better understanding of how the Github actually works and how it is used in our project and also when many contributors are working on the same project.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Other than using Github, we have also learned a lot on UI building and how to implement functionalities on the application, using HTML, CSS and Javascript. We learned how to use event listener, event target, .map, .forEach and localStorage. Especially, using localStorage and making API were very interesting. We followed the <a href="https://github.com/gr2m/localstorage-tutorial/">tutorials</a> which were made by Gregor. It was very helpful and easy to follow. After practicing the code with tutorials, we had a call to solve the problems together and had a Q&A session. We have a call almost every day. It has been really helpful and given us deeper insight on how coding can be applied in the application and how we can use it in the desktop application with Electron framework.
This is our <a href="https://github.com/Rookies-RGSOC2016/hoodie-electron-app">repository</a> of Hoodie desktop application.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="supports-from-a-mentor-and-coaches">Supports from a mentor and coaches</h2>
<p>Sometimes there were some problems which took longer time to solve, but our skilled coaches: Omid, Esko and Musse and mentor Gregor taught us different ways to solve them, and most of the times the new approaches were even easier and clearer to understand. The mentors and coaches’ guidance helped us experiment on different coding practices we came across online.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-Rookies-coaches.jpg" alt="First meeting with Coaches in Helsinki, Finland" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>From left, Tehetena, Omid, Esko and Hyesoo. (Image: Tehetena Masresha and HyeSoo Park)</i></small></font>
<h2 id="our-next-journey-and-our-hope">Our next journey and our hope</h2>
<p>When UI is ready with several Usability tests, we are going to add functionalities to the Hoodie desktop application. As a final step, we are going to wrap the UI and functionalities with Electron framework.</p>
<p>We are hoping to make a useful Hoodie desktop application for the users. Without RGSoC, it could be quite difficult to dive into real world of IT. While writing this post, we realized once again that many great people helped us come this far. One day, we hope that we can also be that person who helps others to open up more opportunities and broaden their horizons. Thank you for providing us this wonderful chance to be part of RGSoC. RGSoC made this summer very special to us. Happy Summer & happy coding! ;D</p>
<p>You can access more detailed information on our <a href="https://github.com/Rookies-RGSOC2016/Project_Plan">project plan</a> in our organization.</p>
B'More Stunners: Puts “Hello World!”Oreoluwa Akinsanmi and Ashley Jeanhttp://twitter.com/ashhjean2016-08-05T00:00:00+00:002016-08-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/B-More-Stunners-puts-Hello-World<h3 id="ready-set-go">Ready, Set, Go!</h3>
<p>We are Ashley and Ore of team B’More Stunners!! We first met at our city’s local Rails Meetup and we instantly clicked. After both coaching a Rails Workshop for Women this past February, we decided to take the plunge and apply for the RGSoC fellowship (Ore was very convincing). Through our various connections within the tech community, we were able to assemble a team of awesome coaches to help us this summer!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/bmorestunners-coaches.png" alt="coaches" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Top left to right: Beverly, Ashley, Ore, Jamie, Andre, Lynn, Benedikt, Will, Mira (Image: Ashley Jean)</i></small></font>
<p><em>We could not have gotten this far without the support of our beloved coaches, mentors, supervisors, and the community!</em></p>
<h3 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h3>
<p><em>Ashley</em> - I was born and raised in New York, but happy to have called Baltimore home for the past six years! Last year, I attended a Rails Workshop where I was introduced to Ruby on Rails. It’s safe to say I quickly became fascinated by the power of code, and I eagerly wanted to learn more. So, for the past year I dedicated myself to learning Ruby in my spare time. Although it has been quite challenging juggling a full time job and learning to program on nights and weekends, I could not be happier. When I am not writing code, I still find myself looking for opportunities to get involved within Baltimore’s tech scene. I avidly attend Baltimore’s Rails and Girls Develop It! meetups. My other interest include, attending my weekly book club with friends, running, and taking naps. Lastly, I enjoy exploring my beautiful city through its eateries, breweries, art galleries, and music venues!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/bmorestunners-ash_and_ore.jpeg" alt="Ashley and Ore" />
<br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Image: Ashley Jean</i></small></font>
<p><em>Ore</em> - I am a staunch advocate of increasing the visibility of women in the technology sector. Through my work with Women Who Code DC and the Baltimore Women in Tech community, I have a commitment to making the tech sector more inclusive. As a teacher for Code in the Schools, I provide quality computer science instruction to youth in Baltimore City.
Last winter a good friend of mine told me about the Rails Girls Summer of Code fellowship. I was working through ruby koans at the time with my mentor Will Barrett, now an unofficial coach, and he encouraged me to pursue it. The hunt was on.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/bmorestunners-monoboh.jpg" alt="monoboh" />
<br /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i> Baltimore’s Mascot (Image courtesy of Baltimore’s graphic designer, Carlos Vigil (https://dribbble.com/carlosvigil))</i></small></font>
<h3 id="starting-off-on-the-right-foot">Starting off on the right foot</h3>
<p>This summer we are working alongside the Bundler team to create a public dashboard that will showcase its metrics. This dashboard will provide programmers with information such as “What is the most popular Ruby version? What is the least and/or most used
Bundler version? etc.” With these metrics, the folks at Bundler will not only be able to analyze this data, but also make precise decisions about future version upgrades. We are super excited to be apart of a project that will have a direct impact to the ruby community. As new developers this opportunity is a dream come true, and couldn’t be a better way to jumpstart our careers.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/bmorestunners-bey2.gif" alt="Beyonce" title="Beyonce-Lemonade:" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Image source: <a href="http://giphy.com/gifs/beyonce-lemonade-l3V0wkKBGQhDmeEJG">giphy</a>)</i></small></font>
<h3 id="struggles-and-breakthroughs">Struggles and breakthroughs</h3>
<p>At the beginning we had a difficult time figuring out exactly where to start.Our coaches and supervisors were incredibly supportive and helped us solidify a plan. With everything going on in our lives, believing in our success and ability to persevere keeps us going through the hard times, and pushed us through the application process.</p>
<h3 id="what-weve-learned">What we’ve learned</h3>
<ul>
<li>Aspects of Agile Methodology for project planning purposes</li>
<li>How to use a Public API and its request to the server</li>
<li>The relationships between clients and servers, specifically within Bundler/RubyGems</li>
<li>Our coaches are the best human beings on Planet Earth….</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="whats-next-to-come">What’s next to come</h3>
<ul>
<li>Create a new controller and route with Rubygems repository,</li>
<li>Figure out where/how to display the dashboard</li>
<li>Figure out how to Batch metrics to Librato Analytics API</li>
<li>Stress less and continue to have fun! (ノ<em>゜▽゜</em>)</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/bmorestunners-rosiep.gif" alt="fighting words" title="Do the right thing: Rosie Perez, Spike Lee" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i> (Image source: <a href="http://giphy.com/gifs/favorite-movies-rosie-perez-do-the-right-thing-8SHI2TWSsk7Ly">giphy</a>)</i></small></font>
<p>Be sure to follow <a href="https://twitter.com/ashhjean">Ash</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/speculate7">Ore</a> on Twitter!
Annnnnnd, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/?kind=&team_id=116">follow our progress</a> this summer! (≧∇≦)/</p>
We are team Perifericas!Emma Pinheiro and Geisa Santoshttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSSA2016-08-03T00:00:00+00:002016-08-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/we-are-team-perifericas<h2>Who are we?</h2>
<p>We are Emma and Geisa from Salvador, a beautiful city in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador,_Bahia">Bahia</a>, Brazil.</p>
<p>We first met at <a href="http://raulhc.cc/">Raul Hackerspace</a>, where we are active members. We both care about diversity and, at RaulHC, we organized some hack nights to promote diversity and now we’re living this amazing experience with other 19 teams around the world. When we received the news that we would be the first team from Brazil participating on the RGSoC, wowww. We just want to say how grateful we are for this great opportunity.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/perifericas-coach-aurium.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Coach Aurium, Geisa and Emma - (Image: Geisa Santos)</i></small></font></p>
<h2>Our team</h2>
<p><strong>Emma</strong>: I’m a trans girl. I love to learn and to listen to metalcore music. I created the Raul Hacker Club in our city to motivate people to build interesting things and to make a hacker scene here :D. I’m interested in security and, for this reason, I’ve created a security research group with some friends (UserX, Gjr). On my free time, I like to study reverse engineer and cryptography/stenography. When I saw Nomi Marks (sense8) for the first time, I thought “I can be this girl”.
<br /></p>
<p><strong>Geisa</strong>: I’m a 220v person. I love to learn and I’m curious about everything. I’m an Advertising and Marketing graduated, with a MBA in Systems Information Management. Because I have suffered a lot for being a woman when I started working in the tech market, I support several local initiatives that promote diversify in tech. I co-organize Rails Girls since 2013 and, last year, I started a PyLadies chapter at my city. I also teach web, social media and entrepreneurship, once a year, at a non-profit organization for teens that live in the suburbs.
I love games, books, book clubs and study groups. You may say I’m a serial book clubber.
<br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/perifericas-online-meeting.jpg" alt="Team Perifericas" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Online meeting with menthor Maren Heltsche, coaches Daniela Feitosa and Brena Monteiro and supervisor Ines Coelho (Image: Ines Coelho)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Four senior developers are helping us during this summer: <a href="https://github.com/monteirobrena">Brena Monteiro</a>, Rails Girls organizer from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governador_Valadares,_Minas_Gerais">Governador Valadares</a>; from Salvador too, we have <a href="https://gitlab.com/u/danielafeitosa">Daniela Feitosa</a>, that also co-organizes Rails Girls Salvador; <a href="https://gitlab.com/u/aurium">Aurium</a>, an enthusiast of hacker culture, open scource and free software; and User_X, that is a member of <a href="https://lampiaosec.github.io/">LampiãoSec</a>, an infosec study group (the same group that Emma is).</p>
<p>And we want to thank RGSoC organization for giving us an amazing supervisor (which is also a Portuguese-native speaker): <a href="https://about.me/inescoelho">Inês Coelho</a>. She participated in the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2015-07-26-meet-team-deigirls">RGSoC 2015 edition</a>.</p>
<h2>What are we working on?</h2>
<p>When we saw the list of projects available for RGSoC our eyes fell immediately on <a href="http://speakerinnen.org/">Speakerinnen</a>. Our only thought was: we need to work with them. Speakerinnen is a platform that provides a list of women who have expertise in a determined field of knowledge, enabling conference organisers from any topic to find and connect with appropriate female speakers. So there are no more excuses like “there’s no women to invite” or “we couldn’t reach a woman with expertise in that filed”.</p>
<h2>What have we achieved thus far?</h2>
<p>Our first goal was to spread this project in our community, so we translated the platform to Brazilian Portuguese. This is being reviewed and soon we will be to connect more women by engaging the Brazilian community to this cause. We are working on others issues too (Emma already sent another PR to production).</p>
<p>Also we were invited to be in charge of Speakerinnen’s expansion at Brazil in the long term. That is awesome! <a href="http://rubymonstas.org/">Ruby Monsters</a> are the most important Ruby group that we know, they rock! And they’re trusting us to take care of their project in our country for long. We are so honored!</p>
<h3>A short video filmed by Geisa Santos to show you the stunning view from Raul Hackerspace window, where Perifericas are hosted</h3>
<p>
<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-version="7" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:658px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"><div style="padding:8px;"> <div style=" background:#F8F8F8; line-height:0; margin-top:40px; padding:28.1944444444% 0; text-align:center; width:100%;"> <div style=" background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACwAAAAsCAMAAAApWqozAAAABGdBTUEAALGPC/xhBQAAAAFzUkdCAK7OHOkAAAAMUExURczMzPf399fX1+bm5mzY9AMAAADiSURBVDjLvZXbEsMgCES5/P8/t9FuRVCRmU73JWlzosgSIIZURCjo/ad+EQJJB4Hv8BFt+IDpQoCx1wjOSBFhh2XssxEIYn3ulI/6MNReE07UIWJEv8UEOWDS88LY97kqyTliJKKtuYBbruAyVh5wOHiXmpi5we58Ek028czwyuQdLKPG1Bkb4NnM+VeAnfHqn1k4+GPT6uGQcvu2h2OVuIf/gWUFyy8OWEpdyZSa3aVCqpVoVvzZZ2VTnn2wU8qzVjDDetO90GSy9mVLqtgYSy231MxrY6I2gGqjrTY0L8fxCxfCBbhWrsYYAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); display:block; height:44px; margin:0 auto -44px; position:relative; top:-22px; width:44px;"></div></div><p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BHlOlpWB1GP/" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none;" target="_blank">The stunning view from Raul Hackespace window - Rio Vermelho, Salvador-BA (Video from Geisa Santos</a> em <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2016-07-08T01:15:23+00:00">Jul 7, 2016 às 6:15 PDT</time></p></div></blockquote>
<script async="" defer="" src="//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js"></script>
</p>
<h2>What tips do we want to share about our journey?</h2>
<ul>
<li>Be calm</li>
<li>There's no need to solve all the issues in a week</li>
<li>Trust in yourself</li>
<li>Community is all. There are lots of people around the world trying to increase diversity in tech and they will help you learn</li>
<li>Test always. Always.</li>
<li>Before starting code in a project you want to contribute, read all docs, check the "blames", try to understand how they developed it. And run tests.</li>
<li>Don't panic and don’t try to break your laptop when something persists not working as you want or as advised by the guide</li>
<li>ERRORs will be common. Accept it, and will be less painful</li>
<li>Try to get fun. Computing, tech, programming and hacking are amazing</li>
<li>"It's aliveeeee!" is the new Eureka</li>
</ul>
<h2>What will we do next for the project?</h2>
<ul>
<li>Solve the issues we set and the rest of the list :D</li>
<li>Work on design thinking and user experience with the whole team</li>
<li>Create gems (it's a fun and curious part - we love it and want to practice more)</li>
</ul>
<p>
We've been following the others blog posts from our colleagues and we're dying of curiosity to know the origin of their teams' names.
_Is there anyone curious to know the origin of ours name?_<br />
Our team is named after Perifericas, an initiative that aims to introduce to programming and technology teens, elders and youngers from peripheral Salvador. We also develop activities to engage minorities to STEAMED (added Arts, Education and Design to STEM).</p>
<p>Thanks for reading!</p>
<p>If you want to talk with us, check out these channels:</p>
<p>Twitter:
<br /><a href="https://twitter.com/geisasantos">@geisasantos</a>
<br /><a href="https://twitter.com/n3k00n3">@emmapinheiro</a></p>
<p>Our blog about RGSoC 2016:</p>
<p><a href="http://perifericas.github.io">http://perifericas.github.io</a></p>
We are Team VegemiteRamya and Kyliehttp://twitter.com/rgau20162016-08-02T00:00:00+00:002016-08-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-team_vegemite<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-vegemite-coaches.jpg" alt="Team Vegemite" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Vegemite with our coaches Tim, Kevin and Jo</i></small></font></p>
<p>We are Team Vegemite: Ramya Ravindranath and Kylie Gusset from Melbourne, Australia. We are working on <a href="http://exercism.io">Exercism.io</a>, a website that offers crowd-sourced code mentorship where you can practice having thoughtful conversations about code. <a href="https://twitter.com/kytrinyx">Katrina Owen</a> is our project mentor, <a href="https://twitter.com/jocranford">Jo Cranford</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/tmoore">Tim Moore</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/sentience">Kevin Yank</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/sporty_sush">Sushma Girish</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/keirasaid">Keira Hodgkison</a> are our coaches with their employer <a href="http://cultureamp.com">Culture Amp</a> being our wonderful hosts. Vi is our project supervisor (and member of last year’s Australian Rails Girls Summer Of Code Team <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamMelbKoala">Team Koala</a>).</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-vegemite-railscamp.jpg" alt="Team Vegemite" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Vegemite eating Vegemite!</i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="ramya">Ramya</h2>
<p>She had lived her entire life in India until she moved to Australia in 2014. Like everyone else in her home country she did not have much options with her career. So she joined an engineering course in Computer Science where she was introduced to the programming for the first time. Afterwards, she started working as a junior Java developer in one of the organizations in Bangalore.</p>
<p>She went to Swinburne University, Melbourne and completed a Masters in IT. She is passionate about programming and thinks anything is possible if you believe in yourself. Her aim is to find a position as a developer in Australia.</p>
<h2 id="kylie">Kylie</h2>
<p>Kylie has a creative background in Graphic Design, Website Design, Community Radio & Textiles. She previously studied and worked in front end website development when the internet seemed to be powered by “under construction” .gifs. She applied for Rails Girls Summer Of Code after attending several Ruby/Rails Girls events, in order to learn more about Open Source and programming, whilst updating her old school front end web development skills.</p>
<h2 id="what-weve-worked-on-and-learnt-in-the-last-month">What we’ve worked on and learnt in the last month:</h2>
<ul>
<li>Creating issues</li>
<li>Getting the local development environment set up and working.</li>
<li>A new color scheme for Exercism, which is adding onto and improving the current colours.</li>
<li>Research on Exercism, UX and fonts, in order to make further changes.</li>
<li>Website updates of copy.</li>
<li>Learning Git and Ruby.</li>
<li>Solving ruby exercises on Exercism.</li>
<li>Teamwork</li>
<li>Understanding the domain model of Exercism.</li>
<li>Learning Sinatra framework, writing specs with Minitest and learning test driven development approach.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="achievements">Achievements:</h2>
<p>We have submitted 4 pull requests and 4 of them are merged :)</p>
<h2 id="events">Events:</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-loadtocode-campjs.jpg" alt="Team Vegemite" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Our Winter of Code at camp.js with Jed + Sharkie from Thinkmill</i></small></font><br /></p>
<p>Ramya & Kylie have attended a few camps and conferences:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Camp.js - a Javascript camp in Sydney, where Kylie gave a <a href="https://medium.com/@gusseting/scent-for-coders-cause-there-s-more-to-life-than-lynx-68f07500f9b9#.3x0kvfqso">talk on scent for coders</a> and we met Jed + Sharkie from Thinkmill, the company behind Keystone.js - another RGSOC project! Here’s <a href="https://medium.com/@ramya_r06/my-experience-at-campjs-b75a68a98505#.vvav1ex6n">Ramya’s writeup of her experiences</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Rails Camp - a camp devoted to Ruby On Rails programmers where the weekend is spent meeting and learning from others in the community.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>CultureXDesign - Culture By Design is the conference run by our hosts Culture Amp - we helped them out by filling conference bags and general assistance on the day, which involved speakers on company culture along with an unconference format, where attendees could choose to speak on the topics that mattered the most to them.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>CODE - a long running Australian conference company Webdirections has a frontend web development conference that Ramya & I will be attending whilst this piece is being published.</p>
</li>
</ul>
The Echo from Uganda, We are Team EchoNaggita Keziah and Nanjekye Joannahhttp://twitter.com/_TeamEchoUg_2016-07-28T00:00:00+00:002016-07-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-Team-Echo<h3 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h3>
<p>We are <a href="https://github.com/knaggita">Naggita Keziah</a> and <a href="https://github.com/nanjekyejoannah">Joannah Nanjekye</a> from Kampala, Uganda. We met at a tech meetup dubbed GeekNight kampala at the former thoughtworks kampala offices where Joannah was speaking about the Transition from continous intergration to continous delivery. The chemistry was instant and we decided to team up and apply for the Rails Girls summer of code with a strong desire to start our journey of contributing to open source.Now here we are one of the 20 teams around the globe sponsored for the fellowship.This is our first time in RGSoC and we are so grateful to RGSoC for this grand opportunity.</p>
<p>Our goal for the summer of code is to learn and learn as much as we can, to become better developers with clean code, to write thousands of lines of code for qutebrowser, to pass on what we have learnt and our experiences to the community and to build a bigger network through networking with those in RGSoC.</p>
<h3 id="this-is-our-team">This is our team:</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamEcho.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<br />
<em>Supervisor Kasia Jarmołkowicz (bottom right); coach Wilson Kiggundu(top left); coach Kisitu Augustine(top right); mentor Florian Bruhin (bottom left)</em></p>
<p><strong>Keziah</strong>: Is a third year undergraduate software engineering student at Makerere University Uganda. Her greatest emphasis is in designing scalable software solutions to solve the common problems in our community through using apropriate technologies.</p>
<p>She has a great interest in Python programming language and Real time Embedded systems. she loves mentoring and inspiring others and she is currently a coach at Django girls, a Tech Kids tutor and a math tutor. She would love to see more women taking up STEM courses at the university.</p>
<p>She started learning python in July 2015 from AI research lab where she was doing her internship. she fell in love with python and she has never looked back. After her internship she joined Django girls Kampala as a participant in September during which she developed flashtrolley an e-commerce site that connects small business owners to their customers. After her cohort of study, she enrolled to become a coach for the next cohort..</p>
<p><strong>Joannah</strong>: She earned a degree in Software Engineering from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. She joined Laboremus Uganda as a software engineering trainee from September 2013 to March 2014 after which she joined Fintech Uganda Limited as a programmer till June 2016.</p>
<p>She has primarily been developing software in C# for all her roles in industry but has this passion for ruby and python. She first fell in love with python from her first year in university till she learnt of ruby from ruby Friday events that were held at thoughtworks Kampala. During ruby Fridays she was able to learn ruby programming and after which she was able to teach in one of the days in the next cohort of ruby Fridays. She has worked with ruby frameworks like Ruby on Rails and shoes and Python frameworks like django. She has contributed to many banking applications during her position a programmer at Fintech Uganda Limited.</p>
<p>She is an advocate for agile software development practices and values reliability in software because she believes it’s an attribute that must never be compromised. She has organized several software development events to pass on knowledge. She organized an Hourofcode event to celebrate computer science week in 2015 where she taught university girls how to begin programming in JavaScript. She also taught ruby and Sinatra a light weight ruby web framework for a week in a code camp she and team she was part of organized.</p>
<p>Other than programming she loves planes and very curious about how they work and in September this year, she will be moving to Nairobi to finally join aviation school to purse aeronautical engineering with a bias in Engines and frames a dream she had from childhood.</p>
<h3 id="what-we-are-working-on">What we are working on</h3>
<p>We are working on <a href="https://github.com/the-compiler/qutebrowser">qutebrowser</a>, a keyboard driven, vim like browser. The browser is built with python3, PyQt5 and QtWebEnginee and it is 100% open source.</p>
<p>We chose to contribute on qutebrowser because we wanted to do something interesting and loved the idea of browsing the web using commands and shell. The project also presented us a great opportunity of learning new things and exploring python3 and PyQt5 deeper.</p>
<p>The fast pace and sheer amount of information keeps us on our toes, but we have each other, our coaches( <a href="https://twitter.com/knaggita">Wilson</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/austiine04">Augustine</a> ) , our mentor (<a href="https://twitter.com/the_compiler">Florian</a>) and supervisor (<a href="https://twitter.com/_idengager">Kasia</a>) to keep us on track. Thank you all for your selfless help :)</p>
<h3 id="what-have-we-achieved-thus-far">What have we achieved thus far?</h3>
<p>About the project</p>
<ul>
<li>Browser architecture. We had no idea how a browser archiecture looks like before we joined the summer of code. But now through the different tutorials and udemy course that our coaches and mentors pointed us to, we feel that we are now comfortable with the architecture of a browser.</li>
<li>Knowledge of TDD and application. Testing has now become a very important aspect of our programming.Now we use it frequently and know how to write tests and apply the idea of TDD. We are writing tests for the commands on qutebrowser..</li>
<li>App features. We are currently solving issues 1395, 844 and 47 and hopefully we will have a pull request for one of them this week and for our tests.</li>
<li>Python3. We have expanded our knowledge in python forexample the use of pdb, decorators and more OOP.</li>
<li>Qt. We read a great deal QtUrls when trying to solve issue 1998, understanding the QtWebEnginee.</li>
<li>Becoming Github Gurus. We are now quite used to performing various GitHub gymnastics such as rebasing, squashing, resolving conflicts, etc. (but sometimes it still acts mysteriously).</li>
</ul>
<p>Our first conference</p>
<ul>
<li>Arrival. We arrived in Nairobi, Kenya for the conference on Wednesday 20th of July 2017 in the morning. We rested for some hours before we started the conference.</li>
<li>Networking session. We attended this session on 20th/July/2017. We made alot of friends, exchanged business cards and it was an amazing evening.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/teamEcho_1st_day_Nairobi.JPG" alt="Arrival" /></p>
<ul>
<li>Day 1 of the conference. We gave a presentation on how drones, sensors and apps are rewriting the rules in agriculture and the future. This talk pulled attention from the attendees after which we got an invite from one of them to do the same talk at another engineering conference in nairobi.We listened to other presentations from other women in the african tech space.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/presentation.jpg" alt="Day 1" /></p>
<ul>
<li>Day 2 of the conference. On this day we did not have a talk but we listened to different panels being conducted by different women in the tech space in Africa. They talked about common reasons why women exit stem , how to succeed as a woman in tech , how to run successful startups and the various innovation opportunities in the fintech space. We also witnessed some women led startups pitch their products and win funding and incubation space.We ended the day with getting some swag from google.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/final day.JPG" alt="Day 1" /></p>
<p>And Yeah..our kickoff Party</p>
<p>We also had an amazing kickoff party with our host <a href="https://twitter.com/CKJapheth">C.K Japtheth</a> and the great minds <a href="https://ug.linkedin.com/in/shakira-ndagire-seruwagi-0640a192">Shakira</a> and <a href="https://ug.linkedin.com/in/naigaga-angella-977693ba">Angela</a></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsockickoff.jpg" alt="RGSOCkickoff" /></p>
<p>Community involvement</p>
<ul>
<li>Rails girls Kampala. We are currently in the process of reviving Rails Girls Kampala chapter,a community that had gone cold after thoughtworks left kampala . We are doing this so that future RGSoC fellows have a commnunity they can call home in uganda as we impart ruby on rails web development skills to ladies in our commnunity. As part of the program , we shall run an 8 week cohort of ruby on rails programing sessions and a rails girls kampala all with the support of our hosts <a href="http://innovationvillage.co.ug/">The Innovation Village kampala</a>.</li>
<li>Hack for Corruption. We are in the process of organising a hackathon to cub the raging problem of corruption in our country. This is an idea that was bone during a discussion we had during our rails girls kick off party with the Team lead of <a href="http://innovationvillage.co.ug/">The Innovation Village kampala</a>. We talked about how technology can impact our country and as we closed the party We coined hack for corruption which is the war against corruption.The organisation for the hackathon is underway with the help of our hosts <a href="http://innovationvillage.co.ug/">The Innovation Village kampala</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="tips-we-want-to-share">Tips we want to share</h3>
<ul>
<li>Take a deep breath, don’t panic. A castle wasn’t built in one day :)</li>
<li>You need to first clearly understand the problem before writing code for it.</li>
<li>Understanding the code flow is the first step to diving into legacy code.</li>
<li>Writing tests for legacy code is one of the best ways to understand the code base.</li>
<li>Be persistent because persistence breaks resistance. Look for all possible ways for squashing that bug, don’t give up and don’t settle.</li>
<li>Make your week’s plan and stick to it.</li>
<li>It’s good to express your problem in clear way, so your helpers can give related suggestions and solutions.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-will-we-do-next-">What will we do next ?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Finish all the issues at hand</li>
<li>Write more tests for the project</li>
<li>Embark on solving other issues</li>
<li>Revive rails girls kampala</li>
</ul>
<p>And we are always looking for new contributors for qutebrowser, so please, join us!</p>
<p>Follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamEchoUg">twitter</a> and like us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TeamEcho-515088588691369/">facebook</a> for daily updates :)</p></p>
Hello! From Team HackbrightersPatricia and Melissahttp://twitter.com/HeartRGsoc_sf2016-07-26T00:00:00+00:002016-07-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-hackbrighters<h2 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h2>
<p>We are <a href="https://github.com/arbonp">Patricia Arbona</a> and <a href="https://github.com/go-bears">Melissa Fabros</a>, and we are based in the Bay Area of California.
Patricia had lived her entire life in the Midwestern part of the United States, primarily in Ohio and Chicago. She attended the University of Chicago for college, and studied Latin American history in addition to Spanish and Portuguese. Afterwards, she had a career at a major educational publishing company, where she was an editor and translator (Spanish-English/English-Spanish) for Spanish High School textbooks. She believes passion for foreign languages translates well to programming, because she views programming as learning a new type of foreign language. She moved out to the Bay Area earlier this year, to attend <a href="https://hackbrightacademy.com/">Hackbright Academy</a>, a fellowship for women who wish to transition to software development. It was at Hackbright where she met her dear friend, Melissa!</p>
<p>Thanks for the intro, Patricia! Melissa comes to programming from the world of non-profits and higher education. Her interests in programming started in middle school where she was one of the first girls to join the computer club. However, she majored in English and American Literature in college. She loved the way literature “codes” the human brain to build worlds and emotions in the imagination. She is a PhD candidate in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She maintained her coding interests by making small web page projects. A friend once told her that reading good code is like reading good writing, which piqued her curiosity. Since that conversation, she went from teaching at the University of California, Merced to taking part-time coding classes, completing a Google Summer of Code internship, graduating from Hackbright Academy, and starting the Rails Girls Summer of Code fellowship.</p>
<p>Together, we’re working on the <a href="https://getlektor.com">Lektor</a> project, a Python-based content management system. The project uses the Python programming language to build static web pages that also have a dedicated administration interface. The build system is in Python, admin UI is written in React.js, and the static pages use Markdown.</p>
<p>Our project mentor is <a href="http://lucumr.pocoo.org/about/">Armin Ronacher</a>. Our local coaches are <a href="https://www.ramencodes.com">Ramil Nobleza</a>, <a href="https://threeplus.com">Gavin Crooks</a>, <a href="https://ssstrieu.carbonmade.com">Samantha Trieu</a>, and <a href="http://www.seemaullal.com">Seema Ullal</a></p>
<h2 id="below-is-our-team">Below is our team:</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Team_Lektor.png" alt="First meeting with Mentor and Coaches" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Clockwise from top-left, Team Hackbrighters (Patricia and Melissa), Gavin Crooks, Ramil Nobleza, Samantha Trieu, and Armin Ronacher.</i></small></font>
<h2 id="what-have-we-achieved-so-far">What have we achieved so far?</h2>
<p>We merged a pull request that helps users install the Linux dependencies needed to run Lektor. We’ve tasked ourselves with giving some love the Lektor’s admin UI.
The first thing we did was to set up our workstations at Github’s office in San Francisco.
<img src="/img/blog/2016/setting-up.jpg" alt="Team Hackbrighters setting up" /></p>
<p>Everyone at GitHub has been extremely supportive and welcoming us for our summer fellowship. Octocat has been especially helpful in giving moral support:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/Octocat.jpg" alt="Team Hackbrighters with Octocat" /></p>
<p>We also had our Kick-Off party with our sagely mentors. At the Kick-Off party, Melissa and Ramil caught a Zubat!
<img src="/img/blog/2016/Zubat.jpg" alt="Catching Zubats" /></p>
<p>To accomplish our task, we’ve reviewed our Javascript fundamentals, particularly solidifying our knowledge of scopes, closures and javascript objects. We found <a href="https://nodeschool.io/oakland">Nodeschool</a> and the Node community really helpful and welcoming as we dived into Javascript! <img src="/img/blog/2016/Meeting-wombat.jpg" alt="Team Hackbrighters at NPM" /><font color="grey"><small><i>NPM's mascot Haggis, a wombat, was giving us moral support at Node School</i></small></font></p>
<p>We researched how developers test React.js components by interviewing every front-end developer we walked into.
This is us, for most of our journey learning JavaScript and exploring the vast possibilities of front-end testing:
<img src="/img/blog/2016/pikachu_question.gif" alt="Pikachu..huh?" /></p>
<h2 id="what-tips-do-we-want-to-share-about-our-journey">What tips do we want to share about our journey?</h2>
<p>Transitioning from another career (We’re both humanities majors previously deeply involved in Education) is really hard. Be nice to yourself while you’re learning because learning to code is a marathon, not a sprint. Some days you won’t be able to wrap your mind around a new or difficult concept.</p>
<p>Transitioning careers is difficult. It’s moving into the unknown, and some people won’t understand why you’d pursue something new. People who are close to you will question you about your choices–they may see your decisions as rash and drastic. Others may doubt you. But if you invest time in yourself to learn, to meet people, and to establish new roots (whether in a new town or a new profession), the concepts and people who seemed mysterious start to make more sense.</p>
<p>You have to believe in yourself and find friends and colleagues that will help hold you up during hard times.</p>
<h2 id="what-will-we-do-next-for-the-project">What will we do next for the project?</h2>
<ul>
<li>We’ll make a pull request for an update to the community page’s Code of Conduct.</li>
<li>We’ll write test coverage for Lektor’s Admin UI page.</li>
<li>We are in the process of learning React, so we can contribute updating the UI’s components.</li>
</ul>
Time for RubyCats, meowww!Iza & Kingahttp://twitter.com/RubyCatsTeam2016-07-25T00:00:00+00:002016-07-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/time-for-rubycats-meowww<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats_logo.jpg" alt="RubyCats" /><font color="grey"><small><i>RubyCats</i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redwho-we-arespan"><span class="color-red">Who we are</span></h2>
<p><strong>Izabela</strong>: Mostly known for being a cook, cleaning lady, Lego architect and a companion to all sorts of crazy activities, like camping trips based in the middle of the living room and ridiculously long scooter/skateboard adventures (on an alien planet). Also known as a scary monster named Monstro or a fellow pirate Larry, on a ship made of cardboard. Summarizing, a Mom (also called Mammoth) of a 3 year old bundle of pure energy, named Zuza. Also a bit of a gamer (indie games in particular). Comic/manga/anime and boardgames fan. Loves to eat - addicted to kimchi, pho and curry. Can’t imagine life without rice, pasta, edamame and tomatoes. Loves to draw & create pixel art after a beautiful day filled with coding. True believer in the World’s true beauty – diversity.</p>
<p><strong>Kinga</strong>: long-time-sense-of-life-passion-and-career-path-seeker. Would like to travel the world and get to know and understand as much as possible. And as many people as possible. Deeply in love with and addicted to her two cats Richard and Leon. And with/to cats in general ;) Loves Asian food, especially Indian cuisine. Likes to cook, bake and read, but often has other things to do instead. Conglomerate of opposites /zodiacal Gemini tells everything…/. Tries to survive in a world full of gluten and dairy ;) Does American Tribal Style and a bit of tribal fusion bellydance. Cares about nature. Wants to do things that are meaningful and ethical and help make world a better place. Artistic soul that wants to create. With no IT and any technical edu/experience/skills decided to get into programming. Taught kids Scratch / ScratchJr, Blockly with Wonder robots, HTML+CSS. Hopes to start working as a programmer in a near future. Now or never. Interested in hard and soft. Dreams about “making something that works and is useful” like some machine built and programmed by herself. And about having a house with a garden away from the city.</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redthe-beginningspan"><span class="color-red">The beginning</span></h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats_foto.jpg" alt="Iza & Kinga" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Iza & Kinga/ RubyCats</i></small></font></p>
<p>We met three times during Ruby workshops and events. After the 3rd time decided to apply to RGSoC together. Cats are one of our shared interesteds, so the name for our team came to us by itself ;)</p>
<p>So here are the real (Ruby)cats:</p>
<p><strong>Izabela’s cats:</strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats_cats_2.jpg" alt="Tosio & Manio" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Tosio & Manio</i></small></font></p>
<p><em>Best listeners ever. All over the place pukers. Warm and cozy hot water bottles => Crazy Tosio & Grandpa Manio. My best friends.</em></p>
<p><strong>Kinga’s cats:</strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubycats_cats_1.jpg" alt="Rysio & Leon" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Rysio & Leon</i></small></font></p>
<p><em>Richard and Leon are both sheltered foundlings. Leon came to us as a kitten half a year after Richard. Richard became his friend and mummy ;). They’re both extremely sweet and crazy.</em></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redstuck-between-a-rock-and-a-hard-placespan"><span class="color-red">Stuck between a rock and a hard place</span></h2>
<p>Those 3 weeks were a bit of a struggle for us. All the plans got washed away by a huge wave of our knowledge deficiency. But as they say, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. We hope for a better. We try hard to make things better.</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redwhat-weve-learnedspan"><span class="color-red">What we’ve learned</span></h2>
<ul>
<li>Partitioning, dealing with virtual machines on Vbox and VMWare, different Linux distributions and continuous reinstalling and setting up all the good things required or useful for Ruby and Rails</li>
<li>Git, gitflow, GitHub. Recently commit and their messages good practices</li>
<li>Using and customize different tools like Sublime Text, Trello, Slack,</li>
<li>Basics of debugging</li>
<li>Basics of Rspec</li>
<li>Expanded out knowledge about validations and callbacks</li>
<li>Got familiar with some new frontend issues incl. Sass and Slim.</li>
<li>We’ve realized how much it takes for a newbie to understand what’s going on in the code of a working app, how much it takes to understand its architecture.</li>
<li>An interesting experience is to observe the daily functioning of software company.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redplans-for-the-remaining-two-monthsspan"><span class="color-red">Plans for the remaining two months</span></h2>
<ul>
<li>Contribute more - hopefully with expanding knowledge, more contribution will follow.</li>
<li>Learn to ask for help more often, not feeling stupid and guilty of a Not Knowing crime ;P</li>
<li>Believe in ourselves more - be happy with little things we do good.</li>
<li>The knowledge - it’s never as full as we would like it to be, we will try not to stress over this.</li>
<li>Take small steps, don’t try to eat a whole cake at one.</li>
<li>Keep learning and practicing what we know.</li>
<li>Smile more often and hug a lot of cats.</li>
</ul>
We are Loaded to CodeMarie & Theahttp://twitter.com/LoadToCode2016-07-21T00:00:00+00:002016-07-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/start-of-loadtocode<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-loadtocode-Loading_icon.gif" alt="Team LoadToCode" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Loading (Image: Team Wikimedia Commons)</i></small></font></p>
<p>So at its core the LoadToCode team consists of two components: Thea & Marie. They found each other in Berlin on their way to learn programming. What a lucky coincidence! Now they are one of 20 teams all over the world that are participating in this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code. Of course, Thea & Marie are not the only components that are needed to make this summer as code- & joyful as possible…</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redso-the-rails-girls-summer-of-code-has-startedspan"><span class="color-red">…so the Rails Girls Summer of Code has started!</span></h2>
<p><strong>Say Hello to Berliner Team LoadToCode</strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-loadtocode-TeamSmile.gif" alt="Team LoadToCode" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Big Team Laugh (Image: Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font></p>
<p>So our Rails Girls Summer of Code has started, we got welcomed by our hosting company SoundCloud and got an introduction to the company + a goodie bag! Day by day, we get treated very well, coffee and food only adds to the good feeling! So on the picture you see glorious & very smart Duana, patient & clever Remy and last but not least encouraging Ruby hero Sergio!</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redhere-we-are-loadtocode--thea--mariespan"><span class="color-red">Here we are! LoadToCode = Thea + Marie</span></h2>
<p>Psssst: Here we are, sitting at our desks, looking very serious and trying to understand Rails, Git & LEAP. I mean, this picture is an exception, we normally don’t look that funny.</p>
<p>Component “Marie”: Finishing her Masters in Interdisciplinary Latin American Studies and was researching about the user experience of period tracking apps from a social perspective. She became curious for programming after a Rails Girls beginner’s workshop in 2015. She is a fan of digital rights like encrypted communication and dared to dive more into coding. She is more than happy to combine many interests during the RGSoC.</p>
<p>Component “Thea”: She holds a bachelor degree in economic computer science and gained some work experience in that field. However she always wanted to deepen her programming knowledge. She then started to get involved with Ruby/Rails via the RubiesOnDaCloud study group in Summer 2015. Now with the RGSoC she is ready to put more effort in the project “to learn programming”!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-loadtocode-Team Load to Code.jpg" alt="Team LoadToCode" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Picture of Thea & Marie (Image: Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redhippie-hackathon--what-happened-so-farspan"><span class="color-red">Hippie-Hackathon | What happened so far</span></h2>
<p>So we got invited to a whole week of a hackathon (we call it Hippie-Hackathon), full of LEAP-knowledge, Q&A with Leap-Coders & last but not least socializing via campfires and advanced mime guessing. <em>So how would YOU describe Quantum, SHA 512 or propietary software?</em></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-loadtocode-lower-hippieh-hackathon.jpg" alt="Team LoadToCode" /><font color="grey"><small><i> (Image: Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font></p>
<p>This does not only look code- & joyful on the photos, it really was. A little campfire is highly recommendable for the teams who are having a winter of code or the teams that live in Germany!</p>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redwhat-we-learnedspan"><span class="color-red">What we learned</span></h2>
<ul>
<li>Overview of LEAP Architecture: Learning about Bitmask, Soledad, Pixelated! It is complex, but not impossible to understand, we recommend to start using these services. They care for your security and privacy!</li>
<li>Web Applications with Rails, creating a blog webapp with Rails</li>
<li>Git & Github</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="span-classcolor-redwhat-comes-nextspan"><span class="color-red">What comes next:</span></h2>
<p>So in order to get more structure and keep track of our tasks, what we have done and we’re we heading to, we created a Kanban board.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-loadtocode-Reallife-KANMAN-board.jpg" alt="Team LoadToCode" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Kanban Board: Goals, ongoing tasks and Backlog :) (Image: Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font></p>
<p>At the end of our 3rd week we’re gonna improve our presentational skills and give an overview of the LEAP project to our coaches at SoundCloud. 20 minutes of presentation and 10 minutes Q&A, so we hope to be prepared enough for the tricky questions.</p>
<p>At the end some dog content! \o/ Here you see our favourite Colleague, adorable mate and patient listener!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-loadtocode-favourite-colleague.jpg" alt="Team LoadToCode" /><font color="grey"><small><i>CTO of SoundCloud (Images: Team LoadToCode)</i></small></font></p>
“For you, a thousand times over.”Taneea S Agrawaal and Vrinda Malhotrahttp://twitter.com/Team_Twitches2016-07-20T00:00:00+00:002016-07-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-twitches-spreads-the-magic<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team_twitches.png" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>The Twitches in their element! (Image Credits: Humans of IIITD)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Yeah, that’s not quite how the Twitches came into being. It was a heatstroke that led to us meeting. If you have ever seen a Bollywood movie, you will relate. On a scorching July morning, our protagonists/narrators met at a college orientation, that both of them would not end up joining. Vrinda was feeling too hot and was lost on the campus when she asked Taneea’s Mom for directions.</p>
<p>T: I hated you on sight.<br />
V: I don’t even remember seeing you. But I remember asking your Mom for directions. She is so sweet.<br />
T: <em>(Rolls her eyes)</em> Oh, she remembers seeing me.</p>
<p>Just to give you a little introduction, T stands for <strong>Taneea</strong>:</p>
<p><em>“I am an Indian student pursuing Bachelors of Technology (B.Tech) at IIIT-Delhi. I have a myriad of interests, coding being just one of them. A hacker, a programmer, and a hardcore Berlin Artparasites fan, I am an outdoorsy person who likes to solve problems in real life (including the ones where almost everyone on Earth spells my name wrong). I am a hopeless romantic and a geek, but an unlikely one. A day spent with my laptop, and an interesting problem to solve, having delicious food (with copious amount of exercise, of course!) only to get into bed with a hot cup of coffee in hand is my idea of bliss. I hope to touch lives and make a difference to the world through my work and expression. I want to be an engineer, a problem solver, and all things awesome!”</em></p>
<p>And V stands for <strong>Vrinda</strong>:</p>
<p><em>“I am a Computer Science Engineering student at IIIT-Delhi. The best way to describe myself would be that I am a problem solver. For me, coding is a way to solve problems. I live for the rush that you get when your code finally does what you want it to do- or more often than not, something similar. I am also an avid reader and a language enthusiast (coding as well as natural languages). I can speak, English, Hindi, German and some Punjabi. Few things are important to me in life, programming being just one of them, and reading, and good food. Good food is paramount. So is Harry Potter - I am a fangirl @TheChirpyBitch. Also, I love TV- comedy shows, sci-fi thrillers, detective shows. My current obsessions include Orphan Black, Veep and everything Marvel.”</em></p>
<h3 id="words-are-in-my-not-so-humble-opinion-our-most-inexhaustible-source-of-magic-capable-of-both-inflicting-injury-and-remedying-it"><em>“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”</em></h3>
<p>Our not-so-pleasant encounter was soon followed by life in adjacent rooms of our campus dorms. What came next was a similar taste in music, a shared love of reading, writing and a common craving for caffeine in the wee hours of the night and mimicking iconic Bollywood scenes, like here:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/twitches_in_a_scene.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Twitches, in their element, pretty much! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)</i></small></font></p>
<p>We first started working as a team at the end of our freshman year- for a course assignment. We quickly realized that we worked well together, filling the gaps for each other. From then on, there was no looking back. We were elected as the coordinators for our college’s Literary Society in our sophomore year, and that really tested us. We clashed a lot but at the end of the day, we would find a way to make both our ideas work. We have been roommates for a year and loved every minute of it.</p>
<h3 id="it-is-our-choices-harry-that-show-what-we-truly-are-far-more-than-our-abilities"><em>“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”</em></h3>
<p>Our decision to apply to RGSoC this year was extremely delayed. It wasn’t until February that we’d made this decision. And after that decision was made, the next biggest challenge was to find our coaches. 3 days, an infinite number of messages to people asking them to coach us, and a ban from Meetup.com later, we had four amazing and capable coaches willing to take on the task of coaching us throughout the summer. That’s when, to represent our twin-like nature and preserve our love for fiction and fantasy, we came up with the name <strong>“Twitches”</strong>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/twitches_logo.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Twitches' customized logo! (Image Credits: A dear friend of the Twitches' : Varnit Jain)</i></small></font></p>
<p>As part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code, we are contributing to OpenFarm, which is a free and open database for farming and gardening knowledge, that according to one of our mentors, Rory Aronson, also is a potential API for Farmbot.</p>
<p>We were first attracted to OpenFarm because of the plethora of opportunities that it provides to programmers and non-programmers alike. The learning curve is huge. It also has great potential in India where two-thirds of the population are farmers. Right now, we are getting accustomed to the code base by solving issues. It is so satisfying when your PR gets merged! Next, we would like to add our own features to the website.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/twitches_pr.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Two PRs Merged on the same day! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)</i></small></font></p>
<p>To get selected as a sponsored team for RGSoC’16 was probably (read: definitely) one of the best days of our lives. It gave us an opportunity to grow not only as programmers, but also to grow as an integral part of the community of women developers contributing to open source across the globe. The first week of the program brought with it celebration, excitement, nervousness, and even frustration. Between uninstalling Linux, getting notified by a bot that we hadn’t updated our log (and having a mini heart attack because of it) and sending our first PR- it was truly a roller-coaster ride.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/twitches_with_ramon.png" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Twitches with their supervisor Ramon! (Images: Team Twitches)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The RGSoC team even put us all on the ‘Thank You’ board, and the students got our very own Slack channel for community bonding!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/thank_you_board.jpg" alt="Team Twitches" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Twitches on the Thank You Board! (Image Credits: Ana! (RGSoC Organizing Team))</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="key-learnings">Key Learnings</h3>
<ul>
<li>Never write ‘Yes, do as I say’ if Linux asks you.</li>
<li>When submitting a PR:
Hound: 17 violations found
Us: We would like to be excluded from this narrative.</li>
<li>Don’t forget to write the daily logs- or the bot will remind you.</li>
<li>Try solving a problem yourself before asking for help. Most of the time, you can solve it- it’s just lack of confidence that is stopping you.</li>
<li>Never judge an issue by its cover.</li>
<li>Never fear or hesitate to ask for help. It can come from the most unlikeliest of places.</li>
</ul>
<p>Like always, Albus Dumbledore has exactly the right words:</p>
<h3 id="let-us-step-into-the-night-and-pursue-that-flighty-temptress-adventure"><em>“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”</em></h3>
<font color="red"><small>Disclaimer: A special thanks to JK Rowling, and Khaled Hosseini for being amazing writers and providing us with quotes that we'll carry with us till the end of time.</small></font>
Team kindr3d – Saying Hi!kindr3dhttp://twitter.com/TKindr3d2016-07-19T00:00:00+00:002016-07-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-kindr3d-hi<p>[Content Note: many animated gifs]</p>
<p><strong>Hello World!</strong></p>
<p>We are Elvina and Micaela of team <a href="https://github.com/kindr3d">kindr3d</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_(novel)"><3 Octavia E. Butler</a>). We first met on the Rails Girls Frankfurt event last year and became bffs instantly (over cake and pizza).</p>
<p><img src="http://i.giphy.com/XA8LazQ9XQotG.gif" alt="Instant BFFS" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Instant BFFS</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p>Half a year later we decided to apply for RGSoC so we can move to the same city and code together. We also share similar views and values on the industry, startup culture, diversity and feminism.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kindr3d.gif" alt="Team kindr3d" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Elvina and Micaela</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p>Now we are based in Frankfurt and dwell in the office of <a href="https://www.namics.com">Namics</a> (unlimited fruit and coffee supply!), where our coaches (<a href="https://github.com/mtrense">Max</a>, <a href="https://github.com/ninoraubaum">Nino</a> and <a href="https://github.com/regexident">Vincent</a>) happen to be working as well. All of this under caring supervision of <a href="https://github.com/klappradla">Max</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kindr3d-team.jpg" alt="The team" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Team kindr3d</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p>This summer we are working on <a href="https://www.discourse.org">Discourse</a> (under watchful beard of our mentor <a href="https://github.com/eviltrout">Robin</a>) and learning to be jacks of all trades (or full-stack developers as they call them on linkedin). By the end of the summer we hope to visualise a bunch of data and have fun. The learning curve for the project is rather steep, but we have faith and help on our side. Before we have fun with svgs and colourful graphs (and charts) we have to figure a lot of stuff out.</p>
<p><strong>Total recall of our summer so far</strong></p>
<p>It has been more than 2 weeks already!!1111 It feels like ages and we’ve learnt so much and so little at the same time. Since we start from the opposite sides of web development (front- vs back-end) we are trying to create a curriculum, that fits everybody’s levels and needs.</p>
<p><img src="http://i.giphy.com/3oEjHFBQuEteIo33RS.gif" alt="how we felt starting the summer" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>how we felt starting the summer</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p>So we went deeper into Rails. And then started working on Ember.js.</p>
<p><img src="http://i.giphy.com/ju2x7IuyNX3qM.gif" alt="when you learn controllers and models in rails and ember mean different things" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>when you learn controllers and models in rails and ember mean different things</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p>We inject ourselves with some juicy database and SQL knowledge.</p>
<p><img src="http://i.giphy.com/B2Rojmkel8EcE.gif" alt="so good" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>ready to send some queries!!</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p>We also had some deep conversation with our coaches on how software development works, what leadership is and what team works is all about.</p>
<p>All this information was at times overwhelming.</p>
<p><img src="http://i.giphy.com/5lB6qGXQgHbAQ.gif" alt="hold on" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>hold on</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p>Sometimes development is hard. Sometimes you have to wait for virtual box to download (while installing Discourse).</p>
<p><img src="http://i.giphy.com/5uGtnXX2tXCqA.gif" alt="Rebooting is not an option" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Rebooting is not an option</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p><strong>Any advice?</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Keep calm and assertive. Know when to chill and relax.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="http://i.giphy.com/xT0BKgBmTrDCbEzW4o.gif" alt="Cesar knows best" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Cesar knows best</i></small></font>
<hr />
<ul>
<li>
<p>Fake it till you make it (most of the times).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Concerning previous point: Everyone suffers from Imposter Syndrome. Talk it out and you will feel better 👊</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>You are not alone 👽</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Coffee saves lives ☕</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Always remember where you parked your bike 🚲</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>What’s next</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Learn some data vis theory and what information is the most useful for discourse users</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Get some fake data and turn it into graphs</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Structure some great and informative sql requests</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Render resulting charts/graphs and diagrams and not break the rest of discourse at the same time</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Get deeper in rails/js/D3</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Not to get lost and always look on the bright side</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Not to run out out of maritime metaphors for our logs</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="http://i.giphy.com/xT5LMHkEg6runrYJuo.gif" alt="Abandon ship!" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>we are trapped and there is no one to blame but ourselves</i></small></font>
<hr />
<p><strong>Thanks!</strong></p>
<p>We feel very lucky to be part of this great community and contribute to such a meaningful project we also happen to like. To everyone else we wish the best of luck and many happy lunch breaks this summer. You folks are great!</p>
<p>See you again in september, Ahoy!</p>
Team MitPal – Getting it StartedSherrihttp://twitter.com/MitPal20162016-07-18T00:00:00+00:002016-07-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-mitpal-getting-it-started<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-mitpal-sherri-anitha-2016.jpg" alt="Team Mitpal" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Sherri and Anitha on the First Day of RGSOC (Image: Team MitPal 2016)</i></small></font></p>
<p>This July we, Anitha and Sherri, began our Rails Girls Summer of Code journey as Team MitPal. We first met at Rails Girls Atlanta meetings, and learned how similar our backgrounds were. We both have backgrounds working in the IT field in non-development roles and have some coding experience. Pamela Vickers, our Rails Girls Organizer recognized that we would make a good team for RGSOC and suggested that we pair up. She also upped the ante by becoming one of our coaches along with Pete Holiday. Our mentor, Henne Volgelsang, and supervisor, Shelly Coen, round out our team. Our project for this summer is Open Source Event Manager (OSEM), an open-source event management software tailored for free software conferences. We’ve been training on our own to become software developers, and have set some big goals for ourselves this summer. Our ultimate goal at the end of our journey is to find our first job in development.</p>
<p><strong>Anitha</strong> I have a Masters in Communication and Network Engineering, and worked as a software engineer in test for an year in India. Due to personal reasons I had to quit my job and moved to the US 6 years ago. I always felt that solving problems and learning new skills would make me a satisfied and happy person. To make myself happy and bootstrap my career, I have been learning web technology through MOOC courses, bootcamp, meetups and other resources. I thought that a more focused and comprehensive hands-on training like Rails Girls Summer of Code would help me become a more well rounded software developer. I am very excited to contribute to a huge, open source project.</p>
<p><strong>Sherri</strong> I have a degree in Public Relations, but began my IT career right after college when I became a technical writer for a startup. From there I moved into Business Analysis when another company I worked for had a need and asked me to join the team. I always wanted to be a developer, but it was difficult to transition to another role. There was always another project that needed attention, and the promise of opportunity ‘in the future’. Finally, I decided to take the leap and focus all my attention on changing my career and life. I trained on my own for awhile, but I felt that I needed to take classes in a focused environment. I then decided to attend a bootcamp here in Atlanta and completed the backend engineering program there a little over a year ago. Since then I have been looking for my first software engineering job. I felt that RGSOC would be a great way to train and learn in a supportive environment.</p>
<p>The first couple of weeks have been a blur, but as we reflect on it all we have gained a lot of valuable experience in a short time. We have gained experience working with another developer, figuring out things together instead of working alone. We get to learn by example by watching our coaches figure out problems, and then taking that knowledge and apply it to what we are doing. We’ve learned how to analyze an issue, troubleshoot a problem, and research different solutions. We are figuring out how to approach developing a solution. We’ve also learned how to use tools like Byebug, and most importantly how to ask for help and what questions to ask. Fail fast, and ask for help quickly.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team-mitpal-2016.jpg" alt="Team Mitpal" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team MitPal and Coaches. l-r clockwise: Anitha, Sherri, Pete, Pamela (Image: Team MitPal 2016)</i></small></font></p>
<p>As we move through this experience, we learn more about ourselves and how to navigate this new landscape. Some of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Be patient with yourself</li>
<li>Schedule regular breaks. Get away from the code.</li>
<li>Read Apprenticeship Patterns</li>
<li>Talk to your partner and discuss the best ways for you communicate as a team</li>
<li>Pace yourself</li>
<li>If you haven’t failed, then you haven’t tried. Failure is a part of learning.</li>
</ul>
<p>Some days truly feel like there is so much we want to do, but so little time to do it in. We are learning to pace ourselves and celebrate all of our victories. This week we are going to continue moving forward and finish working on our first issue and create our first pull request. Our next big goal is to work on adding a newsletter option to the application. We’ll keep learning and keep doing.</p>
“Always two there are, no more, no less.”Johanna Lang and Dayana Mickhttp://twitter.com/Teamjoda20162016-07-14T00:00:00+00:002016-07-14T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-joda-says-hello<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team_joda.jpg" alt="Team Joda" /><font color="grey"><small><i>jodas at Absolventa, their coaching company (Image: Team joda)</i></small></font></p>
<p>What master Yoda is trying to say here is that until the end of September both team <em>joda</em> members will spend almost every day together on their learning path working on SoundDrop.</p>
<p>The “jo” in <em>joda</em> stands for Johanna:</p>
<p>“I am a philosopher, live in Berlin and started to learn programming more than a year ago. The starting point was a <em>Rails Girls Beginners Workshop</em>, which made me very curious about Ruby and Rails, so that I joined two Berlin study groups, the <em>Ruby Monstas</em> and the <em>Rubynettes</em>. In these groups I have been (and am still) participating in several projects from which I learned a lot. Working full time now on the open-source project SoundDrop for three months, surrounded by professional help, is a great opportunity.”</p>
<p>The “da” in <em>joda</em> stands for Dayana:</p>
<p>“I studied literature in Colombia, worked as a teacher for a couple of years and then came to Europe for a Masters Degree in Media and Culture. I had consistently tried to learn programming and had consistently failed until I went to a <em>Rails Girls Berlin Workshop</em> where jo + da met. I am hoping to learn as much as I can to be able to combine my interests in sounds and arts in general with programming and I am really 😃
to have this opportunity. “</p>
<p>“jo” and “da” decided to dive into code during this summer and learn intensively together taking part in the <em>Rails Girls Summer of Code</em> program as <em>joda</em>, after working in both project groups together. They now have a great team of coaches, mentors and an awesome supervisor, as well as Yoda’s teachings as a guide:</p>
<h3 id="do-or-do-not-there-is-no-try">“Do or do not. There is no try.”</h3>
<p>We are working on SoundDrop, a project that has participated twice in previous <em>Rails Girls Summer of Code</em> editions and towards which we felt keen on from the beginning: The app lets you record sounds and connect them to a place where they belong, thus allowing users to leave an audible mark - anywhere. At the moment, SoundDrop is only a web app, but it needs to go mobile so that users can find drops wherever they are located. So the next milestone for SoundDrop (but of course also for team <em>joda</em>) is to build an API, which we will <del>try to</del> <strong>do</strong> this summer.</p>
<h3 id="you-will-find-only-what-you-bring-in">“You will find only what you bring in.”</h3>
<p>In our first week and a half participating in the program, we of course haven’t “brought in” major features yet. We tried to get accustomed to the CSS/front end parts of the app by refactoring some of the code and fixing misplaced buttons and containers. Soon, you will be able to listen to SoundDrops (as the play button works now, yay!) and enjoy the responsive design even on your tablet screen :)
Currently we are preparing for the great task of building a JSON API for SoundDrop. For this goal we built our own small API and now practice testing on it. Once we’ve tested the whole CRUD cycle, we want to use our knowledge for the “big” SoundDrop API.
Furthermore we profit a lot from the many deep dive sessions by our coaches, that provide us with theoretical “background” input.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/team_joda_collage.jpg" alt="Team joda" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team joda, coaches and one of our mentors, also with team LoadToCode and Yodas at work (Images: Team joda)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="always-pass-on-what-you-have-learned">“Always pass on what you have learned.”</h3>
<p>Almost two weeks into the program, we have already discovered some best practices we would like to share with our readers:</p>
<ul>
<li>Take breaks regularly (e.g. 5 minutes every hour).</li>
<li>Try to solve problems on your own before you ask for help. Even though it might temporarily bring you frustration and suffering, it is worth it, as in the end you will understand the solution better.</li>
<li>Ask for Deep Dive Sessions on basically any topic, concept or feature you don’t fully understand, because, as master Yoda says: “Named must your <del>fear</del> bug be before banish it you can.”</li>
<li>Daily feedback to your teammate: What has worked well today? What could be improved?</li>
</ul>
<p>We leave the closing words to master Yoda, who describes our current situation quite well:</p>
<h3 id="in-a-dark-place-we-find-ourselves-and-a-little-more-knowledge-lights-our-way">“In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.”</h3>
Pssst...we're finally revealing our secretNada Ashraf and Mayar Alaahttp://twitter.com/RubysSecretteam2016-07-11T00:00:00+00:002016-07-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/we're-finally-revealing-our-secret<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubyssecret-intro-us.jpg" alt="Ruby's Secret Team" class="img-responsive" /></p>
<p>The dreamer and the realist, Nada & Mayar. This is who we are: two girls with two completely different personalities but somehow we came together and became one team “Ruby’s Secret”; beside our believes in the healing powers of a good bar Chocolate and that there’s nothing Chocolate can’t solve, our passion for code was this thing in common between us and what made us apply in RGSoC in first place and now we’re working hard and trying to do our best to learn and finally to be able to call ourselves Ruby on Rails developers.<br />
Here’s a little intro about each one of us:</p>
<p>Mayar: Hmmm actually I really find it a little bit hard to talk about myself..I’m a very ordinary girl who just wants to find her passion… I believe that happiness and passion go hand in hand… I like reading, a book is my favorite friend. I like coding because I feel that it is a way for solving problems and thus helping people and making them happier.</p>
<p>Nada: I have lots of dreams and most of them are almost impossible or at least really hard; beside coding I love baking, I recently started an online cake business and I hope that one day I’ll have my own bakery.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubyssecret-intro-canofcoke.jpg" alt="Our mysterious can of coke" class="img-responsive" /></p>
<p>Applying to RGSoC wasn’t a piece of cake to us; we faced lots of challenges. One of the hardest tasks was finding a coach. After hopeless weeks looking for a coach we finally have a meeting, we arrived half an hour earlier before our appointment; Coca-Cola company was launching a campaign, you get a can of Coca-Cola and print on it whatever you like of words, being affected by the secret book especially the law of attraction, Nada decided to buy a can and write on it “haneksab” which means we’ll win. We decided to do everything we can in order to get accepted.</p>
<p>This is what our mysterious can of Coke is all about: The moment our hand touched this magical can, it was like a portkey that transferred us to a place beyond our imagination.</p>
Week One of RGSoCAna Sofiahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-07-08T00:00:00+00:002016-07-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/RGSoC-2016-week-one<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-07-08-rgsoc-2016-day-one_online.png" alt="Our teams meet for the first time!" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Our teams meet for the first time! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho with the help of the supervisors)</i></small></font></p>
<p>A week has passed and today we are in the middle of a <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-06-29-kickoff-party">Global Kick-Off Party</a>! Meanwhile, we thought you might be interested to see what all of our teams have been up to in the first days of our program.</p>
<p>From meeting all of the coaches, mentors and supervisors for the first time to making their first pull request or going to conferences, our students didn’t waste any time! We tried to select some of the best moments, but after reviewing all the pictures, we decided to make a facebook album. Take a look <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1083849038362773&id=620914904656191">here</a>!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-07-08-rgsoc-2016-day-one_tweets.png" alt="A week of RGSoC!" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Our teams having fun and getting some work done! :) (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Oh! And if you want to be up to date with everything that’s going with the program and with our students, follow <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">us</a> on twitter and our twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/lists">lists</a>! We created a bunch of lists for the teams, students, coaches, mentors and organisers — just pick the ones you want.</p>
<p>Enjoy your Kick-Off Party! :)</p>
Interview with Emma KoszinowskiLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-07-04T00:00:00+00:002016-07-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/interview-with-emma-koszinowski<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/interview-with-emma-header.png" alt="Interview with Emma Koszinowski" /></p>
<p>Our next alumna (Class of 2015) is Emma Koszinowski, a Swede living in San Francisco. With a background in media production and IT and a bachelor in Social Science (focusing on how humans learn in digital environments), she took a leave of absence from her job as a maintenance manager at Stockholm university to study when her husband moved his company to San Francisco — and eventually left her job to make a career change. Her aim? Becoming a software developer.</p>
<p><strong>Where do you currently work, and what do you do?</strong></p>
<p>I just started an internship at a small startup called <a href="http://www.bridge.us/">Bridge US</a> where we help people juggle American visa applications. It’s a full stack position where I do a bit of everything: fixing bugs, building features and improving the UI. It feels like it took forever to land a job after RGSoC but if I compare with people I met at events and meetups who went through a bootcamp experience here in San Francisco, it seems like a lot of the other alumnis also spent 3-12 months to find a coding job. My goal was to find a junior position as a programmer right after the program, and I did a couple of interviews and made it to the the technical interview in several of them. Solving a programming task and talking through your problem-solving approach was a pretty nerve-wracking experience for me, but at the same time it motivated me to level up on areas I failed to explain or solve. For quite some time, my day job was to level up on skills I lacked for jobs that I wanted.</p>
<p><strong>What does your usual day look like?</strong></p>
<p>So far I’ve been working on new features and UI improvements as well as fixing bugs. I’m getting more and more familiar with the codebase and the app’s architecture everyday. The goal is to get up to speed on how the most fundamental gems work as well as taking ownership of specific parts or projects.</p>
<p><strong>How did you get interested in programming?</strong></p>
<p>I’ve been interested in technology for a long time and worked in IT, which is somewhat related to software development. I started doing an online introductory course in Python just to get more familiar with how programs are built, and even though it was pretty challenging for me I got hooked. It’s an empowering feeling to be on the production side of things and to know how things work. Knowledge is power.</p>
<p><strong>Is a career in tech something you had planned all along? Where did you work or what did you study before?</strong></p>
<p>I’ve been in the industry for the last 10 years, however I was doing IT or media things, and I can’t think of a more interesting area to work in. This said, I guess I had a mental barrier to do programming since I wasn’t that great at math in school and I didn’t use computers regularly until I was in my twenties.</p>
<p><strong>Which of your skills helped you most to be successful during RGSoC?</strong></p>
<p>I feel like positive self talk might be the most important skill for a programmer. It’s hard to be wrong and that one will be as a new developer. It’s important to take a step back and recognize improvements, even though they seem small or obvious. There is a lot to learn and it’s important to also enjoy reaching milestones and not save the satisfaction for the final release. I believe my management skills — to break things down — and at least some level of discipline helped me get things done. I recommend using Trello or Asana with your team to define tasks and have a platform to communicate about them.
I scheduled coaching sessions in advance and made sure I had studied up on the subject I wanted to learn more about before, so that I would have relevant questions. If I reached a roadblock I’d ask in one of our Slack channels to see if there was someone online who had time to answer my questions.</p>
<p><strong>Which difficulties did you face during the program — and how did you overcome them?</strong></p>
<p>We were a really big team! From our open source project <a href="https://cocoapods.org/">CocoaPods</a> we had four remote coaches, two in different time zones than us. We had five coaches from GitHub who hosted us, one and a half remote, and two of our friends also coached us. It was a lot of people involved and just getting everyone on board on what was going on took some managing. The next thing to tackle was to understand who to ask about what. Our GitHub coaches were not familiar with the CocoaPods codebase, so with them we learned everything from demystifying the codebase to iOS development to Regex, algorithms, Git and more. CocoaPods helped us with more specific questions regarding the issues we were working on as well as helping us when we had Git problems, etc… Mostly it boiled down to knowing who to ask about what and to find the time to work on it together, given everyone’s schedule and time zone. If you are having a similar experience, I recommend using Screenhero when you are working together; it allows you to take turns sharing your screen as well as taking over somebody else’s screen.</p>
<p><strong>How did Rails Girls Summer of Code help you get to where you are today?</strong></p>
<p>I can’t stress enough the value of the experience working on a real project with real users. RGSoC is a great way to get that experience which universities don’t really teach that well. I learned to use relevant tools in a team environment and what a workflow can look like. Those are valuable experiences that help me in the internship I do today.</p>
<p><strong>Who do you look up to in your field? Do you have any role models?</strong></p>
<p>I look up to all the amazing people that pass knowledge forward in this field. RGSoC does an amazing job and I would also like to give a big thank you to <a href="http://www.railsbridge.org/">RailsBridge</a> that organizes workshops in Rails as often as once a month in San Francisco. Check them out to see if you have a group close to you, or get in touch with them to organize your own.</p>
<p><strong>Do you have any advice for future Rails Girls Summer of Code students and for women who wish to work in tech?</strong></p>
<p>Finding a local learning environment has been really helpful for me. Keep eyes and ears open for study groups, workshops, hackathons or social events in tech to get to know people and learn about what’s happening. You might meet people to work with or get help solving a problem you’ve been trying to figure out — or just meet new friends. Also guard your maker time — things don’t get built on their own. When it’s time to look for a job, make sure people know you are looking so that they can connect you with people they know are hiring. Don’t wait till the last week of RGSoC (like I did). Start way earlier.</p>
RGSoC day one and...Ana Sofiahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-07-01T00:00:00+00:002016-07-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/RGSoC-2016-day-1<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-07-01-RGSoC-2016-day-one-board.png" alt="Our thank_you board is almost complete!" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Our thank_you board is finished! Did you see the new red squares on top? :) (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The countdown to Rails Girls Summer of Code is over! Can you believe it!? July 1st is finally here! For the next 3 months, 40 women from 11 countries will be dedicating their summer — or winter, depending on the hemisphere they live in, — to work on Open Source projects and take their software development skills to another level. This summer is going to be one of the best summers of their lives and you know what? You made this happen!</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redthe-mystery-unfoldsspan"><span class="color-red">The mystery unfolds…</span></h4>
<p>As you might recall, a couple of months ago, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-04-22-thank-you-lets-diversify-tech">we created our thank_you board</a> and gave each individual donor a square with their name. We applied the same principle to each sponsor and attributed them a group of cards depending on the sponsorship package. We hope you liked this tiny and heartfelt gesture. <3 As time went by, the board transformed — or shall we say became more diverse — and along the way you might have wondered why we never added a square to the top three rows…</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-07-01-RGSoC-2016-day-one-stop-motion.gif" alt="RGSoC board transforms!" /><font color="grey"><small><i>The RGSoC thank_you board transforming throughout the past few months. (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Until now! Those red squares were saved for our RGSoC 2016 teams: students, coaches, mentors and supervisors. More than anyone else, these teams will be dedicating their time and energy to this project, sharing their knowledge and giving back to the community. So, now that we are onboarding all the teams we can finally add them to our board! Whohoo!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-07-01-RGSoC-2016-day-one-teams.png" alt="The teams of RGSoC 2016 on the thank_you board." /><font color="grey"><small><i>The teams of RGSoC 2016 on the thank_you board. (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redits-time-to-close-our-fundraising-campaignspan"><span class="color-red">It’s time to close our fundraising campaign</span></h4>
<p>As the Summer of Code begins, the fundraising campaign for RGSoC 2016 ends. And just like we did on previous years, we are now opening the fundraising campaign for 2017. This means that if you want to contribute to our program, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">you can still do it</a>, but all the money we receive from now on will be used on the RGSoC 2017’s edition.</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redthe-1st-day-of-rgsoc-2016-all-over-the-worldspan"><span class="color-red">The 1st day of RGSoC 2016 all over the world</span></h4>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-07-01-rgsoc-2016-day-one-locations.png" alt="RGSoC 2016 teams!" /><font color="grey"><small><i>The location of the RGSoC 2016 teams all over the world. (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font></p>
<p>The best part of our day 1 of Summer of Code is that it lasts more than 24 hours! Our first team to kick-off is from Melbourne (Australia) and the last ones are from San Francisco and Portland (USA). This is a 17 hour timezone difference and so far we were able to count 11 timezones! This makes RGSoC a 24-hour-non-stop-coding fun! So here they are, this year’s 20 teams, in case you missed our previous posts. Oh, and if you want to follow them on twitter we made <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/lists/rgsoc-2016-teams">this twitter list</a>.</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrgau2016-kylie-and-ramyaspan"><span class="color-red">RGAU2016 (Kylie and Ramya)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Melbourne, Australia<br />
<em>Project</em>: exercism.io</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redreactives-tu-an-and-shwethaspan"><span class="color-red">Reactives (Tu An and Shwetha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Singapore, Singapore<br />
<em>Project</em>: Poetic Computation</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redtwitches-taneea-and-vrindaspan"><span class="color-red">Twitches (Taneea and Vrinda)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: OpenFarm</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redl1ghtsab3r-srishti-and-soumyaspan"><span class="color-red">l1ghtsab3r (Srishti and Soumya)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: VOC</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redfedex-mansi-and-saharspan"><span class="color-red">Fedex++ (Mansi and Sahar)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: PyDSA</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redcrackers-nishtha-and-nikitaspan"><span class="color-red">Crackers (Nishtha and Nikita)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location:</em> Gandhinagar, India<br />
<em>Project:</em> WeCare</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrookies-tehetena-and-hyesoospan"><span class="color-red">Rookies (Tehetena and Hyesoo)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Helsinki, Finland<br />
<em>Project</em>: Hoodie</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrubys-secret-nada-and-mayarspan"><span class="color-red">Ruby’s Secret (Nada and Mayar)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Cairo, Egypt<br />
<em>Project</em>: Exception Notification</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redecho-naggita-and-joannahspan"><span class="color-red">Echo (Naggita and Joannah)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Kempala, Uganda<br />
<em>Project</em>: qutebrowser</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redkaulah-ula-and-katarzynaspan"><span class="color-red">KaUlah (Ula and Katarzyna)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Warsaw, Poland<br />
<em>Project</em>: GitLab Community Edition</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrubycats-izabela-and-kingaspan"><span class="color-red">RubyCats (Izabela and Kinga)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Warsaw, Poland<br />
<em>Project</em>: Rails Girls Summer of Code — The Teams App</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redxyz-veronika-and-dariaspan"><span class="color-red">XYZ (Veronika and Daria)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Prague, Czech Republic<br />
<em>Project</em>: Keystone</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redjoda-dayana-and-johannaspan"><span class="color-red">Joda (Dayana and Johanna)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: SoundDrop</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redloadtocode-thea-and-mariespan"><span class="color-red">LoadToCode (Thea and Marie)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: LEAP Encryption Access Project — Webapp</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redkindr3d-elvina-and-micaelaspan"><span class="color-red">kindr3d (Elvina and Micaela)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Frankfurt, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: Discourse – Visual Forum Analytics</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redperifricas-emma-and-geisaspan"><span class="color-red">Periféricas (Emma and Geisa)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Salvador, Brazil<br />
<em>Project</em>: Speakerinnen</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redmitpal-sherri-and-anithaspan"><span class="color-red">MitPal (Sherri and Anitha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Atlanta, USA<br />
<em>Project</em>: Open Source Event Manager</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbmore-stunners-ashley-and-orespan"><span class="color-red">B’More Stunners (Ashley and Ore)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location:</em> Baltimore, USA<br />
<em>Project:</em> Bundler</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redjam-malisa-and-jeenaspan"><span class="color-red">JaM (Malisa and Jeena)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Portland, USA<br />
<em>Project</em>: Servo</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redhackbrighters-patricia-and-melissaspan"><span class="color-red">Hackbrighters (Patricia and Melissa)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location:</em> San Francisco, USA<br />
<em>Project:</em> Lektor CMS</p>
<p><b>Today is the day we have been expecting for so long!</b></p>
<p>We wish everyone an amazing summer (or winter!!) and to our amazing RGSoC 2016 students, coaches, mentors, supervisors and organizers: Let’s get this Summer of Code started! It’s time to code! 🎉</p>
There’s a kick-off party on the horizon…Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-06-29T00:00:00+00:002016-06-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/kickoff-party<p>Only a couple of days to go until our program kicks off in 16 different locations around the globe. We want all participants to celebrate this day with us on July 8th! In Berlin, for example, we’re planning a low-key kick-off picnic. On July 8th, we encourage you to have a little get-together in your own city with your team; have a picnic, a small party at your coaching company, celebrate with cake, coffee, a tea party or a bbq!</p>
<p>It doesn’t have to be a huge party, and should be an opportunity to bond with your coaches, your team mate, other local teams, and your local community. If you have a coaching company, maybe you can even ask them to cover some of the drinks/food, or to let you use the location after office hours.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/kickoff-party-balloons.gif" alt="Balloons in the sky" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Celebrations! (Image: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/96602242@N00/174375234/">Dimitris Tsakanis</a> / <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/" target="_blank">Some rights reserved</a>)</i></small></font>
<p>If you want us to connect you to other teams or alumna in your city, let us know — we’d be more than happy to do that. You can also open an issue in our Github summer-of-code <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/summer-of-code/issues">issue tracker</a> if you want to make the event public or use that as an RSVP list.</p>
<p>We wish you a wonderful kick-off day on Friday and an amazing kick-off party next week — we can’t wait to see how you celebrated your first full week of RGSoC. All pictures are welcome, and we’d love to see your videos, too.</p>
<p>Let’s tweet under the hashtag <strong>#kickoffrgsoc</strong>!</p>
Interview with Oana SiposLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-06-27T00:00:00+00:002016-06-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/interview-with-oana-sipos<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/interview-with-oana-header.png" alt="Interview with Oana Sipos" /></p>
<p>For the first installment of our “Alumna series”, we’ve spoken to Oana Sipos, who took part in RGSoC 2013; she’s currently living in Belgium but is planning to move back to her home country, Romania, very very soon. When she’s not busy coordinating Rails Girls events (she’s organised four editions in Brussels so far and has started the Cluj and Timisoara chapters), she loves playing with bits all day long!</p>
<p><strong><em>Where do you currently work and what do you do?</em></strong></p>
<p>I am currently working for <a href="https://www.unifiedpost.com/" target="_blank">UnifiedPost</a>, a Belgian company developing its own products for document processing where I am a combination of a developer and a technical writer.</p>
<p><strong><em>What does your usual day look like?</em></strong></p>
<p>My day is a nice mix of documentation, writing tutorials for all kind of internal gems we develop and training people on the platform built in-house. It is a bridge function where knowledge transfer is critical.</p>
<p><strong><em>How did you get interested in programming?</em></strong></p>
<p>Ever since high school I liked the mystical side of it – it felt powerful and intriguing to know programming-related stuff. At university, I studied Telecommunications; so technical studies, but still not programming-oriented enough. So I took my heart in my hands and started learning by myself and with the community’s support.</p>
<p><strong><em>Is a career in tech something you had planned all along? Where did you work or what did you study before?</em></strong></p>
<p>Not sure I have planned it, totally not after finishing university; however a semester at KU Leuven brought it more on my way so I gave it a chance :) Sometimes, the best things happen when you are planning the least.</p>
<p><strong><em>Which of your skills helped you most to be successful during RGSoC?</em></strong></p>
<p>I was part of a volunteering team in RGSoC, as I couldn’t find another girl to pair, and (now I say) luckily that lead to organizing all those Rails Girls events. Critically thinking, it wasn’t necessary a skill, but the ambition / perseverence / stubborness to join even if I was by myself, was what made my RGSoC experience a fruitful one.</p>
<p><strong><em>Which difficulties did you face during the program — and how did you overcome them?</em></strong></p>
<p>Motivation was definitely the first one of them — being alone there was just too difficult to keep it up. Discussing with people around me helped a bit, but not sure that made the trick. Having a clear to-do list and speaking up when something is not clear would definitely be my allies, were I to start all over again.</p>
<p><strong><em>How did Rails Girls Summer of Code help you get to where you are today?</em></strong></p>
<p>A very nice part of Rails Girls Summer of Code was that they handled free tickets to conferences. This is how I got to go to ArrrrCamp in Gent, Belgium and give a talk. That was a way to spread the knowledge about RGSoC and at the same time, a call to organize Rails Girls Brussels since I could find no girl to form a team. By the end of the conference, I had a bunch of developers interested to help and coach and also I was introduced to my current company :) so, tl;dr life changing!</p>
<p><strong><em>Who do you look up to in your field? Do you have any role models?</em></strong></p>
<p>My friends who told me about Ruby definitely are. All the people in the Ruby community (with special thanks to <a href="http://rubybelgium.be/" target="_blank">Belgium Ruby User Group</a>) who have been very helpful and encouraging also. I cannot pinpoint to a specific person, but they are definitely those closer to me, in the community.</p>
<p><strong><em>Do you have any advice for future Rails Girls Summer of Code students and for women who wish to work in tech?</em></strong></p>
<p>Working in tech is challenging, but not nearly as difficult as it may seem. Just give it a try, keep the ball rolling and ask for advice when you are stuck. Don’t stay stuck, there are plenty of people out there willing to give a hand. Walk before you run ;)</p>
<p><strong><em>What is it like to work in tech?</em></strong></p>
<p>I must start with “it is not about coding all day long”. It can be, but there are other functions which need both an understanding of technical specs and a set of soft skills. Get out of the box and for sure you will soon identify all kind of opportunities.</p>
<p><strong><em>Is it difficult to be a woman in tech?</em></strong></p>
<p>This is about knowledge more than it is about genders. I was the only girl in my office of 13-14 developers and hardly felt different because of being a woman. It might need a while to prove yourself, but I guess there is this starting point everywhere when you are new in a team. Just go for it and don’t let this stop you ;)</p>
More 2016 teams? Aye!Mariahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-06-24T00:00:00+00:002016-06-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/more-teams-aye<p>Do you want more awesome news? Here we go!</p>
<p>We have managed to get <strong>FOUR extra teams</strong> on board this year!</p>
<p>Last week <a href="/blog/2016-06-15-meet-our-teams">we announced</a> <strong>seventeen</strong> RGSoC 2016 teams. Unfortunately, one of them (TeamASU) has cancelled their participation for personal reasons. As much as we feel sorry when someone can’t do the Summer of Code after being selected, we are super happy to greet new teams. Now we have <strong>twenty</strong> in total! This is truly amazing, isn’t it? Remember, all of it became possible due to <strong>your</strong> support: the money <a href="/blog/2016-06-10-RGSoC-campaign-wrap-up">you sent us over the last few weeks</a> opened up the possibility to sponsor 2 teams and support 2 volunteer teams. Thank you for making this happen!</p>
<p>And now, meet our new teams!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/meet-our-teams-locations-update.png" alt="RGSoC Teams 2016" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>All of our 2016 teams (updated)! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font>
<h3 id="sponsored-teams">Sponsored Teams</h3>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redhackbrighters-patricia-and-melissaspan"><span class="color-red">Hackbrighters (Patricia and Melissa)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location:</em> San Francisco, USA<br />
<em>Project:</em> Lektor CMS</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrubys-secret-nada-and-mayarspan"><span class="color-red">Ruby’s secret (Nada and Mayar)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location:</em> Cairo, Egypt<br />
<em>Project:</em> Exception Notification</p>
<h3 id="volunteer-teams">Volunteer Teams</h3>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbmore-stunners-ashley-and-orespan"><span class="color-red">B’More Stunners (Ashley and Ore)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location:</em> Baltimore, USA<br />
<em>Project:</em> Bundler</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redcrackers-nishtha-and-nikitaspan"><span class="color-red">Crackers (Nishtha and Nikita)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location:</em> Gandhinagar, India<br />
<em>Project:</em> WeCare</p>
<p>The Summer of Code is almost here, and we are waiting for it impatiently!</p>
Meet our 2016 teams!Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:002016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/meet-our-teams<p>We’ve had so many awesome applications this year, and picking only a few was incredibly tough; we really wish we could have had the money (and the resources) to have them all on board. But let’s not forget how far we’ve come this year already: Thanks to our amazing community and sponsors, we are able to fund not 11, not 12, but FOURTEEN (!!) teams for 2016 — and have an additional 3 take part as volunteer teams. Look at them all on our map:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/meet-our-teams-locations.png" alt="RGSoC Teams 2016" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>All of our 2016 teams! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font>
<p>For the very first time in RGSoC history, we’ve got teams from Egypt, Singapore, the Czech Republic and Brazil — it’s so great to see teams applying from “new countries” every year, and we can only say a huge THANK YOU to you all for spreading the word among your own communities.</p>
<p>And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: it’s time to announce the teams we’ve chosen to take part in Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016! Here they are:</p>
<h3 id="sponsored-teams">Sponsored Teams</h3>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redkaulah-ula-and-katarzynaspan"><span class="color-red">KaUlah (Ula and Katarzyna)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Warsaw, Poland<br />
<em>Project</em>: GitLab Community Edition</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrubycats-izabela-and-kingaspan"><span class="color-red">RubyCats (Izabela and Kinga)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Warsaw, Poland<br />
<em>Project</em>: Rails Girls Summer of Code — The Teams App</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redjoda-dayana-and-johannaspan"><span class="color-red">Joda (Dayana and Johanna)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: SoundDrop</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redtwitches-taneea-and-vrindaspan"><span class="color-red">Twitches (Taneea and Vrinda)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: OpenFarm</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redmitpal-sherri-and-anithaspan"><span class="color-red">MitPal (Sherri and Anitha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Atlanta, USA<br />
<em>Project</em>: Open Source Event Manager</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrgau2016-kylie-and-ramyaspan"><span class="color-red">RGAU2016 (Kylie and Ramya)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Melbourne, Australia<br />
<em>Project</em>: exercism.io</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redl1ghtsab3r-srishti-and-soumyaspan"><span class="color-red">l1ghtsab3r (Srishti and Soumya)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: VOC</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redkindr3d-elvina-and-micaelaspan"><span class="color-red">kindr3d (Elvina and Micaela)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Frankfurt, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: Discourse – Visual Forum Analytics</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redjam-malisa-and-jeenaspan"><span class="color-red">JaM (Malisa and Jeena)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Portland, USA<br />
<em>Project</em>: Servo</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redxyz-veronika-and-dariaspan"><span class="color-red">XYZ (Veronika and Daria)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Prague, Czech Republic<br />
<em>Project</em>: Keystone</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redecho-naggita-and-joannahspan"><span class="color-red">Echo (Naggita and Joannah)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Kempala, Uganda<br />
<em>Project</em>: qutebrowser</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrookies-tehetena-and-hyesoospan"><span class="color-red">Rookies (Tehetena and Hyesoo)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Helsinki, Finland<br />
<em>Project</em>: Hoodie</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redperifricas-emma-and-geisaspan"><span class="color-red">Periféricas (Emma and Geisa)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Salvador, Brazil<br />
<em>Project</em>: Speakerinnen</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redloadtocode-thea-and-mariespan"><span class="color-red">LoadToCode (Thea and Marie)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany<br />
<em>Project</em>: LEAP Encryption Access Project — Webapp</p>
<h3 id="volunteer-teams">Volunteer Teams</h3>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redfedex-mansi-and-saharspan"><span class="color-red">Fedex++ (Mansi and Sahar)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: New Delhi, India<br />
<em>Project</em>: PyDSA</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redreactives-tu-an-and-shwethaspan"><span class="color-red">Reactives (Tu An and Shwetha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Singapore, Singapore<br />
<em>Project</em>: Poetic Computation</p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redteamasu-nada-and-randaspan"><span class="color-red">TeamASU (Nada and Randa)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Cairo, Egypt<br />
<em>Project</em>: Exception Notification</p>
<p>For every team that didn’t make it: please don’t let it discourage you. As much as we love our scholarship program, there are many ways to start contributing to Open Source and our initiative is only one of many. <3<br />
<strong>Have an amazing summer — we sure can’t wait for ours to start!</strong></p>
Last few weeks before closing the RGSoC 2016 fundraising campaignAna Sofiahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-06-10T00:00:00+00:002016-06-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/RGSoC-campaign-wrap-up<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-05-27-RGSoC-campaign-wrap-up-squares-timelapse.png" alt="Our thank_you board is almost complete!" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Our thank_you board is almost complete! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font></p>
<p>As we are a few days away from announcing the selected teams, we can’t help wondering how this new batch of students will change the world around them. Meanwhile, July is almost around the corner. <strong>This means that our fundraising campaign for RGSoC 2016 will be closing in a few weeks, and all the money we receive after that will be used for RGSoC 2017.</strong> So if you still want to help us out getting another extra team this year, you can contribute <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">here</a>.</p>
<p>Having gone through all the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-04-15-application-wrap-up">90+ applications</a> we had this year, we are utterly impressed with all of their incredible stories and how they have been overcoming so many personal and professional obstacles in order to be able to learn programming. On top of this, many of them have created and/or helped out on their local communities doing things like organising events and helping children and women take their first steps in coding. So yeah, in the end, after reading these applications we just wanted to fund everyone because we realised that this scholarship would be just that “little” push they need to change their lives! :D</p>
<p>Money talks and donations are always a sensitive topic, but it is a topic that we need to come back to, as we can proudly say our program is entirely funded by people just like you and companies just like yours who want our tech community to be more inclusive and diverse. <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-04-22-thank-you-lets-diversify-tech">We really couldn’t be more grateful</a> for that and the students feel the same way.</p>
<p>Our students understand how important this opportunity is for them and the impact they have on other people’s lives. Pursuing a career as a developer will inspire other women to follow their steps or at least give them permission to dream about it; unfortunately, many women don’t even consider a career in tech because they never think it could be a viable possibility for them. When they see individuals they can relate to, people from all sorts of places, social backgrounds and ethnicities, their perception changes and beautiful things happen.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-05-27-RGSoC-campaign-wrap-up-teams-stories.png" alt="RGSoC Students" /><font color="grey"><small><i>Some of our students (left to right): Carla and Anja (Team Inchworms); Resla and Esther (Team Techylite); Maren and Julia (Team Delta Quadrant)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Every time you or your company donate, we can proudly say you are helping people like Carla and Anja, two students from Berlin who have participated in the first edition and since then, have started working as developers for Travis CI. Anja even co-founded an Open Source project with another group of amazing women. The name of that project is <a href="https://speakerinnen.org/">Speakerinnen</a> and it’s a platform where women speakers from all over the world can create their profiles, making it easier for conference organisers to have more diverse panels and lineups. But their story doesn’t end here!</p>
<p>In 2015 Speakerinnen was submitted as a project for RGSoC. Resla and Esther from Nairobi, Kenya, were the selected students to work on that project during the summer. And they didn’t stop there either: they are active members in their community and give talks at several events, like the 2nd Annual African Women in Tech Conference.</p>
<p>And then there are record-breaker teams, like Team Delta Quadrant, who spent the Summer of Code not only contributing with 1.850 lines of code to <a href="https://diasporafoundation.org/">Diaspora</a>, but also speaking at eight events and helping out in seven workshops as coaches. Way to go Maren and Julia!</p>
<p>So, as you can see, they really don’t take participating in RGSoC lightly! We actually could spend days telling all the amazing stories (over 100 stories!!!), but we need to stop somewhere — at least for this post! However, we don’t want to ruin the surprise, but there might be some news about this topic very soon… ;)</p>
<p><strong>The question of each RGSoC is still the same: how many lives are we going to change this summer?</strong></p>
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<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/170188877">Mia is trying to help with the RGSoC board!</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user51331690">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>If you believe we can make tech more inclusive faster, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">help us fund</a> as many teams as possible! Really, help us out here because Mia is not helping! So far we have managed to sponsor more than 11 teams (oops, should we have revealed this?), but we would love to have another extra team this year! Let’s <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23diversifytech">#DiversifyTech</a>!</p>
Ruby Heroes 2016Laura & Anikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-06-01T00:00:00+00:002016-06-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/ruby-heroes-2016<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubyheroes.png" alt="Ruby Heroes" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Ruby Hero Awards (Image: <a href="https://rubyheroes.com/">rubyheroes.com</a>)</i></small></font>
<p><strong>We got an award, and it belongs to you.</strong></p>
<p>A few weeks ago, we (Laura, Sara, Anika) flew to Kansas City, where we were presented with a Ruby Hero Award for the work on Rails Girls Summer of Code on the stage of RailsConf. The introduction by Olivier Lacan that led up to the award announcements also included a slide with a multitude of faces: all of the Ruby Heroes from 2008 until today. It felt like an honour and a privilege to be now among them and to have Rails Girls Summer of Code recognised for its work in improving the Ruby community, but one thought crossed our minds right away: Is it appropriate for a couple of people to receive an award for a whole organisation?</p>
<h3 id="rgsoc-in-a-nutshell">RGSoC in a nutshell</h3>
<p>We’re in our fourth year now, and as a community initiative, RGSoC has been organised by lots of people. All in all, every year we have over 100 volunteers working on the program: This includes organisers and developers, project mentors and coaches, who all work tirelessly in their free time to make our community a better place; some of them year after year. <strong>This initiative works because of the people — and only because of them</strong>.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-the-ruby-heroes-awards">What are the Ruby Heroes Awards?</h3>
<p>“The Ruby Heroes Awards recognise the everyday heroes of the Ruby community” — this is the tagline you can find on the <a href="https://rubyheroes.com/">Ruby Heroes</a> website. The award is an attempt to highlight people who have supported the community in one way or the other — in some case, unsung heroes who’d otherwise have their work go unnoticed.
Every member of the Ruby community is welcome to nominate their own Ruby Hero; the people with the highest amount of nominations end up on a shortlist, from which a jury of previous Ruby Heroes will pick the finalists. As with every award, this one comes with a great deal of criticism: <em>Why is ABC on the list? Why isn’t XYZ on the list? Isn’t Ruby Heroes just a popularity contest?</em>
While this blog post isn’t the right place to discuss the issues of how Ruby Heroes are nominated and selected, one thing we have to point out is that the jury selects people, not organisations. In our case, this means some of the individuals behind RGSoC were singled out to receive this award.</p>
<h3 id="everyone-at-rgsoc-is-a-ruby-hero">Everyone at RGSoC is a Ruby Hero</h3>
<p>Standing on the stage of RailsConf, together with 6 other amazing people from the Ruby community — who have worked hard to make Ruby great, accessible, inviting, and inclusive — was incredible, and we are thankful to have had this opportunity. It made us proud of what we’ve achieved and of the lives we changed. It was a tangible proof for us that Rails Girls Summer of Code has an impact on the community. This happiness at the news was also tinged with a bit of sadness, because singling out individuals for their achievements within our organisation doesn’t reflect the spirit of RGSoC. Everyone who ever worked on Rails Girls Summer of Code is a Ruby Hero. If you’ve ever coached or supervised a team, organised, donated or sponsored this initiative: <strong>this award belongs to you</strong>.</p>
<h3 id="special-thanks">Special thanks</h3>
<p>As no award is complete without the special thanks section, we’d like to name a few people who have impacted RGSoC a great deal and without whom the program would not be in its fourth year.</p>
<p><a href="/img/blog/2016/rubyheroes2.png"><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubyheroes2_sm.png" alt="Our Ruby Heroes" /></a></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Some of our amazing volunteers and Ruby Heroes! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font>
<p>Our organisers, past and present: Floor, Katrin, Carsten, Ramón, Ana, Maria, Sven, Lucas, Tam, Markus, Benedict, Lisa, Max, Emi, Vaishali, Andy, Robin, Natalie;
Duana and Erik for always believing in the program and supporting it from the first minute, and Erik for drawing attention to RGSoC for the RubyHeroes award;
Piotr and Tomasz for coaching every year and for this:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubyheroes-piotrtomasz.jpg" alt="Piotr and Tomasz" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>#donatebecause (Photo: Piotr and Tomasz)</i></small></font>
<p>Adam, Alex, Alexandra, Lieke, Vyki, Cathy, JZ, Kasia, Magda, Qian, Laura W., Charlotte, Verena, Claudi, Rebecca, Fanny, Arne, John, Uta, Jen, Anne, Terence, Susanne, Björn and so, so many more.</p>
<p class="center-helper"><strong>Thank you — this is for you!</strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rubyheroes-award.png" alt="Your Ruby Hero Award" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Your Ruby Hero Award (Image: Anika Lindtner/Laura Gaetano)</i></small></font>
Thank you for letting us #DiversifyTechAna Sofiahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-04-22T00:00:00+00:002016-04-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/thank-you-lets-diversify-tech<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-04-22-thank-you-lets-diversify-tech-01.jpg" alt="RGSoC 2016 thank_you board" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>RGSoC 2016 thank_you board (Photo: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font>
<p>This is our fourth year organising RGSoC and each year that goes by we feel extremely thankful for the support of the community: Each student who applies, each coach who gives us their time and knowledge to train our teams, each organizer helping to make the program a reality, each of you who retweets us or contributes to our scholarships with donations, each company that supports us and each project maintainer who submits their project to RGSoC. This program was created by each and everyone of you, and it’s going strong because of the community that backs us every summer.</p>
<p>Our community is the foundation of RGSoC and because of that, for the summer of 2016 we wanted to do something other than thank you: we wanted to show you the impact your contributions have to our program, and consequently to all the people who, in some way or another, have been part of RGSoC.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/2016-04-22-thank-you-lets-diversify-tech-02.png" alt="Building the RGSoC 2016 thank_you board" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Assembling the RGSoC 2016 thank_you board square by square (Photo: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font>
<p>We built a board where we recreated the programming community, with its diversity percentages: roughly 80% men (in blue) and 20% women* (in red and yellow). The grey squares represent all the people outside the tech community who have no idea they have coding superpowers. Or they do, but they don’t have the means to pursue a career in tech (yet!).</p>
<p>We believe that a community changes when its individuals become agents of that change. And this is now when the fun begins! Bit by bit, or shall we say, square by square, the tech community transformed and started to be more diverse. This is where you enter: you are the person who makes all of this possible! You are the foundation of the program and of that change!</p>
<p>We have put the name of each person and company who contributed to RGSoC on a square and gave it a coordinate on the board. This is your place in our hearts! <3 Individual donors will have a square on the board and companies, depending on the type of sponsorship package, will get a specific number of squares. Each time someone donates, a grey square is converted into a colorful one. We took a picture of each time we put a square on the board and made a stop motion video for you.</p>
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<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/163780646">Thank you! \o/ Let's #diversifytech!</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user51331690">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>Together we are creating an environment where women* feel more welcome. We are training more developers and helping them jumpstart their career. We are making Open Source a better place for everyone. We are creating the role models of the future. We are redefining the Tech community. We are helping to make our communities more inclusive and empower individuals to contribute to Open Source with their amazing potential. We are making Tech more diverse!</p>
<p><strong>You make RGSoC possible and we don’t take this for granted! Thank you!</strong></p>
<p>With your support we have already put 445 squares in our board and funded 11 teams. This is amazing! Let’s <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">complete this board</a> and fund even more teams!
<strong>Let’s #DiversifyTech!</strong></p>
<p>* With “women”, we mean all people with non-binary gender identities or who identify as women.</p>
Application Wrap-upLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-04-15T00:00:00+00:002016-04-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/application-wrap-up<p>It’s a wrap!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/application-wrapup-closed.jpg" alt="applications are closed!" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Applications closed. (Photo: Ana Sofia Pinho)</i></small></font>
<p>We finally recovered enough from the applications closing last Sunday to write about it. Just like last year, the last few hours before the 17:59 UTC deadline were <strong>intense</strong> and we sat in front of our screens until the very end to reply to all the support emails and questions coming in.</p>
<p>This year, we received 92 applications — which is almost double the amount from last year. This is truly amazing! In the very last 24 hours of the application period, the number of submitted applications <strong>quadrupled</strong>, with the last application submitted a mere 32 seconds before deadline closed. That’s what we call LIVING ON THE EDGE!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/application-wrapup-adele.gif" alt="living on the edge" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Living on the edge. (Image: <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/lyapalater/the-tables-have-turned-adele" target="_blank">Buzzfeed</a>)</i></small></font>
<p>Because of how we’ve set up our selection process, we will not be able to share information about the location of the different applications just yet; this said, we’ve tried really hard to reach out to several new initiatives worldwide, including a lot of different programming language communities, in the hopes that we could have applicants from different backgrounds, locations, and languages. One thing’s for sure: the next few months are going to be legendary!</p>
<p>And in case you’re wondering just how many support requests we had to answer over the course of the application period, worry no more, we’ve counted them all! Altogether, we’ve received 62 emails, 8 Facebook messages, and 96 requests via our special “application-support” slack channel. On top of that, 78 message threads, mostly by teams looking for coaches, were posted to our Google group community list.</p>
<p>Stats are nice, you say, but: <strong>what’s next?</strong> <br />
We’re slowly getting started with the selection process, which will consist of 3 different phases; after which, the selection committee will get together to make the final decision. By end of May, we’re hoping to send out the application letters. We know it feels like a long wait, but it will be absolutely worth it! In the meanwhile, why not spread the word about our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">campaign</a>? <br />
The more funds we have, the more teams we will be able to support this summer <3</p>
<p>If you’ve applied, I’d also like to take a minute to THANK YOU for being excited about this program, for having read the requirements and worked incredibly hard to fulfil those requirements, for having searched for and found a team to work with and for spreading the word. You’ve already made the first step — always remember that.</p>
4 Ways to Find a Team for RGSoC 2016Ana Sofiahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-03-28T00:00:00+00:002016-03-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/4-ways-to-find-a-team<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/4-ways-to-find-a-team-team-rubyherzlein-rgsoc-2015.png" alt="4 Ways to Find a Team for RGSoC 2016" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Team Rubyherzlein @RGSoC 2015</i></small></font>
<p><br /></p>
<p>As you may have heard, applications to RGSoC 2016 <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2016-03-17-how-to-apply-2016">opened some time ago</a>. So far all we can say is that we are extremely happy with all the support and applications to our program — this just inspires us to make this year even better than the last one!</p>
<p>Knowing how hard it can be to find a teammate or a coach, we thought about sharing with you some tips and best practices on how to do this.</p>
<p>If you don’t know anyone in your own community, you have four ways to find a teammate or a coach: Getting in touch with local Rails Girls Chapters or other similar initiatives, sending an email to our Rails Girls Summer of Code Google Group, tweeting or going to our Teams App.</p>
<h3 id="getting-in-touch-with-local-programming-initiatives">Getting in Touch with Local Programming Initiatives</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/4-ways-to-find-a-team-initiatives.gif" alt="Getting in Touch with Local Programming Initiatives" /></p>
<p>One of the most effective ways to find a teammate or a coach in your city is to get in touch with a Rails Girls chapter, a study group or other initiatives like Black Girls Code or PHP Women.</p>
<p>Before reaching out to them, please take a look at the projects you want to apply to and the programming languages of the project. This way, you will narrow the initiatives by programming language and you can focus on finding someone who has some knowledge in that language.</p>
<h3 id="rails-girls-summer-of-code-google-group">Rails Girls Summer of Code Google Group</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/4-ways-to-find-a-team-google-group.gif" alt="Rails Girls Summer of Code Google Group" /></p>
<p>At the moment there are almost 400 people in this Google Group, so you never know: Someone there might know a person that could be interested to pair with you or be a coach for your team.
When you submit a new topic, please say what you are looking for and don’t forget to mention the city in the subject line! It will make it easier for people to find you.</p>
<p>Oh, and when you find a teammate or a coach, please mark your conversation as “resolved”, so that we know you’ve successfully found what you were looking for. Thank you!</p>
<h3 id="twitter">Twitter</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/4-ways-to-find-a-team-twitter.gif" alt="Twitter and RGSoC" /></p>
<p>A good way to reach to the community is through twitter. You have 140 characters so use them carefully: always mention what you are looking for and identify the city where you are going to be working in the summer.</p>
<p>One of the most common mistakes we see is when people tweet asking for a teammate or a coach but they don’t mention the city. This makes it difficult for someone to find out about the place and because of that, they can’t help you by retweeting or getting in touch with you.</p>
<p>Another important thing is to mention us <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> on the tweet, so that we can get a notification and retweet you. In case you have some space, use the hashtags #rgsoc or #rgsoc2016 to make it easier for people to find your tweets.</p>
<h3 id="rails-girls-summer-of-code-teams-app">Rails Girls Summer of Code Teams App</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/4-ways-to-find-a-team-teams-app.gif" alt="Rails Girls Summer of Code Teams App" /></p>
<p>When you sign up to the <a href="http://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org">RGSoC Teams App</a>, on the top right corner you will find our a link to our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users">Community</a>. There are over 800 people there and even though it is not a seamless process (please bear with us, we are working on it!), here you can filter people by their roles or interests. This means you can look for students who want to find a team or a developer who wants to help out as a coach. Then, you can sort the info by country or city.</p>
<p>We hope this helps! Once again, it is never too much to remind about our Guides, like the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/">Application Guide</a> or <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/#find-coaches">Finding a Team Guide</a>. If you need extra help reach out to us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Rails-Girls-Summer-of-Code-620914904656191/">facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">twitter</a> or send us an email at contact@rgsoc.org.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
Ruby Conference Australia 2016 — Gold Coast!Vi Nguyen and Sarah Nihttp://twitter.com/teammelbkoala2016-03-20T00:00:00+00:002016-03-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/ruby-conference-australia-2016<p>This year’s Ruby Conference Australia was held on the Gold Coast, a vibrant and breathtaking city, known for its world famous Surfer’s Paradise — a beach and surfing haven — and home to the country’s most exciting theme parks.</p>
<p>Over two days in February, 26 amazing speakers from around the world came to Sea World Resort to share their knowledge in all things Ruby-related — technical and non-technical. There were five elective workshops that were offered on the first day being Developer Flow, Go, Trailblazer, Rails Girls and Rails Girls Next. As Vi attended the conference and Sarah attended a workshop separately, this blog post will be split in two parts. The first highlighting the main talking points from the various talks, whilst the second will be a description of Rails Girls Next, a workshop that follows from Rails Girls. Each section represents our own personal views and experiences.</p>
<h3 id="take-aways-from-the-talks-by-vi-nguyen">5 Take Aways from the Talks by Vi Nguyen</h3>
<p>Though Ruby Conf was a technology conference, for me, it really brought home the idea that what enhances technology is the human element, and that code really is just an expression of that.</p>
<p><strong>Takeaway #1 — Want to go from newbie to expert coder? Read code & fill in your learning gaps.</strong></p>
<p>Saron Yitbarek’s talk “Reading Code Good” shared eight guidelines on how a person could go from newbie to expert code. One hour every Sunday, Saron would read code with a few mates and from this social learning she tried new things that then prompted questions, research and interaction with the code. The digression from what was known and what wasn’t known was where most of her learning happened. Importantly, by learning together, it filled a gap in that self-learning to code can be excruciatingly lonely and overwhelming, but, when done together, it’s not so scary.</p>
<p>You can <a href="https://rubyconf.eventer.com/rubyconf-australia-2016-1489/learning-code-good-by-saron-yitbarek-1928">watch Saron’s talk in full here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Takeaway #2 — Your ruby gem does more than just distribute libraries, you can use local ruby gems to better structure your large rails app.</strong></p>
<p>In Enrico Teotti’s talk, I learned that ruby gems could be used locally to better manage very large applications (previously, I just used remote ruby gems so I could avoid writing code from scratch). Instead of generating new scaffolds and classes within one big app, local ruby gems could be used to create a dependency structure. What this means is that a local ruby gem would contain everything that has your first feature in it and when you get new functionality, you extract shared functionality to another gem. What you then get is a view of the application in chunks => reduced cognitive overload => more manageable application.</p>
<p>If you are interested in the technical implementation of using local ruby gems, <a href="https://rubyconf.eventer.com/rubyconf-australia-2016-1489/build-and-maintain-large-ruby-applications-by-enrico-teotti-1929">watch Enrico’s talk</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Takeaway #3 — Empathy makes you a better developer because your feature implementations are likely to be closer to what the user wants.</strong></p>
<p>Ernie Miller’s talk was about empathy as a building block for humane development. Humane development has at its core a simple and obvious belief that humans work with other humans to build software and this software is subsequently, used by humans. Because of this, it’s important to cultivate empathy (i.e. how to speak the thoughts and feelings of someone who isn’t you). Empathy makes you a better developer because you’ll have a better sense of why you’re building something and why it’s important. Your perception goes from “What would I want if I were them?” to “What would make them smile?”. Programming is about building things and according to Miller, “If you’re empathizing well, you’ll build something people love”.</p>
<p>Ernie’s talk is fantastic and you can <a href="https://rubyconf.eventer.com/rubyconf-australia-2016-1489/humane-development-empathy-by-ernie-miller-1945">watch a recording of his talk on empathy here</a>.</p>
<p>Below is a picture of Ernie and I — don’t forget to check out his awesome t-shirt!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/ruby-conf-au-ernie-miller-and-vi.jpg" alt="Ernie Miller at Ruby Conf Au 2016" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i> Ernie Miller at Ruby Conf Au 2016 (Photo: Vi Nguyen).</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong>Takeaway #4 — Event sourcing as an alternative to using the CRUD accepted actions of “update or destroy”</strong></p>
<p>The talk by Sebastian von Conrad questioned whether data should be destroyed or updated at all. This was really useful to me because sometime in late 2015, my developer installed the <a href="https://rubygems.org/gems/paranoia/versions/2.1.5">paranoia gem</a> because I wasn’t comfortable with deleting data that was associated with say, a user account. When a rails app destroys or updates data using Active Record, the original data is lost. Is it right to lose data? Well…something that might not be useful now may be useful later. In the case of organizations that rely on user generated content, like Wikipedia, destroying data could create huge problems - imagine what would happen if a user were to be able to delete their account and have their associated contributions deleted aswell…</p>
<p>Sebastian talked about Event Sourcing which ensures that all changes to the application state are stored as a sequence of events - kind of like an accounting system so that nothing is deleted but rather a balance is kept of all that’s happened. With event sourcing you can query events and use logs to go back to a past state. That’s pretty neat!</p>
<p>If you’re interested in event sourcing, you can watch Sebastian’s talk <a href="https://rubyconf.eventer.com/rubyconf-australia-2016-1489/event-sourcing-or-why-activerecord-must-die-by-sebastian-von-conrad-1933">here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Takeaway #5 — Programming is an expression. Read what’s out there and look at style guides but also, find your own voice.</strong></p>
<p>As idioms exist in language, programming languages are not excluded. Arne’s talk was about burning your idiomatic ruby. While idiomatic language sounds natural and requires less mental processing, according to Arne, “treating idiom as normative hampers innovation”. For example, what would happen if a new language got ported into Ruby? In such cases, we shouldn’t be rigid in the way we approach programming. Idiomatic doesn’t necessarily always equal good. Programming is expression and there are style guides out there that you can reference, but it’s also important to find your own expression.</p>
<p>Arne will be introducing a really exciting screencast and he’s an expert in Clojure, so definitely <a href="https://twitter.com/plexus">follow Arne on twitter</a>. You can also check out his <a href="https://rubyconf.eventer.com/rubyconf-australia-2016-1489/burn-your-idiomatic-ruby-by-arne-brasseur-1936">very intelligent talk called “Burn Your Idiomatic Ruby” here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>In conclusion…</strong></p>
<p>While not a ‘takeaway’, it’s also worth mentioning for those interested in business or who are operating their own business, that Jeff Casimir’s talk shared some great business gems (pun intended). <a href="https://twitter.com/milameow1">Mila Dymnikova’s</a> visual notes on this highlight the main points from his talk perfectly. A big thank you to Mila for allowing me to share her notes on this blog.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/ruby-conf-au-mila-dymnikova-jeff-casimir-notes.jpg" alt="Notes on Jeff Casimir talk by Mila" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i> Ace notes on Jeff Casimir's talk by Mila Dymnikova (Notes and Photo: <a href="https://twitter.com/milameow1" target="_blank">Mila Dymnikova</a>).</i></small></font></p>
<p>So that’s a wrap! If you wish to <a href="https://rubyconf.eventer.com/rubyconf-australia-2016-1489">see the full set of talks, they’re online here</a>. But, before I go, this is an Australian conference right? So I’ll leave you with a collage of party pictures and the obligatory Aussie animal pictures.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/ruby-conf-au-collage.jpg" alt="A collage of social events at Ruby Conf Au" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>
1. From left to right: my roomie, Indah who is a front-end dev, Jo who is lead developer at <a href="https://www.cultureamp.com/" target="_blank">Culture Amp</a> and I at the opening party (Photo: Vi Nguyen).
<br />2. A cutie pie koala, just because (Photo: Thomas (originally posted to Flickr as Koala Bear) <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0" target="_blank">CC BY 2.0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons).
<br />3. From right to left: Timmy from <a href="https://buildkite.com/" target="_blank">BuildKite</a>, Indah and I at the opening party. We forgot our logo tees (Photo: Vi Nguyen).
<br />4. A surprise breakfast for the speakers and volunteers at Sea World Resort — we had breakfast next to dolphins (Photo: <a href="https://twitter.com/freibuis" target="_blank">Freibuis</a>).
<br />5. From left to right: Lauren and Jo, both Ruby Australia committee members at the closing party at Movie World (Photo: Vi Nguyen).
<br />6. An octopus, my favourite animal. This is a blue-ringed octopus that you can find in Australia. If you see it, get away from it quickly. One of the few things that can kill you in Australia, other than crocodiles, poisonous spiders, snakes etc… (Photo: Elias Levy (Blue-Ringed Octopus) <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0" target="_blank">CC BY 2.0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons).
<br />7. From left to right: Allison and I. Allison was a speaker and her talk was about remote working (Photo: Vi Nguyen).
<br />8. Batman and I. He said I looked lovely… but then I heard him say that to all the other girls (Photo: Indah).
</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="rails-girls-next-workshop-by-sarah">Rails Girls Next Workshop by Sarah.</h3>
<p>What you need:</p>
<ul>
<li>Github account: <a href="https://github.com/join?source=header-home">https://github.com/join?source=header-home</a></li>
<li>Cloud 9: <a href="https://c9.io/web/sign-up/free">https://c9.io/web/sign-up/free</a></li>
</ul>
<p>The Rails Girls Next workshop is a step up from the Rails Girls workshop.</p>
<p>The workshop started at 9am at Sea World Resort. Nothing better than a fantastic location with great morning tea.</p>
<h4 id="why-sinatra-instead-of-rails">Why Sinatra instead of Rails?</h4>
<p><strong>Rails</strong>: Things happen magically under the hood.</p>
<p><strong>Sinatra</strong>: More flexible in comparison, but would require you to implement some elements yourself.</p>
<p>We then began learning the ways of building a Rails app from scratch through Sinatra! Develop your app on the cloud!</p>
<h4 id="ruby-girls-sinatra-app-guidehttprailsgirls-bnegithubiosinatra-app-guide"><a href="http://railsgirls-bne.github.io/sinatra-app-guide">Ruby Girls Sinatra App Guide</a></h4>
<p>This was written by Sorcha and is a very excellent step-by-step guide we followed to understand how each file works in Rails. It’s very easy to follow and quite self-explanatory.</p>
<p><strong>Caution</strong>: I learnt that Sinatra is NOT structured like how files in Rails would.</p>
<p>For instance, Routing in Sinatra is controlled in the controller, whereas Routing in Rails is in a separate routes file.</p>
<h4 id="put-your-app-online-with-herokuhttprailsgirls-bnegithubioheroku"><a href="http://railsgirls-bne.github.io/heroku">Put Your App Online With Heroku</a></h4>
<p>I then deployed the app to heroku. A couple of us in the workshop were having a problem with getting the app to deploy (Error: Application not found).</p>
<p>Here’s the solution: Since Sinatra is structured slightly differently from Rails, you’ll need to modify <em>config.ru</em> since gems and classes are located in <em>config/application.rb</em></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/ruby-conf-au-sinatra-config-rails-girls-next.jpg" alt="Sinatra configuration" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i> Configuration set up of Sinatra in Rails (Photo: Sarah Ni).</i></small></font></p>
<p>Big thanks to Sorcha, Rachelle and Daphne for teaching us the tiny details of MVC and Routes.</p>
<h4 id="sarah-and-the-conference">Sarah and the conference</h4>
<p>At first glance, this probably doesn’t make sense.</p>
<p>In short, I actually had to make a quick trip up to Sydney (fun fact: it’s a 1.5 hour-long flight) to attend an awards ceremony. I’m humbled to have been nominated by GradConnection as one of the <a href="https://au.gradconnection.com/top100/">Top 100 students in Australia</a>, 2016.</p>
<h3 id="in-closing">In closing…</h3>
<p>Thank you to the team at Rails Girls Summer of Code and Ruby Conference Australia for giving both of us the opportunity to attend Ruby Conf Au 2016. It was fantastic and a great time was had by all!</p>
How to apply for RGSoC 2016 — in five stepsLiekehttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-03-17T00:00:00+00:002016-03-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/how-to-apply-2016<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/howtoapply_2016.png" alt="" /></p>
<div style="text-align:right"><font color="grey"><small><i>Illustration: Rebecca Conrad</i></small></font></div>
<p><br />
Today we’re officially opening the applications for Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016! Our brilliant Rebecca Conrad crafted this step-by-step illustration about how to apply in 5 steps.</p>
<h3 id="first-things-first-who-can-apply">First things first: Who can apply?</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/you.jpg" style="width:200px" /></p>
<p>Our aim is to create opportunities for new coders on further learning. For this reason, we are looking for applicants who attended at least one Rails Girls or a comparable community-built workshop like Black Girls Code, PyLadies or similar initiatives — and continued learning after that.</p>
<p>While no one is discouraged from applying on the basis of gender, preference will be given to female and genderfluid applicants.</p>
<p>One of the most important things: you have to be able to spend 3 months (July to September 2016) working full-time on your project, so you’re not able to go on holiday during this period.</p>
<p>In short: if you identify as female, participated in a coding workshop, kept learning, and don’t have any (other) plans from July to September 2016, you’re very welcome to apply!</p>
<h3 id="second-find-a-pair">Second: Find a Pair</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/pair.jpg" style="width:200px" /></p>
<p>One of the requirements of the Summer of Code is that you are a two-person team, living in the same city and being able to meet up every day. It’s not possible to apply alone.</p>
<p>If you don’t have a teammate yet, be sure to find one before submitting your application. Understand that it’s important that you’re able work together very closely during the three months of the program. Setting up a team means not just finding someone else to lodge an application with, but someone who you will need to get along with in this period of intense project work.</p>
<p>You don’t know how to find a pair? Read more in <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/">our guide</a>.</p>
<h3 id="third-find-coaches">Third: Find coaches</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/coaches.jpg" style="width:200px" /></p>
<p>We require you to have at least two local coaches. Coaches are developers who are able to give you guidance during the summer: they sit down with you, guide you through relevant coding steps and fine-tune with you at regular intervals (4 to 8 hours a week).</p>
<p>We’ve put together some advice on finding coaches <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/finding-your-team/">here</a>.</p>
<p>If you know someone who’d like to be your coach, you can direct them to our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching/">guide for coaches</a>.</p>
<h3 id="fourth-find-a-coaching-company--workspace">Fourth: Find a coaching company / workspace</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/workspace.jpg" style="width:200px" /></p>
<p>A coaching company provides your team a place to work from during the summer. They’ll provide you with office space and a team of coaches. It is a bonus on your application if you can find a place where you’ll be working together with your teammate and your coaches.</p>
<p>And yes, there’s also a guide for <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">coaching companies</a> for you to share.</p>
<h3 id="fifth-choose-a-project">Fifth: Choose a project</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/project.jpg" style="width:200px" /></p>
<p>If you found a teammate, coaches and a place to work, there’s only one thing left to do: choosing a project.</p>
<p>A good place to start is to have a look here at <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects">our list</a> of Open Source projects approved for RGSoC 2016. Be sure to ask your coaches for their input on which project they feel would be most suitable for you and for them to help you with.</p>
<p>If you want to work on a project that’s not on the list, the maintainers need to submit their project to us first. You can find more information on becoming a Project Mentor and submitting a project in <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">our guide</a> for Mentors.</p>
<h3 id="apply">Apply</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/apply.jpg" style="width:200px" /></p>
<p>Can you check off all of these steps? Yay! Then you’re ready to submit your application — you will have time until <strong>April 10th, 17:59:00 UTC</strong>. But before you do, we recommend you to head over to our Students Section and to check out the full <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/">application guide</a>. Good luck applying — we’re looking forward to reading your application!</p>
<p>If you’ve read the Application Guide, you can create your team and application in our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams App</a>.</p>
<p>If you have more questions on how to apply, you can also hop into our <a href="https://rgsoc-student-application.herokuapp.com/">Student Support Slack channel</a>.</p>
<p>Let’s get another amazing summer started!</p>
Extra Week of OSS project submissions starts today!Ana Sofiahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-03-14T00:00:00+00:002016-03-14T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/extra-week-for-oss-projects<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/extra-week-for-oss-projects.gif" alt="Extra Week of OSS project submissions" /></p>
<p>Good news for all project maintainers: We are re-opening up our project submissions for one extra special week. This gives you more time to submit your Open Source project still for RGSoC 2016!</p>
<p>As you may have noticed, we have closed our project submissions in February. Since then, we have been receiving messages from people who really wanted to submit their projects as well, but for many reasons, they missed the deadline. After a careful reflection, we decided to give everyone an extra week to submit their OSS projects.</p>
<p>So, mark down in your calendar:</p>
<h4 id="the-extra-week-of-project-submission-starts-today-14th-march-and-ends-sunday-20th-march-at-175959-utc">The extra week of project submission starts today, 14th March, and ends Sunday, 20th March at 17:59:59 UTC.</h4>
<p>These <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/projects">Open Source Projects</a> are the basis of our program. From this list, the applicants choose projects they want to work on during the summer and apply for those. The selected teams will then work full-time on them for three months with the help of coaches and the project maintainers. This will allow the students to grow as developers and, at the same time, bring more developers into Open Source Software.</p>
<p>In order to submit your Open Source projects, find out what makes a good project, what programming languages we accept (spoiler: all of them!) and how much time you need to be a mentor - please read our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">Guide</a>.</p>
How to support RGSoC 2016 with your companyAnikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2016-03-08T00:00:00+00:002016-03-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/how-to-support-rgsoc<p>What better day to think about getting more women into Open Source than today - on <a href="http://www.libertyclick.org/wp-content/uploads/A-Womans-Place-is-in-the-Revolution.jpg">International Women’s Day</a>!</p>
<p>While we are working towards equality all year round, today is an especially good day to shed some light on how you and your company can support us in this mission:</p>
<h4 id="getting-more-women-into-open-source---one-summer-at-a-time">Getting more women into Open Source - one summer at a time.</h4>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/all-teams-small.jpg" alt="2015's Teams" /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/2015-teams-map-small.png" alt="" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Our 2015 teams from all over the world!</i></small></font>
<h3 id="sponsoring">Sponsoring</h3>
<p><em>Fund our mission</em></p>
<p>To make RGSoC possible, we need sponsors! This program with all that it entails can only happen with the help of amazing people donating small or large <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign">donations</a>. We are so happy to have amazing companies already on board again for this year like Github, Travis CI, Google Open Source, Gitlab, Basecamp and many more. We already have already 8 teams funded, and only 4 to go. Help us <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign">fund those last teams</a>!</p>
<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign"><img src="/img/blog/2016/progress_8_march.png" /></a></p>
<p>Here you can find our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/packages">Sponsorshop packages</a> with all perks a company’s heart can imagine - we even single handedly pack and send out our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2015-09-30-swag-packing">lovely care packages</a> to students with your merchandise.</p>
<h3 id="coaching-companies">Coaching Companies</h3>
<p><em>Get involved locally</em></p>
<p>Every team needs a place to work and coaches to apply for Rails Girls Summer of Code - If your company wants to support us in hosting and coaching a local team, this is your way to go! We are eternally grateful to all companies who are dedicated to the teams during the summer.</p>
<p>Allowing your devs dedicated time to coach a team will support a great cause, let you stay in touch with the Open Source community and help advertise that you are working together with us towards getting more Women in to OSS. <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/#q1">A good example</a> for this are Soundcloud, Absolventa, 6Wunderkinder or Travis CI, who have supported teams as companies and stood by them with all the coach power they could give.</p>
<p>Your can register here: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/</a>, set up a profile with your GitHub login and be sure to check our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">Guides on how to become a Coaching Company</a>.</p>
<h3 id="helpdesk">Helpdesk</h3>
<p><em>Remote coaching</em></p>
<p>Your devs can also help out in our remote #helpdesk Slack channel during the summer, where students can ask for help if their coaches are not available or are stuck as well. If you are interested in that, you should register in our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams-App</a> as well and tick the “Interested in helping out as helpdesk coach” box. We’ll write a grateful blog post about your involvmeent and will mention you in our tweets and Facebookpostings with lots of love.</p>
<p>We hope you’ll join us in one way or another on our journey to bring more women into the OSS world. <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> if you have more questions.</p>
<p>Help us make Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 happen: <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign">Donate now!</a>!</p>
Our 2016 crowdfunding campaign is open!Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2016-02-23T00:00:00+00:002016-02-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/crowdfunding-campaign-is-open<p>The days are getting longer, the sun is a little more visible in the winter sky, and with spring nearing, we’re glad to announce there’s an even better reason to rejoice: <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">Our crowdfunding campaign is open</a>!</p>
<h3 id="a-little-earlier-every-year">A little earlier every year</h3>
<p>Since its inception in 2013, our program has grown from a grassroots movement to a program involving all in all over 700 people — with a bigger impact on the Open Source community every year. In 2015 <a href="http://foundation.travis-ci.org/2015/12/02/record-breaking-rgsoc/">we broke all our records</a> and could fund not 10, but 16 teams! We’ve even managed to open the campaign a little earlier every year, giving more sponsors the opportunity to support us from the very beginning.</p>
<!--<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">YEHAAW! We’ve opened our crowd-funding campaign!!<br><br>Help Fund Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015: <a href="http://t.co/R0WBOPqai1">http://t.co/R0WBOPqai1</a> <a href="http://t.co/vXH2V1q56W">pic.twitter.com/vXH2V1q56W</a></p>— Rails Girls SoC (@RailsGirlsSoC) <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/status/573494852345851904">March 5, 2015</a></blockquote> -->
<h3 id="our-early-birds">Our early birds</h3>
<p>In the last few weeks, we’ve been reaching out to some of our most faithful supporters; the early donations of these 19 (!!!) sponsors and partners, and their support, have helped to get this campaign started with a bang.</p>
<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/"><img src="/img/blog/2016/earlybirdsponsors_2016.png" /></a></p>
<p>We’re amazed — sparkles-in-our-eyes, jaw-dropping kind of amazed — to see how much of our goal we’ve already reached. Six teams are already funded — let’s keep this momentum going!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/sixteams.png" alt="" /></p>
<h3 id="donatebecause">donatebecause</h3>
<p>Last year, with the hashtag #donatebecause, we encouraged our community to donate for our last stretch goal, towards funding extra teams. This year, we’re asking you from the beginning to donate, because:</p>
<p><strong>We know you can help us make a difference. Even the smallest amount helps!</strong></p>
<!--<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">How about helping <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> fund one more team before the May Day? <a href="http://t.co/3KCo5Dqb5v">http://t.co/3KCo5Dqb5v</a> Please <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/donatebecause?src=hash">#donatebecause</a> <a href="http://t.co/yzqD8IsPUo">pic.twitter.com/yzqD8IsPUo</a></p>— Piotr Szotkowski (@chastell) <a href="https://twitter.com/chastell/status/593398292261777408">April 29, 2015</a></blockquote> -->
<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/donatebecause-collage.png" alt="" /></p>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>We can’t wait to meet all of the teams we will be able to fund this year, and we’re always so incredibly happy about every little donation that comes in. No amount is too small, and your money will go towards a great initiative to help awesome women learn and code during the summer.</p>
<p>So, what are you waiting for? Donate to our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">crowdfunding campaign</a> today, and help us make a difference in our Open Source Community! <3</p>
Call for Organizers and HelpersAnikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2016-02-10T00:00:00+00:002016-02-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/call-for-organizers<p><img src="/img/blog/2016/rgsoc_calls.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 is coming closer and we are looking for you to join our orga team. We are a group of people who are working behind the curtains to make RGSoC happen again and can use every helping :raised_hand: We are looking for people who either</p>
<ul>
<li>like doing PR stuff (#allthesocialmediathings) <em>or</em></li>
<li>like getting in touch with the community and students <em>or</em></li>
<li>have ideas on how to improve our website <em>or</em></li>
<li>can help out on the development of our <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/rgsoc-teams">teams app</a> <em>or</em></li>
<li>can help out with design / illustrations <em>or</em></li>
<li>organize events <em>or</em></li>
<li>help packing up care packages <em>or</em></li>
<li>help us get in contact with other initiatives <em>or</em></li>
<li>help with guiding students through the application process <em>or</em></li>
<li>help with the teams selection <em>or</em></li>
<li>can post hedgehog gifs in the random channel</li>
</ul>
<p>If you like doing at least one of these things, we already love you and would be super happy to have you on board and build an amazing RGSoC 2016 together with you. It’s going to be a wonderful adventure!</p>
<p>We have a global organizers call on Wednesday evenings (6 pm CET) that you can join if you want to know more or set up a separate chat with us. So <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">drop us an email</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc">tweet</a> at us or <a href="https://rgsoc-slack-inviter.herokuapp.com">hop into Slack</a> and ping @alicetragedy or me @anikalindtner. We can’t wait to meet you.</p>
Thank you Team Alpha RubyRamya and Arianehttp://twitter.com/teamalpharuby2015-11-11T00:00:00+00:002015-11-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Thank-you-Team-Alpha-Ruby<p>Thank You Rails Girls Summer of Code for providing us an opportunity to work in a multicultural environment. Rails Girls Summer of Code allows to meet like-minded people and is a great opportunity to expand our knowledge.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-alpha-ruby.jpg" alt="Team AlphaRuby" /></p>
<h3 id="goal-of-our-project">Goal of Our Project</h3>
<p>Ruby is the programming language that we use for our project.<br />
The goal of our project (the Official Ruby Documentation Redesign) is to design an attractive and useful template for reading Ruby documentation, made available as the official ruby-lang.org language reference documentation: <a href="http://docs.ruby-lang.org/">http://docs.ruby-lang.org/</a>.</p>
<h3 id="how-we-worked-for-our-project">How we worked for Our Project</h3>
<p>First registered online courses, probably you know some of them:<br />
- <a href="http://www.codecademy.com">Codecademy</a> (HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby and RoR, the whole package)<br />
- <a href="http://www.caelum.com.br/apostila-html-css-javascript">HTML/CSS/JavaScript</a><br />
- <a href="http://www.caelum.com.br/apostila-ruby-on-rails">Ruby on Rails</a><br />
- <a href="https://www.codeschool.com/">CodeSchool</a> (Git and Ruby are some of the free courses)<br />
- <a href="http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/courses/30-days-to-learn-html-css">30 Days to learn HTML and CSS</a><br />
- <a href="http://code.tutsplus.com/courses/perfect-workflow-in-sublime-text-2">Perfect Workflow in Sublime</a> <br />
- <a href="http://coursera.org">Coursera</a></p>
<h3 id="weekly">Weekly</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://rubyweekly.com">Ruby Weekly</a></li>
<li><a href="http://css-weekly.com">CSS Weekly</a></li>
<li><a href="http://html5weekly.com">HTML 5 Weekly</a></li>
<li><a href="http://codeschool.us7.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=b9a8d14c0dcb1dab9fa67a13a&id=fe2924848f">Ruby 5</a></li>
</ul>
<p>We cannot forget to mention the amazing kick-off with all students and mentors in the first moment of this project.</p>
<p>We had an opportunity to study and explore the Ruby programming language.<br />
We worked daily and also had an opportunity to work using Trello for Activity updates within our Team.<br />
We also had an opportunity to explore and work in Github: Update and contribute source code using Git.</p>
<h3 id="what-did-we-learn-from-the-project">What did we learn from the project?</h3>
<p>When we study individually we do not have an opportunity to explore all the concepts.
We had an opportunity to learn and write code by following the Software Engineering Process in a real environment with support from our team.
We had an opportunity to work for Official Ruby Documentation Redesign, and whenever we had issue during our coding and testing, we were guided by our coaches and mentor.
They helped to contribute and explore this Open Source Project, making it an amazing team.</p>
<p>Our heartfelt thanks to our coaches, mentors and supervisors.</p>
<p>The team had positive support for Rails Girls Summer of Code from the beginning and have been understanding; this helped us during difficult times, by guiding us into the right direction.</p>
<p>Thanks to Rails Girls Summer of Code for providing us with such an opportunity to implement new skills, knowledge and experience in the Information Technology and Internet services area.<br />
We consider that it is great to have a project that supports women’s empowerment and provides interesting projects for women to show their potential to work in all the areas.</p>
<p>We learnt to organize our tasks and maintain schedule of activities completed on a daily basis: https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/</p>
<p>Our team was very positive and we will certainly continue to empower women in coding and technology and contributing to Open Source.</p>
<h3 id="coaches">Coaches</h3>
<p>Barbara and Stella: Our coaches worked with us throughout the Summer Project and also supported on weekends to fix issues in our project. They have been supporting us and helped us during any issues by providing advice on the project, helping to understand and resolve issues, helping to implement our goals and giving valuable guidance. Learning has been a very important and valuable aspect of this project.</p>
<h3 id="mentor">Mentor</h3>
<p>Zachary is a great project maintainer and Ruby core contributor. He was our inspiration and we had an opportunity to work under his guidance. At any point of difficulty in the project, he always provided support and helped us to fix the issues with our project.</p>
<h3 id="our-experience-and-our-learning">Our experience and our learning</h3>
<p>We had a wonderful time, learning and coding, that allowed us to explore and gain knowledge in Open Source. We are stepping out with so lots of positive experiences and gained knowledge which help us further to shape our career.</p>
<p>Organizers of Rails Girls Summer of Code have been inspirational: We have no words to express our love for the organizers. They have been supporting us during the most difficult phases of our project and Rails Girls Summer of Code would definitely not be possible without such amazing people: Thank You from Team Alpha Ruby!</p>
CocoaGems gets strange at Strange LoopKarla and Emmahttp://twitter.com/cocoagems2015-10-30T00:00:00+00:002015-10-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Cocoagems-gets-strange-at-Strange-Loop<h2 id="what-is-strange-loop">What is Strange Loop?</h2>
<p>Strange Loop took place in St. Louis, Missouri. The same county where Ferguson is located. The conference, like the attendees themselves, were anything but conventional. I heard more than a few attendees who described it as a conference with equal amounts of heart and brain. So what makes it so that a conference has head and heart? Speakers who talk about society and about how software affects society – some talked about inclusion, the technical divide, what it means to be a person of color in tech and what we can do about it, and also about cognitive biases. The lightning talks and sessions at Strange Loop were plentiful; by plentiful I mean there was a total of 20 workshops to choose from the day before the conference began, and then there was a total of 36 talks over two days plus 12 evening un-sessions on Friday after day one of the conference. Strange Loop has a wide range of talks, many of them had a inter-disciplinary vibe to them. As an attendee you get exposed to a lot of different languages and techniques.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG_SL_preparty.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">The pre-party was held at the City Museum. (Photo: CocoaGems)</div>
<h2 id="take-aways">Take Aways</h2>
<p>A main take away from Strange Loop was the great value of connecting computer science with other interests or subjects. <a href="http://www.thestrangeloop.com/2015/unconventional-programming-with-chemical-computing.html">Carin Meier</a> played around with building programs in Clojure based on chemical reactions. Since all living organisms information systems are based on chemical processes, there is a lot we can learn from it; by showing the audience demos she wanted to give an eye opener for more innovation and new ways of thinking about computer problems.<br />
<a href="http://www.thestrangeloop.com/2015/sweaters-as-a-service.html">Amy Wibowo’s</a> talk was about how she and a group of Airbnb engineers hacked a knitting machine to be computer-controlled so that it could print images in yarn. She and her team learned a great deal of electronics using the problem-solving skills that computer science requires in an engineering day job; by applying these skills to a hobby project, they experienced the joy of being new to something as well as getting yarn print outs.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG_SL_chemical.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Carin Meier talks about Chemical Computing. (Photo: CocoaGems)</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG_SL_knitting.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Amy Wibowo shows the yarn print out from the hacked knitting machine. (Photo: CocoaGems)</div>
<h2 id="favorite-talks">Favorite Talks</h2>
<p>Out of the sessions I attended some of my favorites included Abby Bobe’s Keynote: <em>From Protesting to Programming</em>, <em>Becoming a Tech Activist</em>, Morgan Marquis-Boire’s <em>Security for Humans: Privacy Coercion Resistant Design</em>, and Brian Lile’s, <em>Cognitive Bias: A reflection</em>, Evelina Gabinova’s <em>How Machine Learning helps Cancer</em>, <em>Beating Threads - live coding with real time</em> by
Sam Aaron, and <em>No, Really… Robots and JavaScript?!</em> by Raquel Vélez. Morgan Marquis-Boire’s talk was eye opening because it debunked conspiracy theories and proved that many science fictions alluding to a big brother surveillance system are as real as the built-in function <em>SpyCore</em> featured in iOS. Boire’s talk made me and I’m sure many other rethink our loyal attachments to our phones and our trust with all of the personal info we share. As the world goes mobile, he said, so does the surveillance state.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thestrangeloop.com/2015/beating-threads---live-coding-with-real-time.html">Sam Aaron</a> talked about his invention Sonic Pi which allows him and many more to create music with code live in real time. He created Sonic Pi to teach kids about programming, but the program is really for anyone. We were so inspired that we immediately downloaded it and played with it the same night.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG_SL_SonicPi.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Sam Aaron talks about Sonic Pi. (Photo: CocoaGems)</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG_SL_SonicPiPlay.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> A group of us playing with Sonic Pi. (Photo: CocoaGems)</div>
Farewell, Summer of Code, farewellAnia&Basiahttp://twitter.com/girlscoderswars2015-10-23T00:00:00+00:002015-10-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/farewell-summer-of-code-farewell<p>Unfortunately the summer is over and we have to move on. Those were an amazing three months that completely changed our lives. At least we hoped so!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/barucomatz.jpg" alt="With Matz" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">L-R: Ania, [Yukihiro Matsumoto](https://twitter.com/yukihiro_matz), Basia (Image: Piotr Szotkowski)</div>
<p><strong>First of all, we wrote a lot of code.</strong></p>
<p>Working on our training apps:</p>
<p><strong>Anna:</strong> 89 commits / 4,350 ++</p>
<p><strong>Basia:</strong> 75 commits / 7,692 ++</p>
<p>And working on RubyClerks:</p>
<p><strong>Anna:</strong>
38 commits</p>
<p><strong>Basia:</strong>
29 commits</p>
<p><strong>in total: 221 commits / 352,287 ++</strong></p>
<p>What’s more, we’ve been to two great conferences, seen 30 talks and we’ve met many amazing human beings.</p>
<p><strong>What we were working on?</strong></p>
<p>RubyClerks is an e-commerce web application built from rails engines. Before RGSoC, we had no idea how to build an engine like that. But now we have our contribution into open source, we succeed in building our own engines as well as adding one to the RubyClerks. The engine that we made is named Stripe Clerk. It’s a payment module for charging money with Stripe app. We also added some features to the RubyClerks, like a rake task for adding an English sample database and buttons for invoice printing. We also learned Test-Driven Development and Behaviour-Driven-Development, which was rather something new for us.
We are very proud of ourselves when we see that our changes will be used in the app.
It makes us sing:</p>
<p><em>Like an engine, built for a very first time!</em></p>
<p><em>Like an e-e-e-engine, when your app runs next to mine!</em></p>
<p><strong>What we gained?</strong></p>
<p>When you study alone at home, you know nothing about working on a project, collaboration, git or code reviews. Rails Girls Summer of Code was a great opportunity to try work on a real project, but in a very friendly environment and with great support. We couldn’t imagine a better start into IT. That was a very intense time, we’ve learned a lot. About rails, html, css, js, rails engines and testing. We also used a lot of gems and spent long hours on stackoverflow. During the first month we’ve learned more than during half a year of self-study. This is an invaluable advantage.</p>
<p>What we feel?__</p>
<p>This feeling when you see your contribution in an open source project is really good, and we want it more. We are also very impressed with the energy of the organizers. We want to thank the whole Rails Girls Summer of Code Core Team and all of the grantors. We are super super grateful for this amazing time and commitment of so many people. Without them it wouldn’t have happened. Our roots are in the Rails Girls movement and we will support this initiative as much as we can.</p>
<p><strong>What we are doing now?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Ania:</strong>
I am preparing some apps for my portfolio and started looking for my first job as an intern or junior developer. When I look back, I can see all the things that I learned, but I can also see all these things that I don’t know yet. That’s why I keep on learning. But if I failed, I can always continue writing IT-pop songs… ;)</p>
<p><strong>Basia:</strong>
I was lucky to get a job without a break after RGSoC. I was lucky but I worked hard on this for 1,5 years. This is it, this is my place, this is what I want to do: constantly learn new things and build interesting software with great people.</p>
<p><strong>Summary</strong></p>
<p>Being part of Rails Girls Summer of Code was a great adventure. We strongly recommend to try it. Just get involved: as a student, supervisor, mentor, coach or sponsor and give the best of yourself.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-girlscoderswarsaw-team.png" alt="Our big team" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">L-R: Piotr, Tomasz, Ania, Basia, Jarek, Łukasz, Tomek. (Image: Magda, CodeQuest)</div>
Binary Say Goodbye :(Lina and Angelahttp://twitter.com/TeamBinaryRG2015-10-20T00:00:00+00:002015-10-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/BinarySayGoodbye<p>It is the end of an incredible summer. We improved our skills so far and attended our first conference, <a href="http://www.rubyconf.co/">RubyConf Colombia</a>. We are very grateful with the program of Rails Girls Summer of Code.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/teambinary_teambinary.jpeg" alt="Team Binary" width="600" /></p>
<div align="center" class="image-credits">L-R Alfonso Mancilla, Angela Guette, Laura Garcia (alumni), Lina Torres, Sebastian Sogamoso</div>
<p>At the beginning of this summer we had high expectations about what we might do. We read, did so many tutorials, we investigated and especially, we coded, considering that practice is most important thing when you are learning to code. So we decided to absorb all the necessary knowledge of our supervisor, mentors and coaches and see for ourselves the satisfaction to see our complete project and that’s priceless.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/teambinary_sarahmei.png" alt="Team Binary" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Sarah Mei with Is Your Code Too SOLID? </div>
<p>We can say that this is a new beginning, although three months were not enough now we have more confidence to start new projects and be more active in the open source community. We want to express our gratitude to the program’s organizers, our supervisor <strong>Ramon Huidobro</strong>, our coaches <strong>Sebastian Sogamoso</strong> and <strong>Alfonso Mancilla</strong>, and mentors <strong>Nick Quaranto</strong> and <strong>Benjamin Fleischer</strong>, who were always willing to help.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/teambinary_sandimetz.png" alt="Team Binary" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Sandi Metz with Nothing is Something </div>
<p>Last week we attended the RubyConf Colombia, which was amazing! Especially Angela, who lived this experience as an organizer.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/teambinary_register.jpg" alt="Team Binary" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Registration</div>
<p>The atmosphere in an event like this is indescribable. You’re surrounded by great people, from whom you can learn a lot. All you want is to just hear everything they say and not miss a word. There were four women speakers (Woohoo!!) with very motivational talks.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/teambinary_organizers.jpg" alt="Team Binary" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">The people who made possible this conference</div>
<p>This year the conference was held in parallel with the <a href="http://jsconf.co/">JSConf Colombia</a> at the same place, we also had the opportunity to attend, and were very excited after the last keynote. In it, the organizers made a homage to the women in tech, exalting all the work we have done to make progress in this sector.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/teambinary_fridayhug.jpg" alt="Team Binary" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Friday Hug!</div>
<p>Finally, we want to thank all the <a href="http://www.rubyconf.co/#organizers">organizers</a> who made these conferences possible, especially RubyConf Co, which is the first time that was realized in Colombia. All speakers were very excited and were saying they definitely would come for a second edition, to which we also look forward!</p>
Goodbye from team RubyGirlsQuitoSofi Cherenkov and Evyhttp://twitter.com/zeroknowledge92015-10-15T00:00:00+00:002015-10-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/goodbye-from-team-rubygirlsquito<p>So long and (and no thanks for the
<a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1719050">externalities</a>) goodbye! Rails Girls Summer of Code
2015 has come to an end, and, as it has always been, it has been a sad farewell.
For 3 months, we have been coding and learning evything that we could about
this amazing world that coding is. We have not only learnt that coding is
fun but also that the people who code is perhaps the most kind and most
willing-to-help people on the world. Throughout this 3 incredible months we
have got in touch with people from all over the world who, without any kind of
compensation, was always been there to help. So for everything that has been
done and taught, thank you all!</p>
<p>In general, it was not only about learn technical skills… it goes farther than
that: it is a personal experience to prove yourself that you
can do things that you never thought you could. How important is for a
person to get this knowledge when he/she doesn´t know nothing about programming,
like running a server, creating a controller from the terminal or doing a “push”
on git? It´s so important as it encourages you to try new things. So, for sure,
“this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is,
perhaps, the end of the beginning.”</p>
<h2 id="soo-how-was-it">Soo… how was it?</h2>
<p>FYI, we were (well, actually, we ‘are’) TeamRubyGirlsQuito from Quito, Ecuador. Our
work was to implement Braintree Payment gateway, allow Bitcoin payments and
implement a deactivate button for the amazing LEAP web app. And even though, we
knew nothing about crypto currencies and payment’s gateways, we managed to learn
everything about them (well, maybe not everything, but, at least, a lot).
Working with LEAP was, in a word, amazing. It was like a dream come true to work
on an application that works with encryption and, so far, it has motivated us to
learn more about encryption (or, al least, to read a lot of books about
cryptography). So, we think that Rails Girls Summer of Code is one the most
amazing experiences we will ever have. We know that all of the things that we
learnt on this summer, all of the people we met, and all of the nights and days
we spent coding will be part of our fondest life memories! :)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubygirlsquito-goodbye-bitcoin.jpg" alt="Bitcoin" width="auto" height="300px" /><br /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Pretty much what implementing Bitcoin feels
like (image from www.bidnessetc.com)</div>
<p>But apart from everything that was learnt (git, Rails, the evil haml,
javascript, bitcoin functionality, Braintree functionality, etc.) we had a
really great time while meeting people from all over the world. Even though, we
only had one amazing coach (having Batman is always enough!), we got help from a
variety of people. We couldn’t be more thankful for the help that was given:
from Erlang’s master <a href="https://twitter.com/dch__">Dave Cottlehuber</a> from whom we
learnt that MacPorts are the evil and should not never (NEVER) be used, from
stackoverflow’s boy <a href="https://twitter.com/rakib312">Raki</a>, who helped us even though
we only met him at Stack, to Colombia’s rails core member [Guillermo Iguaran]
(https://twitter.com/guilleiguaran) (thanks so much for all the tutorials,
for all the amazing discussions about logic, Turing and Hilbert, and for all
of the sleepless-nights in which you helped us to understand ‘fake-braintree’).
Thanks to LEAP guys (Thorsten, Azul, Elijah, Klaus and Christoph) for
everything… You’re, indeed, amazing! Thanks to the Rails Girls Summer of Code
and ThoughtWorks! And of course, thanks so much to our amazing only coach,
Batman! As the “real” Batman would say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“a hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as
putting a coat around a young boy’s shoulders to let him know that the world
hadn’t ended”. (You’re our hero ;) )</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Soo.. Thanks so much!! RGSoC has taught us not only how to code but also that
there is people building a better world while coding, who we will always give
help to whoever needs it. And, lastly, it has taught us that no matter how
many bugs there are, no matter how many nights you haven’t slept and no matter
how many dreams you had about your code, at the end of the day to see
your code complete and useful is, in a word, priceless.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.”
– Ken Thompson</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubygirlsquito-goodbye-thankyou.jpg" alt="Thank you" width="auto" height="300px" />
<br /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Oh, Sean Bean, we love you so much (image from:
worldbuilderblog.me) </div>
Team CodeBenders Wrap UpJayasi and Meghahttp://twitter.com/teamcodebenders2015-10-13T00:00:00+00:002015-10-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-codebenders-wrap-up<p><img align="center" src="/img/blog/2015/JayasiMeghaIntro.png" /></p>
<p>We are <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/469">Jayasi</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/26">Megha</a>, a.k.a. <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/54">Team CodeBenders</a>. We were working on the Rails Admin gem, and were mentored by <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/111">Erik</a> for the same. <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/474">Benedikt</a> was supervising our work and we had three awesome coaches - <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/306">Kashyap</a>, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/144">Bharti</a> and
<a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/247">Shobhit</a>.</p>
<p><img align="center" src="/img/blog/2015/WorkInfo.png" /></p>
<p>To say that these three months were great would be an understatement. We had so much fun, we learnt a lot, we faltered, made
mistakes, and interacted with so many nice and humble people this summer. To be honest, we could have never imagined how warm
and welcoming the open source community would be to newbies like us. Not only our coaches, but the whole RGSoC community was
super helpful throughout these three months - no question was dismissed as small or trivial, and help was always found on
hangouts or on Slack. A very special shout out goes to Kashyap, who took extra efforts to give us Ruby lessons on Google
Hangouts even during his busy office schedule.</p>
<p><img align="center" src="/img/blog/2015/Coding.png" /></p>
<p>To give a brief about what we had been up to - the first half of our summer was about creating a demo app for the Rails Admin
gem, something which could be linked to the Rails Admin website and could be used by people to play around with. While we were
ready with the initial app very soon, we stumbled when the time came to write tests and deploy the app on Heroku. Having no
prior experience of the same, it was challenging at first, but we soon got a hang of things and started enjoying the learning
bit.</p>
<p>When we moved to contributing to the core gem, we were introduced to the very encouraging and helpful contributors of the Rails
Admin gem. They suggested us what to work on, and what we could improve in our code - we could not be more grateful to the
awesome people who helped us throughout the summer!</p>
<p>Being a volunteer team, we were only supposed to give 20 hours per week to RGSoC, but hell, we were having so much fun, that we
would often find ourselves over stretching our limits and working on the gem just because we got so engrossed in it.</p>
<p><img align="center" src="/img/blog/2015/ThankYou-codebenders.png" /></p>
<p>RGSoC has been an amazing experience, something that we will remember for the rest of our lives. It was great interacting with
the other teams on Slack and reading their status updates and the cool things that they were doing. It inspired us to do more,
and give our very best. Erik has been such a wonderful mentor - he gave us full freedom to work on anything that we liked in
the gem, and encouraged us to learn as much as we could in these three months.</p>
<p>Last but not the least, we are so thankful to the core team - for organizing this wonderful summer. You guys are the best,
thank you for giving us the opportunity to be part of something so great. You have given a remarkable beginning to our open
source journey.</p>
<p>Signing off,</p>
<p>Team Codebenders</p>
Yours cheesyRoos de Bildt & Maud de Vrieshttp://twitter.com/team_cheesy2015-10-12T00:00:00+00:002015-10-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/yours-cheesy<p>Our project was to change all of the RGSoC participants lives… aka working on the RGSoC Teams App! If you paid some attention this summer, you might already have noticed some of the amazing stuff we did. Here’s a summary of our milestones:</p>
<ul>
<li>The Teams App is now RESPONSIVE! A big deal in the 21st century. Try opening that app on your phone now!</li>
<li>The readme got a manual for newbies. Next year’s RailsGirls will profit from our startup problems.</li>
<li>The daily status update entry form is on a way more user-friendly spot</li>
<li>The activity stream on the root page has avatars and is streamlined</li>
<li>A “Fork me on Github”-ribbon for bigger screens</li>
<li>Seeds for the Job Offers</li>
<li>And for our fellow developers, there is a season phase switch in order to get access to phase-dependent settings</li>
<li>We left our cheesy mark on the FFaker seeds:</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/yours-cheesy-ffaker.png" alt="Oh yeah, cheesy lingo FFaker seeds." /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Oh yeah, cheesy lingo FFaker seeds. </div>
<p>###Master proof: Supervisor Dashboard
And let’s not forget about the milestone of milestones… creating a supervisor dashboard!
Under a namespace dedicated to supervisors, there is a brand new supervisor dashboard to enable them to better monitor their teams. This is how it was and how it looks now:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/yours-cheesy-beforeafter.jpg" alt="Quite the make-over." width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Quite the make-over, don't you think? </div>
<p>Look at all the shiny features. They can make notes, check upon their team, send a message to the organisation, read the latest status update of the students and see if they need some TLC, and that all at first glance. We sure hope the supervisors were as content as we were with creating this :)</p>
<p>###Ready Steady Go!
But…. how did we do this? We noticed that the warming-up period is very important. Installing everything, getting to know everybody, deciding on a (Git) workflow, getting everything working and… finding out that our knowledge of RoR wasn’t by far sufficient to substantiate our project goals.
So, Maud (formerly known as a trainer/coach) came to the rescue and created a learning plan that saved our asses. Big time.
We were like students back in high school and strictly followed the learning plan to get the hang of Rails’ fundamentals. The learning plan consisted of reading stuff, doing tutorials and exercising our new knowledge with playing around in no less than three sandbox apps. And don’t get misleaded by the word “playing” here. This period included bruteless code reviews and hardcore challenges by our coaches.
But we survived and thrived! The third month we worked on the supervisor dashboard agile style. In five sprints, we created the dashboard, in short and quick iterations, delivering working functionality with each sprint. WE DID IT!</p>
<p>###Screenheroes
And we could not have done this without our team of superb coaches, who knew everything from front- to back-end, from Git to Slim back to Javascript and of course Rails. Thank you for your time and dedication:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/yours-cheesy-screenhero.png" alt="Wanna be my screenhero?" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Wanna be my screenhero? </div>
<ul>
<li>André Medeiros</li>
<li>Thijs Cadier</li>
<li>Yorick Peterse</li>
<li>Hans Gerwitz</li>
<li>Shannon Thomas</li>
<li>and Nathan Van der Auwera and Ariejan de Vroom, for filling in for the other coaches during their holidays</li>
</ul>
<p>You have no idea how much we appreciate what you did for us. Thank you for your time, your lessons, your patience, your support - and the fun we had in between. But most of all, thanks for pushing us to do the best we could and for insisting that the code we delivered was clean code. In a few years, we will probably laugh at the coding challenges of this summer, but the bigger lessons will carry a long way.</p>
<p>Thanks Carsten Zimmerman for being the best and most generous mentor one could wish for. Your instructive code reviews took both our code and our understanding to a higher level.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/yours-cheesy-stats.png" alt="We earned some decent GitHub credibility :)" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> We earned some decent GitHub credibility :) </div>
<p>Thanks also to Laura, who made herself available for reviewing and merging our many front-end pull requests - and being enthusiastic about it as well. And of course thanks to supervisors Lieke, who was able to fix two extra coaches on a crucial moment - thanks for your support, and Alexandra, who left a lasting impression on us with just two Skype sessions.</p>
<p>And let’s not forget… the organization! The people who enabled all of us to experience this life-changing summer #wecanteven.</p>
<p>All of you THANKS, it’s been AMAZING! <3</p>
<p>Yours cheesy,</p>
<p>Maud & Roos</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/yours-cheesy-finissage.jpg" alt="Didn't we get amazingly attractive during the summer?" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Thanks everybody!</div>
The end of an amazing Summer Of Code program – RGSoC 2015Nidhiya and Anjalyhttp://twitter.com/RGSOC_Hackrgirl2015-10-10T00:00:00+00:002015-10-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Hackrgirls-blog<p>The Rails Girls Summer of Code program was one of the best experiences we had in our life. By the way we are <a href="https://twitter.com/RGSOC_Hackrgirl">Team Hackrgirls</a>; <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjalysaju">Anjaly Elizabeth</a> is a good front-end developer and a passionate designer and<a href="https://about.me/nidhiya"> Nidhiya</a> - two crazy coders from Cochin, Kerala, India who believe in the awesomeness of “OPEN SOURCE“. Although we have participated in many coding events and all, we never got to work in a project that spans for 3 months. We still remember the wow moment, when we got the selection mail from the <a href="http://www.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">RGSOC</a> organization. We never expect that we could be one among the worlds 16 teams who got sponsored for the <a href="http://www.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">RGSOC</a>. And with all that enthusiasm we started the project on July 1st. We were working on one of the dream projects we had in our mind – <a href="https://github.com/impress/impress.js"> impress.js </a>( a 3D presentation tool) with the one and only <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/148">Bartek</a> as mentor. We were literally thrilled to know that we got the great person behind the impress.js as our mentor. <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/17">Katrin Kampfrath</a> was supervising our project and she was supporting us through out the program. Even though our coaches were not getting sufficient time to help us out, our mentor was extremely supportive. There have been days on which we got stuck with some bugs. And Bartek was more than happy to help us despite of the fact that he was very busy. It was like our mentors and supervisors were just a “slack message” away from us. The remoteness didn’t matter at all. Only thing is we had to convert the IST to CET most of the time. ;)</p>
<p>We were learning many things throughout the program. And we had to admit that we had a difficult time in managing our academics with it. We used to bunk classes, skip food and miss sleeping. But the perks of learning always kept us going. And most importantly we were enjoying the Summer Of Code. Nope. We will call it the Monsoon of code. Coz it was raining throughout these three months. During three months we also had set backs when Nidhiya fell sick because of food poisoning and Anjaly fell sick due to viral fever. But we cooperated well to complete the work. And the disrupted internet services and frequent power failures due to Metro work really made a hard time for us. Sometimes we forgot to update the log and it led to warning mails. With the frequent support from our mentor and supervisor we were able to complete the tasks in time. Towards the last month our supervisor got changed and Laura was given charge of our project. And on 27th we had the final call with our mentor and supervisor and we got chance to pull the code into the original repository of impress.js :D :) We were truly excited about it.</p>
The Beginning of an EndResla and Estherhttp://twitter.com/techylite2015-10-09T00:00:00+00:002015-10-09T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/beginning-not-the-end-team-techylite<p>“Why did we sign up for this?”<br />
“Why aren’t the test passing after all the time we put it? Sigh”<br />
“Why all these errors? But my code was running yesterday? Arrgh”<br />
“You mean to tell me no one has ever got the solution to this error since the invention of Stack Overflow?”<br />
These are just but some of the few questions that kept running through our minds each time we hit a snag during the three months. After asking ourselves these questions in several occasions, you would wonder why we have such a hard time saying goodbye.</p>
<p>We had the most intense three months and we loved it. We learnt a lot: testing with cucumber and rspec, internationalisation, even some German. Awesome, right? haha. Great of all, we got to experience the beauty of open source since it was our first time to contribute to an open source project. Last but not least, we learnt to work as a team. Even when we were in different parts of the globe, we braved the distance and shared in the spirit of teamwork. These three months that left us glued to our laptops brings to our minds a beautiful quote that says “The roots [of coding] are bitter, but the fruits are sweet.”</p>
<p><strong>MEET THE TECHYLITES</strong></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/techylite-meet-them.jpg" alt="Team Techylite" width="auto" height="500px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Resla & Esther (image by Techylite) </div>
<p>The Techylite team starred Resla and Esther as students, Percilla as the coach, Maren as the mentor and Alex as the supervisor. Alex used to check on us frequently through all available methods, be it Hangouts, Skype calls, Slack. These calls taught us several little facts about video calling over the internet. We are grateful to Maren for all those questions and merge conflicts we sent her way, thank you for having our back. We also thank <a href="https://github.com/tyranja">tyranja</a> for always being there to review our code.<br />
Perci, we can’t even count the number of bugs and errors we sent your way every day. Your time, effort and care is much appreciated.
We couldn’t have made it without your support and encouragement.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/techylite-oprah-applause.gif" alt="Team Techylite" width="auto" height="500px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (image courtesy of [giphy](http://giphy.com/gifs/thread-teh-riQw6Nc9i4sKc)) </div>
<p><strong>PROJECT SPEAKERINNEN</strong>
Our project, Speakerinnen, is a searchable web directory designed specifically for women conference speakers. Women speakers are encouraged to sign up and provide professional information, including their area of expertise, any previous conferences they’ve presented at, contact details, etc.. The aim of the app is to provide a way for conference and event organizers to find and contact appropriate women speakers.</p>
<p>During the three months, we put our focus on TDD and BDD. We were running tests on Speakerinnen using rspec. It was our first time doing testing and it was a challenge to find someone who does testing to help us. We later discovered that very few people tested their applications since testing is an arduous undertaking. We thus found ourselves hanging out on Google, Stack Overflow, Jumpstart lab and Rspec forums. We even borrowed books on testing (Esther who isn’t the greatest fan of books found herself reading the Everyday Rails Rspec by Aaron Sumner). We learnt the pros and cons of both rspec and cucumber. And then there is Github. To think there was a time we thought we knew how to use Github because we could write commits and push code is perplexing. Who knew Git was a whole complicated universe? Certainly not us (at the beginning of RGSoC). There is a whole lot of knowledge about Github that we’ve learnt that is incredible. There was so much inflow of information about git everyday such as git rebasing, git squashing, merging conflicts, cleaning the merge conflicts, creating branches and remote origins, writing good commits, etc.. We also got the hang of Postgres, FactoryGirl, Capybara and lots of gems. It is extremely difficult to summarize the challenges and successes of RGSoC out, but what matters is that we lived it and we loved it. In the end, we know so much (plus we are now asked a lot about rspec) to the extent that the Nairobi Tech Community has nicknamed us “The Rspec Girls” :)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/techylite-at-work.jpg" alt="Team Techylite" width="auto" height="500px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (image by Techylite) </div>
<p><strong>CHALLENGES</strong>
The main setback we encountered was the fact that we had very few people who understood rspec in Nairobi and we had to learn a lot on our own (which took much time than anticipated). Thanks to the Slack helpdesk channel, the late nights and Stack Overflow, we were able to work around it.</p>
<p><strong>CONFERENCES</strong></p>
<p>Some of the opportunities accorded to us after being part of the RGSoC include being invited to the Africa Hackon Conference in Nairobi, winning tickets to attend the <a href="http://gotocon.com/berlin-2015/">GoTo Berlin Conference</a> and being invited to speak at
<a href="http://akirachix.com/announcing-the-2nd-annual-african-women-in-technology-conference-hosted-by-akirachix/">2nd Annual African Women In Technology Conference</a> to be held on October 15th 2015 in Nairobi, Kenya. Esther will be speaking at the Women in Technology Conference about her experience at RGSoC and on why more women should join the coding community. We are also looking forward to seeing you at next year’s Rubyconf Kenya, which we are organizing and may speak at.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/techylite-africa-hackon.jpg" alt="Team Techylite" width="auto" height="500px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Esther, Resla and Dorcas at the Africa Hackon Conf (image by Techylite) </div>
<p><strong>WHAT NEXT?</strong>
Our journey just began. RGSoC has given us the confidence, skills and the attitude required for coding. With the opportunity we’ve been given, we hope to work on projects that are close to our hearts such as lowering the barrier for women/girls who who want to join the tech community. We are currently working on starting a Rails Girls Nairobi Chapter and we hope this goes well.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/techylite-work-after.jpg" alt="Team Techylite" width="auto" height="500px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Dorcas, Resla, Esther & Chris (image by Techylite) </div>
<p><strong>OUR APPRECIATION TO RGSoC</strong>
As much as we would want to write a beautiful vignette describing our gratefulness, words cannot express the joy we feel for getting this opportunity. We hope to continue contributing to open source projects and finishing translating Speakerinnen to Kiswahili.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/techylite-thank-you.gif" alt="Team Techylite" width="auto" height="500px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Thank you. (image courtesy of [giphy](http://giphy.com/gifs/nintendo-thank-you-satoru-iwata-10dvjmLNHQ6O3e)) </div>
So Long and Thanks for all the Sea Monsters!Shelly and Pilarhttp://twitter.com/teamtessie2015-10-08T00:00:00+00:002015-10-08T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/So-Long-and-Thanks-For-All-The-Sea-Monsters<p>Shelly:</p>
<p>So here we are. After excitedly preparing for all of this since November last year, it’s done. Finished. Over. We are no longer RGSoC students. How has this time gone so fast?!</p>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code has been a life changing experience. I don’t say that lightly either, in April I was still a kindergarten teacher. Now, not only have I completed Summer of Code, but I have a real job as a real programmer! Watch out for my skills with exit [live] :D</p>
<p>It’s so hard to sum everything up, but I will of course try! This summer would not have been in any way possibly without the help of so many people.</p>
<p><strong>The core orga team from RGSoC.</strong></p>
<p>Your countless hours, your unfailing enthusiasm, your ability to keep quiet all that day where teams were being announced and not let slip to us, even a second before the emails were sent out while we hung out together at JSConfBP. You cruel and wonderful people! <3</p>
<p><strong>Our coaches and supervisors.</strong></p>
<p>Ramon and Igor were roped in because of their connections to us and we appreciate the fact that they were so happy to help us figure out databases and javascripts. Clemens and Aaron, total strangers (to me at least!) this time last year, they answered our yelling at vienna.rb one night and hopped on board as coaches. Thank you all for helping and for always being there if we needed the help!
Markus and Laura, you were assigned to us so it’s not exactly like you had a choice in the matter but you helped so wholeheartedly and were always available to us! While we didn’t call on all of our coaches as much as they might have expected, or more than they might have expected (as might happen when you live with one of your coaches <em>waves at Igor</em>) the fact that you were all there willing to help us as much as we needed, was a massive boost in and of itself. Thank you for believing in us enough to dedicate time to us. <3</p>
<p><strong>Our Hoodies.</strong></p>
<p>While Jan and Ola were the “official” mentors on our application, it was so wonderful to see every one of the hoodies help us at different points throughout the programme. We learned so much from everyone, and from what we have worked on over the course of the summer! Our daily standup calls made everyone (even Gregor all the way in Boston!) feel so much closer. When we were confused or frustrated with things (which happened often for me admittedly… Damn HapiJS) we knew that we could yell for help in the hoodie slack, and before long there would be someone who at the very least would point us where to look for the answers.
Jan, Ola, Gregor, all of our hoodies, we want to thank you from the very bottoms of our hearts for helping us to learn all that we have learned this summer. We learned more than just coding. Thank you for welcoming us into your family <3</p>
<p><strong>Sektor5</strong>.</p>
<p>Thank you for providing the Tessies with a home this summer! Sektor has been a special place for team tessie - it’s where we were first introduced and where we began to plot our world domination plan for summer of code. You haven’t seen the last of us now that summer of code is over (especially now that the AC is installed!) but even more so because thanks to the sektor slack (and networking using giphys), Shelly has a job as a real programmer! Actually by the time this post is published, Shelly will have had this job for a few days. <3</p>
<p><strong>The Sponsors</strong>.</p>
<p>If it hadn’t been for the people and companies who donated to the fundraiser, I would never have been able to dedicate so much time to learning how to be a developer. I am not the only one to whom this applies. I hope you all realise what a real difference you have made to the lives of the many people who took part in RGSoC 2015.</p>
<p><strong>The Other Students.</strong></p>
<p>It was lovely to chat to you all on Slack and Twitter, sharing cat gifs and frustrations! Also sharing super handy tips and tricks that you also learned <3</p>
<p>We weren’t just helped by the people I listed above. People were also so fast to jump in with help whenever we were stuck and yelling in frustration on Slack or Twitter. It is very humbling when so many people come together just to help us reach our end goal.</p>
<p>I’m looking forward to next year when the next batch of students begin, and when I can be that old cat lady who comes along to dispense advice and reminisce about “back in my day”.</p>
<div align="center"><img src="/img/blog/2015/TessieMVP.png" alt="RGSoC, you da real MVP!" /></div>
<p>Pilar:</p>
<p>I always find it a bit hard to list out all the people I’m grateful for, not because I’m not grateful, but because of the worry that I may forget to list someone and hurt their feelings! There are so many incredible people who I have to thank for everything this summer, so I’d like to do that here:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thank you. Thank you so much. You’ve changed my life, you know that? Before this summer I was kind of a mess. There was a lot of personal stuff going on and there was a lot of growing up I had to do. I needed this summer, and I’m so grateful you were there with me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you read that, chances definitely are that I’m directing that to you. You may not know it but even just by being your awesome self, you were there for me this summer.</p>
<div align="center"><img src="/img/blog/2015/TessieStats.png" alt="Our statistics for this summer" /></div>
<p>Team Tessie:</p>
<p>It’s been such a fantastic summer. We definitely plan on continuing our work together so keep a look out for awesome Team Tessie projects in the future! We’re extremely excited for our journey ahead and we’ll never forget all the amazing people that made this possible!</p>
<p><3</p>
This isn't a goodbye, it is a continuityFanxhe Teamhttp://twitter.com/fanxhe2015-10-03T00:00:00+00:002015-10-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/this-isnt-a-goodbye-it-is-a-continuity<p>It is incredible that three months have passed already and this code summer has ended. It seems like it was yesterday when we decided to participate in RGSoC and the moment that our small great adventure began feels even closer. However, when we recap these months, we realize how many things can happen in such a little time.</p>
<p>They have been three very intense months, with a lot of new apprenticeship and knowledge, in which we met great people, grew in many aspects and dove into the fascinating world of programming.
What started for us as curiosity a little over a year with the <a href="https://es-la.facebook.com/Codificadas">“Codificadas”</a> girls, converted into reality at the moment in which we were selected to participate in this summer of code, and now that the experience ends, we’ve realized that it has become a big passion and we want to do this in our profession.</p>
<p>A brief answer would be an infinity of things, but we believe that it is worth to expatiate for you so there can be a general idea of the effect that RGSoC has had and still has in our lives.</p>
<h3 id="team">TEAM</h3>
<p>We have turned into a great unit team. One that is not only shaped for both of us but also:</p>
<div align="center"><img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe-team.gif" alt="Fanxhe Team" style="width: 560px" height="315px" /></div>
<div class="image-credits"> Fanxhe Team (left to right: Jonathan Tapia, Ignacio Galindo, Alejandro Espinoza, Gilberto Villa, Anyelina Moreno and Estefanía Cano) =) </div>
<p>Our coaches Nacho, Tapia and Gil that have had a great patience, they have dedicated us their time and they have put all their efforts, determination and desire to teach us everything that was possible and they have become an example to follow and they’re both great teachers.</p>
<p>Our mentor Nico, that despite the distance, the time difference and all the work that had to be done, he has supported us and have found the way and the right moments to be present, and the Content and Media Chief, Jen; She was always willing to help, cared about us and was always smiling.</p>
<p>Our supervisors, the great Katrin and always cheerful Ramón. They both are amazing people attentive professionals who were concerned.</p>
<p>Our coaching-company <a href="http://www.magmalabs.io/">“Magma Labs”</a>, that has provided us with all the possible resources, people have believed in us and they showed support in everything they could.</p>
<p>And for all those people who have been there when we have needed help or support, not only speaking professionally, but also personally.</p>
<h3 id="us-in-a-new-world">US IN A NEW WORLD</h3>
<p>The summer of Rails Girls has transformed us, and when we think about the moment we arrived at the office, this comes into our minds:</p>
<div align="center"><img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe-team-crazy.gif" alt="Fanxhe Team" style="width: 150px" height="120px" /></div>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: <a href="http://ar.cdn01.mundotkm.com/2014/11/buying-tickets-gif.gif" target="_blank">mundotkm.com</a>) </div>
<p>A new world opened in front of us, and it was inevitable that we felt insecure, they were hard times… we even thought that all of this was too much for us.</p>
<p>But as after the storm comes calmness, we had to make a great effort: practice, study, more practice and more study… and more of the same thing over and over again. Bit by bit we gained confidence and fluency, completing our tasks, getting familiarized with the gem code and developing our logic; the time we got rid of the nervousness, everything passed by inadvertently.</p>
<p>The summer of code hasn’t only made us grow as programmers, but also personally. We both have learned more about ourselves, and also about the other; we have won more confidence and we have noticed that perseverance and tenacity, before or after, everything is possible. So we just think that we have been transformed after this summer.</p>
<div align="center"><img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe-team-superwoman.gif" alt="Fanxhe Team" style="width: 150px" height="120px" /></div>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: <a href="http://www.giphy.com" target="_blank">giphy</a>) </div>
<h3 id="learning">LEARNING</h3>
<p>RGSoC supposes a continue learning that starts from the very first minute. They are team apprenticeship, about how it is worked within the programming world, the basic process to do it, new tools, good practices and, above all, of code that is shown in different languages and under different logics, so there are diverse visions and ways to solve the same task.</p>
<p>RGSoC also has helped us to overcome barriers. We have to confess that when we decided to start our adventure in the summer of code, we were very scared of our English level, and although there are still many obstacles to bring down that barrier, we have already jumped the first one by losing fear and we feel safe that soon we’ll be done with this big barrier.</p>
<p>During this time, we have studied, investigated, read, attended courses and workshops, talks, we have done hundreds of questions and received hundreds of answers or explanations, we have practiced and written many code lines. We have improved our knowledge about JavaScript, Ruby, HTML, CSS, Git and Markdown, we have taken our first steps in Rails and we have learned to use Sinatra, Sass, SCSS, HamL, Jekyll, RSpec, Minitest, as well as the composition and performance of the gems and, in depth, about the structure and logic of the gem which we are working on: <a href="http://livingstyleguide.org/">Living Style Guide</a>.</p>
<p>In our first blog post, we already said that since the first moment we believed in the potentiality of this gem bit by bit, as we have been analyzing its code, searched in order to do our task and complete it, we have confirmed and, in point of fact, it has allowed us grow and learned so much about different areas of programming and also, it has turned us aware of what we have been and are able to do.
There have been hundreds of learning experiences, but the major revelation has been programming as profession and way of life.</p>
<h3 id="our-project-living-style-guide">OUR PROJECT: LIVING STYLE GUIDE</h3>
<p>Ended our summer of code, we can say that we worked and we completed the tasks that we had proposed and that had been accorded with our mentor Nico. Some of them were more simple and some were more complex that took us more time, effort and study than we expected. But, this was precisely what we wanted it: to grow with the project.</p>
<h4 id="what-functionalities-have-we-included-in-the-gem">What functionalities have we included in the gem?</h4>
<ul>
<li>
<p>We included the functionality to be able copy the hexadecimal codes or the variables in the colors examples through a Click event or Alt + Click with vanilla javaScript.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>We worked on a button that allows copying your style guide code blocks.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>We added a search-box that allows searching any word inside of your style guide. This search-box is a filter, so that the user of the gem can decide whether to put it or not in his style guide, putting @search-box, as well as personalizing its placeholder:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code> @search-box placeholder: I am search …
</code></pre>
</div>
</li>
<li>
<p>We did a button to hide the code blocks that appear in your style guide, and same as the former one, this is a filter that can be included or not, depending on the user:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code> @toggle-code
</code></pre>
</div>
</li>
<li>
<p>We included a menu of navigation that is automatically generated with the style guide in function of the titles and subtitles that the user includes in his own. This means, that is personalized and suitable to the style of each user ( in process of getting merged).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>We added before and after filters so that the users can place content before or after the main container, and we also added tests for all the filters that we created. ( in process of getting merged)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The ultimate task in which we have been working and that we started from scratch is a <a href="http://lsg-editor.herokuapp.com/">live editor</a>. This editor allows you testing the functionality of the gem, learn to use it and see small examples of what is possible to do with the gem.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>There are many things in such a little time, it is a very intense experience, fun, enriching, great and highly recommended. It is something that we wouldn’t want to finish, but the ending of this great stage has come, so we’ll continue learning, contributing and fighting to achieve a job, because there is nothing better than to convert our passion into a profession. We will be always grateful for the big experience that RGSoC left in our lives, for everything they taught us and the world that they made us discovered. Because, definitely it exists a before and an after in all levels.</p>
<p>Our team will tell you about our experience in this video</p>
<div align="center">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LCV5QfbjWVU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>
<div class="image-credits"> <a href="https://twitter.com/zazvick">By @zazvic</a> </div>
<p>And last but not least, to thank. To thank for each second of these three months that marked and changed our lives. Thank infinitely our coaches <a href="https://twitter.com/joiggama">Ignacio Galindo</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/jonat_on">Jonathan Tapia</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/ingilniero">Gilberto Villa</a>, for supporting us, teaching us so much, for being the best teachers and yet best people. Thankful to Living Style Guide for having opened us so many doors, to <a href="https://twitter.com/Hagenburger">Nico Hagenburger</a> for allowing us work with him, helping us in this process, and letting us collaborate in his gem. To <a href="https://twitter.com/anomiseditrix">Jennifer Geacone-Cruz</a>, for being a huge support and a person with whom we can always count.</p>
<p>Always thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/_die_katrin">Katrin Kampfrath</a>, so dedicated, so watchful, so patient, so nice. Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/senorhuidobro">Ramón Huidobro</a>, for his time, dedication, happiness and contagious energy.</p>
<p>We’d also like to thank our coaching company “Magma Labs” and <a href="https://twitter.com/zazvick">Víctor Velázquez</a> as representative of the company, for always being attentive to us, following our process, supporting us and putting all the necessary tools at our disposal for this to be possible. Thanks to our coworkers at “Magma Labs”, specially to <a href="https://twitter.com/alexesba">Alejandro Espinoza</a> for helping us always we needed.</p>
<p>Thanks to all the students and partners of this RGSoC edition for sharing their knowledge, for being always willing to provide help and support and for the sweet and funny GIFS that made us laugh every morning =).</p>
<p>Thanks to our dear “Codificadas”, our big teachers that initiated us in this: <a href="https://twitter.com/Sixviv">Viviana Palacios</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/erin_mejiaa">Erika Mejia</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/anymoto">Ana Castro</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/enelesmai">Selene Flores</a>; also to all the partners and friends that supported, motivated and believed in us.</p>
<p>Thanks to the sponsors for contributing to make this possible.
And of course, thanks so much to all the team of RGSoC and its organizers to make this possible, for all the attention, support, dedication, for the great job and for making this experience simply amazing.</p>
<p>We say goodbye but only for the momentarily, because this isn’t a goodbye, it is a continuity. We hope to keep on learning, contributing to open source, finding a job soon, writing many lines of code and follow on telling how we’re doing in our <a href="http://code.fanxhe.com/">blog</a> or in <a href="https://twitter.com/Fanxhe">Twitter</a>.</p>
Team Delta Quadrant Wrap UpMaren and Juliahttp://twitter.com/zaziemo2015-10-02T00:00:00+00:002015-10-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team-DeltaQuadrant-WrapUp<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/delta-quadrant-wrapup-janeway.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<div align="center" class="image-credits"> (Image: <a href="http://mistresscara1000.tumblr.com/post/61292922924/our-favourite-captains-expressions-can-sum-up-any" target="_blank">Tumblr</a>) </div>
<p>Summer of Code was amazing. Not only in terms of what we learned but also in the amount of support we got from our amazing coaches, the diaspora maintainers, our hosting company, our mentor, our supervisor and the whole RGSoC orga team!</p>
<h3 id="what-we-did-this-summer">What we did this summer:</h3>
<p>We started with a <a href="https://github.com/TeamDeltaQuadrant/project_plan/blob/master/plan.md">plan</a> with all the issues we wanted to work on to improve diaspora. And somehow this plan worked out. Here you get a short summary of how it went:</p>
<ul>
<li>show geo-location on a map !!🎊📅</li>
<li>use chunking to upload photos 😖⚡️</li>
<li>create new role: moderator 😊😎</li>
<li>export to tumblr 😆</li>
</ul>
<p>For our most complex issue, the implementation of a map to show geo-location data we prepared a small screencast to see the results:</p>
<div class="videoWrapper">
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/140902101?color=ff0179" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>
<div class="image-credits"> <a href="https://vimeo.com/140902101">Diaspora* Map Demo</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user42699530">Julia</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>. </div>
<h3 id="tips-from-our-side">5 tips from our side:</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<p>If you want to get used to <strong>test-driven development (TDD)</strong> and like playing, try out a TDD approach to implement Conway’s Game of Life through <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLXO2FLPulI">this tutorial</a>. Attention: this tutorial uses the old RSpec Syntax - we translated it to <a href="https://github.com/TeamDeltaQuadrant/game_of_life">the new one</a>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If you want to get a deeper understanding of git, this tutorial is a <a href="https://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/">great resource</a>.
<strong>Pull requests are a good discussion base.</strong> So open it early and ask for feedback and help if you need some. It is good to name the pull request with WIP in the beginning which stands for Work In Progress.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Pair Programming</strong> - if you have the possibility to do pair programming do it. Even if it feels a little bit weird in the beginning (no checking of mails or twitter in between, the other person always looks on what you are typing and corrects it) it is a great way to learn from each other and together. We almost paired the whole time, interrupted from pauses for email checking and hours or days of reading and going through tutorials individually.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Be a coach yourself</strong> - we are so happy to have this very empowering and patient network of coaches. And we try to give something back by also coaching beginners. Two very important effects of this coaching: you suddenly realize how much you have already learned and you even learn better while explaining it to others.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>###Our summer in numbers:</p>
<script id="infogram_0_rails_girls_summer_of_code___wrap_up_team_deltaquadrant" src="//e.infogr.am/js/embed.js?dqa" type="text/javascript"></script>
<div style="width:100%;border-top:1px solid #acacac;padding-top:3px;font-family:Arial;font-size:10px;text-align:center;"><a target="_blank" href="https://infogr.am/rails_girls_summer_of_code___wrap_up_team_deltaquadrant" style="color:#acacac;text-decoration:none;">Rails Girls Summer of Code - Wrap Up Team Deltaquadrant</a> | <a style="color:#acacac;text-decoration:none;" href="https://infogr.am" target="_blank">Create infographics</a></div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/delta-quadrant-wrapup-tothefuture.gif" alt="To the Future!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: <a href="http://i-amarobot.tumblr.com/post/117556937146" target="_blank">Tumblr</a>) </div>
<p><strong>Start using <a href="https://podupti.me/">Diaspora*</a> & connect with <a href="https://wk3.org/u/anderspree">Julia</a> and <a href="https://wk3.org/u/zaziemo">Maren</a>.</strong></p>
The End and a BeginningAnikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-10-01T00:00:00+00:002015-10-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/the-end-and-a-beginning<p>Whoops. There it was. Yesterday: The last day of Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/10220073/9c8f3416-6844-11e5-8e08-1f83b5787df2.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>We want to especially thank <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/3">Carsten</a>, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/9">Ramon</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/17">Katrin</a> for being not only supervisors and coaches or mentors but also organizers of the program.</p>
<p>A round of applause as well to <a href="http://twitter.com/junioratze">Claudi</a>, who prettyfied our website and designed our stickers this year. We had an <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/team/">amazing team</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>We’d also like to thank our wonderful <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">sponsors</a>, 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 <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">Travis CI</a> through <a href="http://foundation.travis-ci.org/">Travis Foundation</a> as well as <a href="http://github.com">GitHub</a> who are partners of RGSoC. Forever grateful we are for the support of <a href="http://mandrill.com">Mandrill</a>, <a href="https://www.liip.ch/en">Liip</a> who were our awesome platinum sponsors. Thank you as well to our Gold Sponsors, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">SoundCloud, Basecamp, Elastic and Google Open Source</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Cheers to a truly brilliant Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015! Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.</p>
<p>We are so happy to have shared this summer with you! It was a-ma-zing!</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/10220821/4e80cc84-684a-11e5-8fb6-05a295561f80.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>P.S. No need to fall in to a post-RGSoC-blues! After RGSoC is before RGSoC: You can already <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">sponsor the 2016 edition</a>. Or get involved with organizing: drop us <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">an email</a>!</p>
The Delights of Care PackagesSarahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-09-30T00:00:00+00:002015-09-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/swag-packing<p>A tradition of the Rails Girls Summer of Code is to gather swag from our wonderful sponsors and send out care packages to our hardworking, dedicated participants.</p>
<p>In our global program, student teams scattered around the world might feel a little isolated from the organisation HQ, based in Europe. With the swag packages, we try to give them the feeling that they belong to something bigger. It’s also a way to let our sponsors have “direct contact” to our students and last but not least: some objects can last a lifetime! Notebooks or t-shirts will always remind our teams of their very special Summer of Code.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Our packages with gifts from <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> arrived! Yay! :D <a href="http://t.co/WvhIFESIcV">pic.twitter.com/WvhIFESIcV</a></p>— Ania & Basia (@GirlsCodersWars) <a href="https://twitter.com/GirlsCodersWars/status/642253446071103488">September 11, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p>This year more than ever, with the highest number of students we’ve had in the last three years, the task of hand-packing every gift box is a big one, but Katrin and myself made some fun from it by doing a swag packaging day. From morning till night, we carefully folded and curated the packages, hand wrote the addresses (don’t even get us started on the online postage payment system; #sessiontimeouts), and ferried every last one down to the post office.</p>
<pre>Step 1 get boxes
#intermediate step: drink coffee
Step 2 put stuff in boxes
# this step took quite some time... and more coffee
Step 3 ferry boxes to post office
# note: stretch/warmup next time
Step 4 wait for reaction tweets (see below)
</pre>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/swag-package.gif" alt="the care package process" width="auto" height="450px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: Sara Regan)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">It got run over by a truck and covered in mold, but my <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> care package is finally here! ❤️☀️💻 <a href="http://t.co/Mw9RGRY9AD">pic.twitter.com/Mw9RGRY9AD</a></p>— Sarah Guermond (@smguermond) <a href="https://twitter.com/smguermond/status/647218017785393153">September 25, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p><br /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">O Rails Girls Summer of Code swag box, how I've longed for thee. <a href="https://twitter.com/exercistas">@exercistas</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/rgsoc?src=hash">#rgsoc</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> YaY! 😃 <a href="http://t.co/r4Tq75egOc">pic.twitter.com/r4Tq75egOc</a></p>— mix (@mix) <a href="https://twitter.com/mix/status/646903521468530688">September 24, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p><br /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> our sponsors are the best! <3 <a href="http://t.co/p1QApuFRXb">pic.twitter.com/p1QApuFRXb</a></p>— Basia Kłosowska (@_aberracja) <a href="https://twitter.com/_aberracja/status/642242728894537728">September 11, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p><br /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">OMG! A table full of awesome gifts! Thanks you <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> & everyone that made this incredible summer possible <3 <a href="http://t.co/hjnAn8D2jP">pic.twitter.com/hjnAn8D2jP</a></p>— Ines Coelho (@ines_opcoelho) <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho/status/644232902230835200">September 16, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p><br /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I came home from <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/rubyconfpt?src=hash">#rubyconfpt</a> and there was a box full of surprises waiting for me! :D thank you <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a>!!! <3 <a href="http://t.co/PYQlMun6LF">pic.twitter.com/PYQlMun6LF</a></p>— Ines Coelho (@ines_opcoelho) <a href="https://twitter.com/ines_opcoelho/status/644229581139017728">September 16, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p><br /></p>
<h3 id="thank-you">Thank you!</h3>
<p>Many thanks go to our wonderful sponsors who sent us swag! The contents were so diverse – from stickers and t-shirts to bottles and battery packs – that we think it made every single one of our students happy. The gift packages were the biggest ones received by any batch so far: We take that as a good sign ;D</p>
<p><br /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><3 All the way from Berlin! Thank you <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a>! Now which T-Shirt should I wear first... <a href="http://t.co/GvABTHOWqS">pic.twitter.com/GvABTHOWqS</a></p>— Sarah Ni (@cyber_koi) <a href="https://twitter.com/cyber_koi/status/648384654169370624">September 28, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p><br /></p>
<p>A special mention goes to <a href="http://www.offscreenmag.com/">Offscreen</a> magazine, who donated past copies of their magazine to be sent to students. We are big fans of the periodical, and were so grateful they wanted to support our program somehow. We’ve loved each package sent to us by sponsors, and think our students enjoyed the surprise, too!</p>
<p><br /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Look who is smiling! :) <a href="https://twitter.com/anderspree">@anderspree</a> cc <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/zaziemo">@zaziemo</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/rubyandbugs">@rubyandbugs</a> <a href="http://t.co/6vbegwCt1s">pic.twitter.com/6vbegwCt1s</a></p>— TL (@inthuytion) <a href="https://twitter.com/inthuytion/status/645246826279489539">September 19, 2015</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Exercistas Say GoodbyeMixolidia & Sarahhttp://twitter.com/exercistas2015-09-30T00:00:00+00:002015-09-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/exercistas-say-goodbye<p>This summer we pushed, pulled, squashed, force pushed, gave lightning talks, exercised, interviewed, toured, travelled and became official core contributors to exercism. It’s all due to Rails Girls Summer of Code and we’re so grateful.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/exercistas_first_day.jpg" alt="Exercistas & NIRD" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: Exercistas)</div>
<p>Working out of the NIRD office in Seattle allowed us to learn what it is like to work as part of a team in an office and learn all the tools of working remotely. From time to time, the NIRD staff works remotely and our exercism team spread from the West to East Coasts. We are in Seattle, WA, our supervisor JZ is in L.A., our mentor Katrina is in Texas and of the UX/UI team we are working with, one member is in L.A. and the other in NYC.</p>
<p>Working on exercism was a bit of a whirlwind which just started to settle. We started out with a plan to streamline the onboarding process of new users to exercism. At our mentor’s suggestion, to learn the codebase we decided to institute a small feature by the end of the first full week: a menu of languages available on exercism. So we hit the ground running and smashed right into a wall of the most convoluted codebase either of us had ever seen. We waded through it, took some missteps, but achieved our goal of making our first pull request within 7 days of starting RGSoC.</p>
<p>That was just the beginning. We toured Julep, Porch, and Facebook, met some of their software developers, also met developers from EnergySavvy all in our quest to learn more about software development and the Seattle Tech scene.</p>
<p>Through RGSoC, we were able to attend the last Madison+ Ruby conference and give a LIGHTNING TALK!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/exercistas-onstage.jpg" alt="Exercistas @ Madison+ Ruby" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: Exercistas)</div>
<p>At first it was a bit terrifying finding out that we were giving a talk. That’s why we practiced and practiced, gave our talk in front of our coaches, mentor and even a local meetup. The Madison+ Ruby crowd was very supportive, welcoming and seemed to love our talk and exercism. We were also treated like full fledge speakers and received a yummy speaker goodie bag. We even got to meet Anika!
Attending Madison+ Ruby was a great experience.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/exercistas-anika.jpg" alt="Exercistas <3 Anika" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: Exercistas)</div>
<p>We ended up doing so much more than we’d planned in our application for RGSoC. We didn’t just restart a conversation about the ease of access of the website for new users, we were able to influence nearly every aspect of the site.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/exercistas-RGSoC-redesign.jpg" alt="We made this!" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: Exercistas)</div>
<p>…and that’s just the front page. We submitted a total of 36 pull requests, 29 of which were merged and 7 of which went back to the abyss where they belong.</p>
<p>Our original project was to improve the onboarding experience, and boy did we go all-out on that one. We’ve been meeting with User Experience professionals for two months now to entirely redesign this aspect of the site. As part of this project, we ran user interviews, made wireframes, and will be doing more user testing in the future once the redesign is complete.</p>
<p>The two large features we added were information pages showing the languages and exercises available, and an engagement-driving feature that suggests five exercises to comment on every day that are appropriate for the user’s level of experience.</p>
<p>We surpassed all of our goals for this summer. We never thought we would be able to reach the level of ease we now have with Ruby and exercism after three months. We loved being able to influence the direction the site was taking and having Katrina take our comments and suggestions to heart.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/exercistas-thanks-from-katrina.jpg" alt="Exercistas <3 Katrina" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(Image: Exercistas) </div>
<p>Rails Girls, it was a lovely summer, and we are so grateful to have had this opportunity!</p>
Conference Raffle Round TwoLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-09-29T00:00:00+00:002015-09-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/raffle-round-two<p>As we’re nearing the end of the program, it was also time to get the second round of our WORLD-FAMOUS conference raffle going. We’re excited to finally announce the winners:</p>
<p>RubyConf Colombia (16-17 Oct): RubyGirls Quito<br />
EuRuKo (17-18 Oct): GirlsCoders Warsaw, R’n’B<br />
Codemotion (2-3 Nov): GirlsCoders Warsaw<br />
beyond tellerrand (2-4 Nov): Delta Quadrant<br />
StarTech Conf Chile (6-7 Nov): RubyGirls Quito<br />
RubyKaigi (11-13 Dec): Tessie (Pilar & coach Ramon)<br />
RubyConf Australia (10-13 Feb 2016): Melbourne<br />
RubyConf Philippines (8-9 Apr 2016): Tessie<br />
Ruby Conf Kenya (5-7 May 2016): CocoaGems</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/round-two-raffle-space-cat.gif" alt="excitement" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: <a href="http://www.omgcatsinspace.com" target="_blank">omg cats in space</a>)</div>
<h3 id="congratulations">Congratulations!</h3>
<p>You should have all already been introduced to your respective conference organisers; and as always, we’re happy to introduce first-time (and even second-time) conference goers to people from the local Rails Girls community. If you need to be introduced, let us know - we can try connecting you. For those of you giving lightning talks, we always have those <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/talk/">tips</a> and <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-07-29-talk-tips/">tricks</a> handy so you can rock that stage! Don’t forget to take pictures and, most importantly: have fun!</p>
<p>Last but not least: We’d like to thank again all of the conferences who offered tickets for our second round conference raffle:</p>
<p>♥ <a href="http://2015.arrrrcamp.be">Arrrcamp</a> ♥ <a href="http://rubyconf.ph">RubyConf Philippines</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.rubyconf.co">RubyConf Colombia</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.startechconf.com/">StarTechConf Chile</a> ♥ <a href="https://2015.webcampzg.org">Webcamp Zagreb</a> ♥ <a href="http://berlin2015.codemotionworld.com">Codemotion Berlin</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.rubyconf.org.au/2016">RubyConf Australia</a> ♥ <a href="http://osfeels.com/">Open Source & Feelings</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.beyondtellerrand.com/">beyond tellerrand</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.euruko2015.org/">EuRuKo</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.rubykaigi.org/2015">RubyKaigi</a> ♥ <a href="http://rubyconf.nairuby.org/2015">RubyConf Kenya</a> ♥</p>
<h3 id="youre-all-amazing-hearts">You’re all amazing! ♥</h3>
Review of Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015 by Team MelbourneVi and Sarahhttp://twitter.com/TeamMelbKoala2015-09-27T00:00:00+00:002015-09-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team-Melbourne-Final<p>G’day!</p>
<p>We’re <a href="http://adcopywriter.github.io">Vi</a> & <a href="http://www.cyberkoi.com">Sarah</a>. We’re the team that makes up Team Melbourne, the first Australian sponsored team to participate in Rails Girls Summer of Code.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/team-melbourne-final-infographic.jpeg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Image: Team Melbourne</div>
<p>From July to September 2015, we created <strong><a href="https://github.com/team-melbourne-rgsoc2015/discourse-adplugin">an advertising plugin</a></strong> for <a href="http://discourse.org">Discourse</a> that supports Adsense, DoubleClick for Publishers and Amazon Affiliates. This was our first ever contribution to open source.</p>
<p>In the podcast below we interview each other and talk about our experience in Rails Girls Summer of Code <em>(Q&A Format with 5 questions each. Duration: 13 minutes)</em>.</p>
<iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/223931295&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false"></iframe>
<p><em><a href="https://soundcloud.com/sarah-ni-520428285/podcast-team-melbourne-rgsoc-2015/s-8apCo">Official Link to the Podcast</a> on Soundcloud & <a href="http://team-melbourne-rgsoc2015.github.io/Transcription/">Podcast Transcription</a> on Team Melbourne’s Blog.</em></p>
<p>Don’t have 13 minutes to listen to the podcast? Below we’ve summarized the skills that we’ve gained over three past three months in 8 dot points:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>Javascript</strong>: Prior to the program, we completed Codeacademy’s Javascript course and read Eloquent Javascript. The challenge came with picking up Ember.js from scratch. It took a while for us to get our heads around Routes, Views and Templates!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Google Doubleclick for Publishers</strong>: We had to create code that supported both Adsense and DoubleClick for Publishers in harmony. One key feature of DFP is custom targeting, where we built an infinitely increasing user input box that supported multiple keys and values.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Amazon Affiliates</strong>: This was an additional feature in the last 3 weeks of the project. We found out about Banner and Product Link Amazon Ads, and managed to build support features in the plugin.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Git</strong>: With multiple contributors, we quickly learnt the ins and outs of managing a full project and to ensure that it was in sync. We learnt about symlinks, submodules and more…</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Mobile Testing</strong>: We learned how to deploy Discourse to a live site (Docker) in order to test mobile ad features.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Pair Programming</strong>: This allowed us to discuss features and programming approaches in an effective and engaging manner every day. It’s a great approach!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Asynchronous Loading</strong>: With Ember.js, advertisements would time-out without a page refresh. We fixed this and the tough part was ensuring ads would work with Discourse’s asynchronous logic.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Productivity Platforms</strong>: Our amazing coaches introduced us to Slack, Trello, and Daily Stand-Ups. These were effective tools in making sure the project continued to stay on track!</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/team-melbourne-team.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image: Team Melbourne </div>
<p>Exciting News: Vi’s business that provides <a href="https://www.examsuccess.com.au/">tutoring for selective school and scholarship tests</a> is sponsoring for 2016 Rails Girls Summer of Code.</p>
<p>We’d like to thank Rails Girls for giving us the opportunity, Redbubble for being our coaching company and Discourse.org for building something amazing!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/team-melbourne-discourse.gif" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Image: Team Melbourne</div>
<p><strong>Start using our <a href="https://github.com/team-melbourne-rgsoc2015/discourse-adplugin">Advertising Plugin</a>! Follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/TeamMelbKoala">Twitter</a>. Read about our journey on the <a href="http://team-melbourne-rgsoc2015.github.io/">Team Blog</a>.</strong></p>
Team Tremors - Amazing JourneyNelly and Mercyhttp://twitter.com/teamtremors2015-09-26T00:00:00+00:002015-09-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/tremors<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/NelmyTremors.JPG" alt="Team Tremors" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Nelly and Mercy (Image: Nelly & Mercy) </div>
<p>We have been working on the RapidFTR project, which assists humanitarian workers to gather, sort and share information about separated children in emergency situations so they can be reunited with their families.
Working on this project has broadened our programming knowledge especially in Ruby and Rails. We have interacted with Git (It was not that easy at first :)), CouchDB, Solr, and Gems. At this point, we cannot say that we are masters with Ruby and Rails, but we are much better than when we started learning it.</p>
<h2 id="start-of-the-project">Start of the Project</h2>
<p>Initially, setting up the project on our local machines was a bit challenging (we were discouraged at first :( ). Nelly uses a Windows environment and that required vagrant installation (with this, one does not require a manual install of all the features) alongside setting up the project on her machine. On the other hand, Mercy uses a Linux environment and that required manual installation of the required features of the application. At the end of it all, we had installed so many features and gems but the good news was that the application was working perfectly fine after a couple days of setting up our respective environments.</p>
<h2 id="rapidftr-setup-blog">RapidFTR setup Blog</h2>
<p>We noticed the guidelines for setting up RapidFTR on our local machines was not so clear. We decided to write more detailed instructions which can be found <a href="https://teamtremors.wordpress.com/">here</a>. This would also be used by new and upcoming contributors to the project.</p>
<h2 id="united-states-international-university---africa-summer-2015-hackathon">United States International University - Africa Summer, 2015 Hackathon</h2>
<p>Last semester, we had a hackathon at our university which was amazing. A few universities across Nairobi, Kenya were in attendance too. Surprisingly, out of 80 people in attendance, only 7 were female :0 :0 :0. That got us a bit worried since that clearly showed not many female coders and programmers are out there. We created a kind of a revolution to encourage women into programming. How did we do that? Well, it was easy. We came up with a women’s award category called ‘Nekesa Kiboi’ Award. Nekesa Kiboi is a combination of both our names.</p>
<p>The award focused to provide funding on the best project done by a female(s). The theme of the hackathon was based on social innovation. More details on the hackathon can be found <a href="https://usiuhackathon.me">here</a>. The winner under the Women’s award category did a hardware hack using raspberry pi for digital display which incorporated the use of counter and timer. As simple as it was, their project can be further extended and applied not only in the university, but also in the country for digital display purposes.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/announceTremors.JPG" alt="Team Tremors" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Announcing the Women’s Award Winner. L-R: Paul, Mercy, Nelly and Prof. Wamuyu Kanyi (Image: Team Tremors) </div>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/hacklaTremors.JPG" alt="Team Tremors" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Women’s Award Winner (Image: Team Tremors) </div>
<p>We decided to have that because we know women have potential in programming that they can exploit and the award was a way to facilitate and drive women in the hackathon to exploit their potential. Well, we did not do that alone. We contributed some of our RGSoC funds and also got help from our professors and friends. We encouraged the girls at the hackathon to work on projects and join community groups like RGSoC, AkiraChix, and Women in Tech Africa. Such groups help women of like minds to learn from each other and grow together.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/hackcrowdTremors.JPG" alt="Team Tremors" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Hackathon Day (Image: Team Tremors) </div>
<h2 id="meeting-with-team-techylite">Meeting with Team Techylite</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CheersTremors.JPG" alt="Team Tremors" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Esther, Nelly and Mercy (Image: Team Tremors) </div>
<p>We met up with Esther Monchari, from Team Techylite. They work on the Speakerinnen project. It was such a great day to spend time chatting, learning from each other and sharing our experiences. We actually had our weekly skype call with Cathy together with Esther. Cathy was excited to see and have a chat with the two teams from Nairobi, Kenya.</p>
<h2 id="conferences">Conferences</h2>
<p>We could not manage to attend any of the conferences because of the proximity. But, we attended the <b>Women in Tech Africa Conference</b> held at ihub in Nairobi, Kenya on September 10th 2015. This was the launch of the Kenya chapter. The conference aimed at identifying women in tech from Africa, and to organise activities that would support these women across the African continent. During this conference, we learned to apply the tech knowledge in business growth. In addition to that, we learned how to be techpreneurs. Where we focus on both technology and entrepreneurship. That was a good perspective to look at technology since most people would always associate technology with techies and rarely with techpreneurs.</p>
<p>We would be attending the <b>2nd Annual African Women in Technology Conference</b>, hosted by AkiraChix held on October 15th 2015, in Nairobi, Kenya. AkiraChix is a non- profit organisation that inspires and develops the force of women in technology who will change Africa’s future.
From the 2nd round raffles tickets, there would be a RubyConf in Kenya and we are so looking forward to it.
We are hoping to give a lightning talk during both conferences.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-learned-during-rgsoc">What we learned during RGSoC</h2>
<p>Throughout this journey, we learned to work as a team and absorbing pressure when things don’t work out as we anticipated.</p>
<p>We managed to fix the issues on the project that was required of us and we also learned how to make successful pull requests. :)</p>
<p>We also learned that women are few and needed as well in the STEM world. Well, based on our experience from the hackathon, we noticed that most girls are enthusiastic about programming but lack that drive and motivation. We had the chance to encourage the few female that attended the hackathon, shared our RGSoC experience and the lots of opportunities alike that are available for women in STEM.</p>
<h2 id="challenges-we-faced">Challenges We Faced</h2>
<p>We faced a couple of challenges but the two major ones were Internet reliability and writing cucumber tests. We use a space at the university for the RGSoC. At some point, internet connectivity was so slow that we opted to use LAN connection as opposed to WiFi. Sometimes we would even use our phones for internet connection. That saved us some trouble.</p>
<p>Writing cucumber tests was very challenging for us (extremely challenging :) ). We asked pro ruby programmers around Nairobi, Kenya concerning cucumber tests and surprisingly, none of them write tests because they say it is difficult and confusing. Eventually, we managed to find our way through understanding cucumber tests and actually writing them. :)</p>
<h2 id="our-gratitude">Our Gratitude</h2>
<p>We appreciate our mentors, Sri Prasanna and Anne Mwangi for guiding us through the whole project. They showed us the easy way out to work with not only the RapidFTR project, but also understanding the project’s code and the importance of writing tests :) :). Our supervisor, Cathy Nangini, has been very supportive throughout the program. From the weekly skype/hangout calls and updating our progress with her, to also linking us up with the tech people across the globe. She has also been very understanding on the unreliable internet that would occur a few times. Thank you very much Cathy :). Not forgetting our Coach, Paul Bombo, For being with us from the word go. Paul, we are apologize for ever bugging you, but you’ve helped us quite a lot both during the sad and happy times. :) :) And owww… and Max Musau. The one guy that we took over his office whenever the university labs were closed for the night. Thanks Max for giving us a space in your office ;). And all in all, we appreciate the RGSoC community which is and will always be a lovely family.</p>
<h2 id="what-next">What next???</h2>
<p>The RGSoC is coming to an end and we are glad to be part of the journey. We have a positive impact from the experience. This is not the end for us as we will still continue to learn everything new, and take the initiative to encourage other women to be part of <em>‘Women in Technology’</em>.</p>
A Tale of Sweet Cocoa with GemsKarla and Emmahttp://twitter.com/cocoagems2015-09-24T00:00:00+00:002015-09-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/A-Tale-of-Sweet-Cocoa-with-Gems<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG-FirstWeekGH.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Emma and Karla during the first week in the GitHub office.</div>
<h2 id="a-little-bit-of-background">A little bit of background</h2>
<p>CocoaGems is a pretty large team. We had the great fortune of having four mentors from CocoaPods and a total of seven coaches. Five of our coaches are from GitHub and two of them are private coaches. GitHub hosted us during the entire Summer of Code and provided us with office space in their beautiful office in San Francisco. <a href="https://cocoapods.org/">CocoaPods</a> is a dependency manager for iOS development written in Ruby. It allows iOS developers to use pods containing libraries and also to share their own pods with other developers.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-did-together">What we did together</h2>
<p>While pairing with our CocoaPods coach Boris Bügling we worked on a CocoaPods plugin called <a href="https://rubygems.org/gems/cocoapods-label">CocoaPods Label</a>. Step by step we created and released our first gem together. We took terms driving, navigating and asking questions. As you fellow developers know, pairing is a great way to practice your patience, asking questions and taking initiative. Communicating about code can be frustrating when you are having trouble explaining what you mean, but it gives you hints about what you need to work on more since the only way to be good at explaining something is to really understand it. It is also pretty epic to put your trust in someone much more experienced to walk you through there ways of thinking and solving problems.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG-EBKTwitter.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Karla, Boris and Emma visiting the Twitter office.</div>
<p>We also had more theoretical sessions with our coaches at GitHub about general Computer Science subjects like algorithms, search, sorting, regular expressions, piping etc. As individuals we worked on our own project helping CocoaPods with defined issues. This allowed us to work with projects that inspired us at our own pace. While working on our issues we scheduled tutorial sessions with our coaches and mentors about concepts we needed to understand to be able to solve our issues. As if this wasn’t enough we also worked on our side iOS projects with one of our savant GitHub coaches to better understand CocoaPods audience. We also created a <a href="http://cocoagems.github.io/">blog</a> together using Jekyll. It is a developer friendly blog tool that allows you to write blog posts in markdown and just push it to your git hub repository to post a new blogpost using GitHub pages.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG-3DPrint.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">During CodeConf in Nashville we got to take a 3D image. </div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG-CodeConf.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">We also got some nice t-shirts, had fun and learned a lot. </div>
<h2 id="what-we-learned">What we learned</h2>
<p>Karla:</p>
<p>How do you work on an Open Source Project without a read.me as a newbie? As some of you may know this summer <a href="http://cocoagems.github.io/about.html">CocoaGems</a> have been working on CocoaPods. Sorting the order of how pods are listed in an Xcode project. The issue I have been working on this Summer <a href="https://github.com/CocoaPods/Cork">Cork</a> did not contain a read.me. Fortunately, I had mentors and coaches who offered there precious time to work with us. The question that confronted me shortly after choosing to work on Cork is how do you go about getting more background of the Code base while learning Ruby? Git-blame came to the rescue. Git-blame allows you to track down the first person to contribute to the file and also to track every other commit since the first to the most present connecting each one to its author and date. While working on an open source project it is useful to know whom the contributors of each commit are because it makes it a lot easier to ask them questions directly.</p>
<p>How to automate your learning process. Is that even possible? learn to schedule meetings with mentors, coaches, colleagues and managers naturally by scheduling one each and every single time after every session. The best resource available for learning aside of the web are definitely our coaches and mentors. I learned to schedule as many sessions with them. Some were in person, some were over screen hero and some of the meetings we scheduled were also with other RGSoC participating teams and or Github Summer of Code students in particular Mark Tareshawty. Google Calendar became my best friend. Adding Meetup events that I wanted to attend and also scheduling a well thought out plan for the day made it so that transitioning from one activity to the next happened with as least cognitive exertion as necessary.</p>
<p>Emma:</p>
<p>I wanted to take the opportunity to get exposed to different parts of programming during this summer. To get started I chose one of the issues labeled easy in the CocoaPods repository. The pods used to be ordered case sensitive and that caused confusion for users with a large number of pods. By working on this issue I learned a great deal of things that I can’t imagine learning in a better way. I hadn’t been exposed to a larger codebase before an it felt exciting to search for the lines of code that loaded the pods in Xocode. I picked my coaches and mentors brains for all of there tips and tricks to find the right place and ignore everything else. I also learned more about how sorting works and became better at understanding Ruby syntax. Once I got the sorting figured out it was time to rewrite the tests. I needed to learn how to write tests, did a bunch of online tutorials and got help from our coaches. Once the tests succeeded I was very proud to do my first <a href="https://github.com/CocoaPods/Xcodeproj/pull/294">pull request</a> ever to an open source project.</p>
<p>After that I worked on moving the <a href="https://github.com/CocoaPods/cocoapods-search">source code for search</a> to its own plugin (gem) to make the codebase more modular. By doing so it will be easier to make changes or improvements to search in the future. With my new skills from previous work it was easier to get started, however CocoaPods is pretty huge and has its own infrastructure to get your head around. I struggled with understanding the development environment and how to run my local changes with Rake. Once I got that figured out I worked myself backwards copying code too the new plugin and making sure I got everything right. Moving the tests for search was actually more complicated than moving the source code since the tests required a lot of files in the fixture folder to run the tests. By working on this I got a better understanding of what a gem is an how it’s structured. For the last month I chose to work on a new web project called <a href="https://github.com/CocoaPods/stories.cocoapods.org">CocoaPods stories</a> that enables user generated lists of pods. I’ve always wanted to learn more about databases and I feel really inspired to be able to do so in this project working my way through the issues.</p>
<h2 id="thank-you-3">Thank you <3</h2>
<p>Karla:
The summer was a full on learning experience - it makes me happy to know that we kept a RGSoC Team Apps journal- this summer has to be the best well spent three months of my life and best use of time. An enormous thank you to our CocoaPods Mentors: Kyle Fuller, Orta Therox, Boris Bugling and Samuel Giddins. To our GithHub coaches: Jake Boxer, Jesse Toth, Rachel Meyers, Rob Rix and Ross Mc Farland. Learning about software development, fundamentals, Git, algorithms,how to write tests, and Agile has been a great experience with you!!</p>
<p>Emma:
I just want to aim a big thank you to everyone who made these three months of immersive learning possible. Thank you to Rails Girls Summer of Code organizers for creating this excellent program to help change the ratio in open source development. Thank you to CocoaPods for believing in us, giving us support and projects to work on. Thank you to GitHub for hosting us and giving us coaching in various subjects. Thank you to our private coaches for your patience, time and support.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CG-2ndDinnerCocoaPods.JPG" alt="Team CocoaGems" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Members of CocoaPods getting together for dinner after AltConf. Photo by Karla </div>
Goodbye from Team DEIGirlsInês & Rosahttp://twitter.com/teamdeigirls2015-09-23T00:00:00+00:002015-09-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/goodbye-from-team-deigirls<p>###Goodbye from team DEIGirls</p>
<p>Summer of 2015 is almost ending and, with it, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2015-07-26-meet-team-deigirls/">team DEIGirls</a> adventure comes to an end. For 3 months we have been delving into the world of Ruby, learning Ruby on Rails, Lotus, Git and meta-programming with Ruby. It has been 3 awesome months, full of joy, happiness, laughter and some frustration, as well. We meet incredible people, Ruby community is great! And, most of all, we had lots of fun!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/teamDEIGirls_hanging_out.gif" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Waiting for someone to join a call with team DEIGirls(Image: Team DEIGirls)</div>
<p>###So, who are we?</p>
<p>Team DEIGirls is composed by Inês and Rosa, two portuguese IT girls interested on programming for the web and learning new technologies.</p>
<p>Initially our team was supported by our coaches Christian Weyer, Pablo Porto and Tiago Mendes-Costa. These amazing guys were with us from day one, helping us and supporting us, we wouldn’t have survived without their help! However, somewhere in the middle of the Summer, more help was needed, and our little team grew with the addition of Benedikt Deicke, Markus Prinz and Ramon Huidobro as coaches. Their help was invaluable! We can not thank our coaches enough for all the help they gave us throughout the Summer!</p>
<p>The project mentors were also always there for us. Luca, the project owner, helped us to design our project plan and to set our route. Trung, our mentor, accompanied us in our journey, guiding us in every turn and not even the time difference (he lives in Australia) prevented him to come to our rescue, when needed!</p>
<p>The last, but not the least, member of our team is our amazing supervisor Alex! Our talks and our weekly catch-up calls are something that we’ll surely miss! We always ended up laughing until our stomachs hurt! (and no, it isn’t from the cookies!)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/teamDEIGirls_tree.png" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Team DEIGirls family tree (Image: Team DEIGirls)</div>
<h3 id="our-work">Our work</h3>
<p>During the Summer, we have been working on the web framework <a href="http://lotusrb.org/">Lotus</a> for Ruby. But, since we were newbies in programming for the web, there were a lot of things to learn before we get out hands into that.</p>
<p>First, we started by learning Ruby, Ruby on Rails, html and css. We also had to learn how to work with Git, for real. We did a lot of online tutorials and earned loads of badges! Then, we did a diary application on Ruby on Rails and a similar one in Lotus, to better understand their differences. Afterwards, we started meta-programming on Ruby. Our main work was to built a mailer gem for Lotus. And we did it!</p>
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="a/Hlqzh" data-context="false"><a href="//imgur.com/a/Hlqzh">Some memories from team DEIGirls working on RGSoC (Images: Team DEIGirls)</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>###Our participation on RGSoC</p>
<p>Participating in the Rails Girls Summer of Code was much more than working on Ruby. It had a human component that is hard to put on words. Ruby community is warm and welcome, and we felt like we belonged to a big and cozy family!
We used Slack and Twitter to comunicate with everyone and the daily logs and blog posts on the RGSoC app page allowed us to keep up with the work done by other the teams. We would start our days by catching up on the news and the other teams’ tweets.</p>
<p>It was overwhelming to participate in something like this! There was always someone active on the community. When our work, in Portugal, started, the team from Australia was finishing their day. And when our day ended, the teams from North America were just starting! Even on weekends we would find someone out there, working on their projects!
We had regular skype/hangout/team viewer/screen hero calls with our team. Most of them were work related but some of them were just catch-up calls. Our team is great and we had lots of fun!</p>
<p>We also had a chance to participate on a Rails Girls event, to help as coaches and to do a <a href="https://prezi.com/7lmbh9uhd7ja/rgsoc/">lightning talk</a> about our experience on RGSoC. We were a little scared but it turned out great!
After that, we participated on RubyConf PT. We attended great talks and we were able to meet other Rubyists and share our experience of participating on RGSoC. We also had a chance to meet our coach Christian on person, since he was one of the speakers at the conference. We are glad that we had this opportunity to meet one of our team members for real, after spending a big part of the Summer talking with him through a computer!</p>
<p>Most of all, it was an enriching Summer, full of new experiences and challenges, and lots of fun!</p>
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="a/1BSqz" data-context="false"><a href="//imgur.com/a/1BSqz">Funny moments from Team DEIGirls (Images: Team DEIGirls)</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>We want to thank everyone who made this Summer possible! The organizers, the sponsors, the people who donated money for the program, the coaches who volunteered to help us and the mentors who brought the projects. You are incredible for allowing us to have this amazing adventure!</p>
Rubyherzlein - Last Blogpost of the SummerNynne and Franzihttp://twitter.com/RubyherzleinRG2015-09-19T00:00:00+00:002015-09-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/last-blog-post-rubyherzlein<h2 id="rubyherzlein--the-rails-girls-summer-of-code-2015">Rubyherzlein & The Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015</h2>
<p>This summer is nearly over! Team Rubyherzlein has been working on the SoundDrop app at the SoundCloud office in Berlin since July, as a part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015 Program.</p>
<p>So what have we learned during these three months? Here is the list of most of (but not all!) the topics that we covered with our coach, mentors and coding buddies:</p>
<ul>
<li>Git, GitHub and Version Control</li>
<li>A brief history of Unix</li>
<li>Binary and octal numbers</li>
<li>Hexadecimal numbers</li>
<li>Testing</li>
<li>Pairing</li>
<li>Shells</li>
<li>Characteristics of programming languages: compiled vs interpreted, objective orientated, Functional, etc. example languages: characteristics, area of use etc etc</li>
<li>Databases + SQL</li>
<li>High-level vs. low-level languages</li>
<li>Database migrations</li>
<li>Stack traces (stack overflow)</li>
<li>Recursion</li>
<li>Regular expressions</li>
<li>Vim as a text editor</li>
<li>Inheritance in Ruby</li>
<li>SSL</li>
<li>_why the lucky stiff (Why_day is August 19)</li>
<li>Environments (and environment variables)</li>
<li>JavaScript and jQuery</li>
<li>Garbage Collector</li>
<li>Variable Scope</li>
<li>Duck Type</li>
</ul>
<p>This checklist looks pretty long, actually we probably covered much more ground than that!
<br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein-eurucamp-lecture_room.jpg" alt="Eurucamp 2015" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image: Bitcrowd </div>
<h2 id="eurucamp">Eurucamp</h2>
<p>Besides working on the SoundDrop app and learning all those basics, we also attended two conferences this summer! For both of us it was our first ever tech conferences, and such great experiences. The first one was Eurucamp held in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. Eurucamp is a one-track conference that prides itself in its inclusiveness.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein-eurucamp-tweet.jpg" alt="Eurucamp 2015 Tweet" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image: Twitter/Speakerinnen </div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Its really cool that a tech conference with <em>that</em> many women were our first ever! It sets the bar pretty high for future conferences.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein-eurucamp-presentation.jpg" alt="Eurucamp 2015 Rubyherzlein presentation" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Image: Team Rubyherzlein</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>On the first day of the conference, we both coached at the Rails Girls Beginners’ workshop. We even gave a lightning talk about our experience with the Rails Girls Community! The main point of the talk was to tell the story of how we went from attending a beginners’ workshop to teaching it as a Rails Girls Summer of Code team only a few months later. With this slide we tried to tell what it’s like to be a RGSoC team:</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein-eurucamp-slide.jpg" alt="Eurucamp 2015 slide" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image: Team Rubyherzlein </div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>Important elements include: the Rails Girls Community, SoundCloud team, our SoundDrop project group, the conferences we attend and our twitter community!</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein-fullstack-fest.jpeg" alt="Full Stack Fest 2015" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(Photo by Amanda Kievet)
</div>
<p><br /></p>
<h2 id="full-stack-fest">Full Stack Fest</h2>
<p>As Team Rubyherzlein we got the unique oppertunity to attend this years Fullstack Fest in Barcelona, which is composed of two separate conferences:
Baruco (Ruby Conference) + FutureJS (Javascript Conference) = Fullstack Fest.</p>
<p>First of all, we would like to thank everyone who helped us make this trip possible:
Erik, Alex Duana, Tam, Txus, Jano, Sara, Sergio and George!</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein-fullstack-lunch.jpeg" alt="Full Stack Fest 2015 lunch" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Photo by Amanda Kievet)</div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>our personal highlight was it to meet Matz in person. We guess it’s always good to get to know people who have achieved something incredible in their life and experience them as a normal human being. Us being total beginners, it was great to joke around with Matz and ask him all the questions we always wanted to know about ruby and its creation process. Matz is a very authentic and kind person. It was great that he took so much of his time to chit chat with us. Now, our motivation to become a top ruby developer has exponentially increased ;) !</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein-meet-matz.jpg" alt="Full Stack Fest 2015 MATZ!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Image: Team Rubyherzlein </div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>It was great meeting so many people from the ruby and javascript community. The random lunches as well as all the other offsite events were the perfect setting to have longer and more intense conversations and made the whole week feel like a big friends & family meetup.</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein-fullstack-franzi.jpg" alt="Full Stack Fest 2015 Franzi!" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Image: Team Rubyherzlein </div>
<p><br /></p>
<p>The last three months have been both challenging and rewarding. After the summer, Nynne and Franzi will continue to code, continue to learn with all the tools and connections made. You can follow our journeys on @WlFranzi and @nynnest.</p>
...the end of a wonderful summer...Sophiya and Boryanahttp://twitter.com/RailsGEnthusia2015-09-18T00:00:00+00:002015-09-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/the-end-of-a-wonderful-summer<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rails-g-enthusiasts-coffee.jpg" alt="Sophia & Boryana & Andrew" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Sophia & Boryana & Andrew Radev, RailsGEnthusiasts Team (Image: Sophia & Boryana & Andrew Radev)</div>
<h4 id="hello-again-from-our-team-railsgirlsenthusiasts">Hello again from our Team RailsGirlsEnthusiasts</h4>
<p>As we all know there isn’t endless happiness, unfortunately, but we think we could change that :)</p>
<h5 id="the-expectations-that-we-had-at-the-beginning-">The expectations that we had at the beginning :)</h5>
<p>We actually hadn’t been prepared for everything that happened…and that is true because we didn’t know what to expect :)</p>
<h5 id="how-did-these-three-months-just-disappeared">How did these three months just disappeared?</h5>
<p>Well, like it was yesterday when we were just starting :)
<img src="/img/blog/2015/rails-g-enthusiasts-bugs.jpg" alt="99 little bugs in the code" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Part of the coding process, RailsGEnthusiasts Team (Image: Sophia & Boryana)</div>
<h5 id="what-have-we-achieved-during-the-rgsoc">What have we achieved during the RGSoC?</h5>
<p>At the beginning, there was a lot of reading, we mean (a lot) * 10 … and nothing left in our heads till the moment we started the real coding process :)
As you all know, it doesn’t matter how many books and tutorials you gonna read, the practice is the most important thing if you want to learn coding.
So, this summer we spent our time in reading and practicing, reading and practicing and listening to our coaches, and again, and again, and again. And the practice – coding was … :) you know … fascinating in its own way :) You can spend hours trying to find a solution or fix bugs etc. … but when you make it, when you see you have finished the task, well, you are full with enthusiasm to start with the next one … :) :) :)</p>
<h5 id="what-comes-next">What comes next?</h5>
<p>As maybe, every team from this year edition of RGSoC knows that 3 months are not enough to learn all aspects of coding, we are eager to continue our training in RoR, JavaScript and further some other programming languages. ‘Cause our aim is to become Senior RoR Developers :)</p>
<h5 id="this-second-blog-post-for-the-rgsoc-will-be-full-with-gratitudes-but-it-could-not-be-otherwise">This second blog post for the RGSoC will be full with gratitudes, but it could not be otherwise.</h5>
<h6 id="lets-start">Lets’ start:</h6>
<ol>
<li>
<p>We would like to express our big gratitude towards our coaches during RGSoC.
Without the support of <strong>Andrew Radev, Tsvety Mihaylova, Marta Radeva</strong> and last but not least <strong>Dimitar Dimitrov</strong>, we would be able to understand nothing, nooothiing.
They gave us not only explanation, they were helping us, pushing us to continue to fight with the problem and grab the knowledge. They had the steadiness and patience to explain us everything and to share their knowledge with us. They were just like a kick-boxing coaches sitting in the corner of the ring and primed you up :)</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>We want to thank as well to our mentor <strong>Andrew Havens</strong>. Although the time difference was huge, we could always rely in his support and advices. Thank you Andrew for giving us the opportunity to work on RubyGameDev.com, which was a real challenge for us. The Project is a wonderful idea, giving a great opportunity for Junior RoR enthusiasts to develop their skills and if we have the possibility, we will continue helping Andrew with his Project.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Aaaaaand <strong>TheOryx</strong> – Thank you that you hosted us during the RGSoC and that this summer was a real one with your wonderful green summer garden and the breathtaking view to the Pancharevo Lake.
<img src="/img/blog/2015/rails-g-enthusiasts-TheOryx.png" alt="Sophia & Boryana & TheOryx" /></p>
</li>
</ol>
<div class="image-credits"> Sophia & Boryana & TheOryx crew, RailsGEnthusiasts Team (Image: Sophia & Boryana)</div>
<ol>
<li>And we won’t forget <strong>InitLab Sofia</strong> which hosted us during the time we were not at TheOryx company.<br />
<img src="/img/blog/2015/rails-g-enthusiasts-ruby.jpg" alt="Ruby" /></li>
</ol>
<div class="image-credits"> A present from InitLab Sofia, RailsGEnthusiasts Team (Image: Sophia & Boryana)</div>
<ol>
<li>(Oh, God, we feel as if we are on the Oscar’s awards ceremony… :) )<strong>…because now we would like also to turn to all RGSoC organizers:</strong> Without your brilliant idea and hard work to create this wonderful three-month event of coding, we would know almost nothing about how to create a real RoR Project, how to write blocks of code, methods, functions, tests, how to use Git, etc, etc…
Thank you <strong>Sara, Anika, Laura, Lieke, Verena and all other organizers</strong>, who participate in this great organization. Thank you, you are here for us!</li>
</ol>
<p>Now, it’s time to finish writing our second blog post, as it’s time to start writing our code and tests for RubyGameDev.com as Andrew is waiting for our next pull requests.</p>
<p>Stay tuned for our next blog post about ‘dotJS’ conference in Paris ;)</p>
Alster Hamburgers - Our (Summer of) Code ReviewAnke and Ayahttp://twitter.com/alsterburgers2015-09-16T00:00:00+00:002015-09-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/alster-hamburgers-code-review<h2 id="project-leap--what-weve-learned">Project LEAP & what we’ve learned</h2>
<p>During our summer, we’ve been working on the <a href="http://www.leap.se">LEAP Encryption Access Project’s</a> web app. Some email providers have been looking for a way to select the users who can sign up for their service, or to limit the number of new sign-ups. As a solution, we implemented a new field on the signup form that asks for an invite code: New users will have to receive one before they can create a new account. We also set up the necessary validations so that you can only sign up when you have a valid, unused code and built a way for admins to generate new codes to give out to new users.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/alster-leap.gif" alt="Our finished invite code" width="500px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Our finished invite code in action</div>
<p>Our coaching team was really helpful. We honestly can’t thank them enough for their time and effort. Almost every day, we had sessions with at least one of them and learned about a lot of new and interesting things. Sometimes we were just programming, other times it was more about theory and general coding knowledge. Some examples of the topics we covered are Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), CouchDB, (a lot of!) Git (oh Git, we tried really hard to become friends), project management and agile development…</p>
<p>Since we were mirroring our current work status and github issues on our kanban board, we have accumulated quite a collection of cards with finished stories. Every week or so, we dumped our signed-off issues in a big box to make more room on our board. We’re looking forward to emptying our box of completed stories when we finish the project and reminisce about all the fun and the struggles we encountered while resolving the issue.</p>
<h2 id="what-else-weve-done">What else we’ve done</h2>
<p>We won tickets to two conferences via the first conference raffle. Luckily for us, we got into the conferences that are relatively near to Hamburg so we didn’t have to pay too much to get there. The first conference was the Eurucamp in Potsdam (near Berlin) where we got to know many other passionate Rails Girls. The other one was in Dortmund and was called Open Tech School (OTS) Conference, where Anke and I got pretty lucky! We attended two different workshops on the second day of the conference and were given a phone and a drone to take back with us to Hamburg. We held lightning talks at both conferences.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/alster-conferences-talks.jpg" alt="Lightning talks at Eurucamp and OTS Conf" width="600px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Lightning talks at Eurucamp (left) and OTS Conf (right) (Photos: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/langziehohr" target="_blank">Anika</a>) </div>
<p>Because we were so impressed by the lively Ruby community in Berlin, we decided we needed a learner’s group in Hamburg as well. Our group is called <a href="http://rorganize.it/groups/hamburg-learner-s-group-tbd">“Hamburg Gem Sessions”</a> and has about 7 attendees, which is pretty awesome given that we’ve only had a few meetups!</p>
<p>Not only did we go to the conferences proposed by the Rails Girls, but we also got a few opportunities to go to other ones, such as the Dine and Discuss by the <a href="http://www.geekettes.io/">Hamburg Geekettes</a> and the <a href="https://www.polymer-project.org/summit">Polymer Summit</a> in Amsterdam.
On our international RGSoC day off (where we were supposed to spend our time doing anything but code), we decided to help at our local donation center for refugees at Messehallen. We were busy folding donated clothes for a few hours - a great feeling to leave the place just a little bit tidier than before!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/alster-messehallen.jpg" alt="Folding donated clothes at Messehallen" width="600px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Folding donated clothes on our RGSoC Day Off (Photo: Aya/Anke)</div>
<h2 id="what-we-liked-best-about-our-summer">What we liked best about our Summer</h2>
<p>We were really happy to get such a warm welcome from ThoughtWorks, our coaching company, as well as the whole Rails Girls Summer of Code community. We felt very lucky to always have a friendly, patient coach around to help us when we got stuck or to give us a session on software development.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/alster-teamfoto-600.jpg" alt="The Alster Hamburgers team!" width="600px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Our team of coaches and burgers ;) (Image: Anke) </div>
<p>Beyond our everyday office life, it was great to feel like we weren’t just a tiny team of two working in isolation but instead part of something bigger, coding and learning at the same time as 19 other teams all over the world. Too bad we can’t all have one big meet-up with everyone because we’d surely have a lot to talk about and celebrate! But it was wonderful to meet some of the teams at conferences and get glimpses of other teams’ work on Slack, the blog and daily logs.</p>
<p>We also loved the welcoming atmosphere at the conferences and meetups we attended. Being just a small newbie burger in a big world of software development can be intimidating - but we soon discovered that people were very supportive and excited to hear about the Rails Girls Summer of Code. We gave three lightning talks about RGSoC and our progress to spread the word and were very happy with how friendly and encouraging the feedback has been. <3 You hear a lot about Ruby/Rails having a great community and we found out that it is really true.</p>
<p>Outside all that community love, it has been really motivating that there are some email providers out in the “real world”, waiting for this functionality to be implemented so they can start using LEAP. So we haven’t just been working on a sample application to prove that we’ve learned something (which is what one often ends up doing when learning to code, it seemed before RGSoC…) but instead were able to have real users in mind who will be using our work as soon as it gets implemented. We really hope they will like it! :)</p>
<h2 id="whats-still-left-to-do-until-the-end-of-the-summer">What’s still left to do until the end of the summer</h2>
<p>We still haven’t had the hamburgers by the Alster that we were planning on in our first blog post. That still has to happen!
Also, we’re excited to see our code merged into the LEAP project. While the main functionality is already done, we also still have a few features in our backlog that will make it even nicer to use, so we won’t get bored in our last weeks.</p>
<h2 id="and-whats-next">And what’s next?</h2>
<p>Hopefully, we’ll continue to build our coding skills! We’ve learned a lot of things during those summer months but often, the questions grow at an even faster rate…</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/alster-learntocode-graph.jpg" alt="a graph of our learning curve" width="600px" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">What learning felt like at times... Illustration: Anke </div>
<p>After RGSoC, Aya will be travelling on to California to attend Draper University and found her first startup! Follow her adventures at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/ajafferson">@ajafferson</a>. Anke (<a href="http://www.twitter.com/ankonym">@ankonym</a>/<a href="http://www.ankonym.de">ankonym.de</a>) hopes to continue coding but will be distracted for a while by her side project: Her due date is in December to welcome a member of the next generation of programmers into the world.</p>
BaRuCo. It’s not just the talks, it’s the people.Ania&Basiahttp://twitter.com/girlscoderswars2015-09-11T00:00:00+00:002015-09-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/baruco-its-not-just-the-talks<p>Well, it’s after <a href="http://www.fullstackfest.com/?from_baruco">BaRuCo</a>. We came back refreshed, full of new energy to work. We would like to tell you about this conference very subjectively, about our impressions, which consists of four elements: atmosphere, talks, community and Barcelona.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/baruco1.jpg" alt="Full Stack Fest" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Full Stack Fest (Image: Ania) </div>
<p><strong>Atmosphere</strong></p>
<p>This is indescribable. The amounts of energy at BaRuCo is comparable to the energy at a concert of a popular rock star. A huge joy, warm applause before and after each talk, a lot of discussion and a lot of fun in the evening conference parties. A big plus for the organizers for a large number of women among the speakers. Ruby is a girl’s best friend. ;)</p>
<p><strong>Talks</strong></p>
<p>To be honest, we were not expecting to take so much advantage of the merits of such a conference. Meanwhile, even for such newbies as we, this conference was very stimulating, and giving new perspective on object-oriented programming. While our notes are mainly a list of incomprehensible concepts, which we now check in google, which is also learning. We definitely will be going back to those talks and we encourage you to watch them online when they are available. Our favorite was Sandi Metz with her “Nothing is something” talk. The way Sandi explains things is absolutely wonderful. In very simple and precise examples, we could see what the object-oriented thinking is, how inheritance should look like, what is a good composition and how to use dependency injection. And we definitely want to read her book “Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby” - it’s waiting on the shelf. We look forward to the publication of all the talks, to be able to see them again and understand more. We very strongly encourage you to do the same. Many of the talks were on high technical level, but there were also others, inspiring with their uses of metaphors and comparisons, for instance comparing programming to building skyscrapers or to poetry.
This is one of our thoughts after the conference: even if you can not be at the conference - watch talks online!
We also have to mention that we met there a lot of famous people like Ruby chief designer, Yukihiro Matsumoto or Aaron Patterson from Rails Core Team. Yay!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/barucomatz.jpg" alt="With Matz" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">L-R: Ania, <a href="https://twitter.com/yukihiro_matz" target="_blank">Yukihiro Matsumoto</a>, Basia (Image: Piotr Szotkowski) </div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/barucoaaron.jpg" alt="With tenderlove" /></p>
<div align="center" class="image-credits">L-R: Ania, <a href="https://twitter.com/tenderlove" target="_blank">Aaron Patterson</a>, Basia (Image: Basia) </div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/barucolauren.jpg" alt="With devdame" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> L-R: <a href="https://twitter.com/devdame" target="_blank">Lauren Scott</a>, Basia (Image: Magda)</div>
<p><strong>Community</strong></p>
<p>On BaRuCo site we can read “It’s not just the talks, it’s the people”. And It’s really true. It’s very inspiring and encouraging how open and friendly people at that Ruby conference were. We were very surprised. People were willingly explaining to us, if we didn’t understand parts of the talks or some concepts, we could asked freely even about basic things and reactions were always very warm and kind. We would say that Ruby Community is a great environment for female beginner programmers. Do not be afraid to participate in such events and do not be afraid to ask for even quite basic things. Remember that there are always people who would support you.
And Rails Girls community is even better. We met Paulina & Maria - Rails Girls Barcelona organizers, and these girls are amazing! We shared our experience about organizing such events like Rails Girls or regular programming classes for women. It is really amazing how strong that idea is and how many people want to participate in this without any profits (besides lots of joy).
<img src="/img/blog/2015/barucoMagda.png" alt="With our supervisor" /></p>
<div align="center" class="image-credits"> L-R: Ania, Basia, Magda (our supervisor) (Image: Luca)</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/barucomagda2.jpg" alt="With Magda" /></p>
<div align="center" class="image-credits">L-R: Basia, Magda (our supervisor), Ania (Image: Magda) </div>
<p>We’ve also met closer our super supervisor Magda and she is the best supervisor ever! We spend a lot of time with her and her colleagues from DaWanda. Thank you guys for a wonderful time and help in understanding talks!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/barucopaellainmaians.jpg" alt="With friends" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">L-R: Magda (our supervisor), Basia, Luca (DaWanda), Marcin (rebased), Paulina (Rails Girls Barcelona), Tadas (DaWanda), Ania (Image: Sławek) </div>
<p><strong>Barcelona</strong></p>
<p>And finally, Barcelona … very European city, vibrant, upbeat and interesting even just for simple walking down the streets. There are so many things you can do in Barcelona: there is a seaside and mountains as well. This never sleeping city is full of cafes, pubs and has plenty of interesting cultural and art institutions. We managed just to taste the artistic side of Barcelona and certainly we will go back there. Maybe next year for the next edition of BaRuCo?</p>
The RGSoC Day Off 2015Sarahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-09-02T00:00:00+00:002015-09-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-dayoff<p>Three months is a long time to go without a break, so we like to schedule a day
off mid-program. While it’s not required to take the day off, we highly recommend
that participants take it to regroup, relax, and do something other than
coding.</p>
<p>As has become the tradition, the Berlin teams got together for the HitFox/SoundCloud Houseboat party, which was a blast! It’s a great opportunity for Berlin-based organizers, mentors, coaches and students to have some offline time together.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Having fun at <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> party <a href="http://t.co/JDBvBvMRsF">pic.twitter.com/JDBvBvMRsF</a></p>— Raluca Badoi (@ralucainberlin) <a href="https://twitter.com/ralucainberlin/status/636921094813917184">August 27, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="und" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> on a ⛵️ <a href="http://t.co/nrPmHW3exf">pic.twitter.com/nrPmHW3exf</a></p>— Erik Michaels-Ober (@sferik) <a href="https://twitter.com/sferik/status/636893949291012097">August 27, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<p><br />
Team Alster Hamburgers dedicated themselves to helping others on their day off, by volunteering at a Refugee Centre in Hamburg, sorting clothing donations.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">How we spent our <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RGSoC?src=hash">#RGSoC</a> day off - volunteering at the donation center for refugees at Messehallen. :) <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/hhhilft?src=hash">#hhhilft</a> <a href="http://t.co/TEyyGQ4AX8">pic.twitter.com/TEyyGQ4AX8</a></p>— Alster Hamburgers (@alsterburgers) <a href="https://twitter.com/alsterburgers/status/637179859282862080">August 28, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<p>Team DEIGirls did some adventuring in a rope park, through tree canopies.</p>
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="a/w5i2s" data-context="false"><a href="//imgur.com/a/w5i2s">Sky Garden</a></blockquote>
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<p><br />
Team Tessie enjoyed some <a href="https://twitter.com/shellycoen/status/636838693211381760">delicious looking pancakes</a></p>
<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="4" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:658px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"><div style="padding:8px;"> <div style=" background:#F8F8F8; line-height:0; margin-top:40px; padding:50.0% 0; text-align:center; width:100%;"> <div style=" background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACwAAAAsCAMAAAApWqozAAAAGFBMVEUiIiI9PT0eHh4gIB4hIBkcHBwcHBwcHBydr+JQAAAACHRSTlMABA4YHyQsM5jtaMwAAADfSURBVDjL7ZVBEgMhCAQBAf//42xcNbpAqakcM0ftUmFAAIBE81IqBJdS3lS6zs3bIpB9WED3YYXFPmHRfT8sgyrCP1x8uEUxLMzNWElFOYCV6mHWWwMzdPEKHlhLw7NWJqkHc4uIZphavDzA2JPzUDsBZziNae2S6owH8xPmX8G7zzgKEOPUoYHvGz1TBCxMkd3kwNVbU0gKHkx+iZILf77IofhrY1nYFnB/lQPb79drWOyJVa/DAvg9B/rLB4cC+Nqgdz/TvBbBnr6GBReqn/nRmDgaQEej7WhonozjF+Y2I/fZou/qAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); display:block; height:44px; margin:0 auto -44px; position:relative; top:-22px; width:44px;"></div></div> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://instagram.com/p/64ekkXSgaT/" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="\n_top">The #rgsoc day off means pancakes just because. @railsgirlssoc</a></p> <p style="color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A photo posted by shelly (@sherribobbins) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2015-08-27T09:52:29+00:00">Aug 27, 2015 at 2:52am PDT</time></p></div></blockquote>
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<p><br />
Team Fanxhe took some time to laze by the pool and enjoy the beautiful Mexican weather.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">That was our <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> day off in México. 🌊😊 <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/rgsoc?src=hash">#rgsoc</a> <a href="http://t.co/KUgemvBJxu">pic.twitter.com/KUgemvBJxu</a></p>— Fanxhe Team (@Fanxhe) <a href="https://twitter.com/Fanxhe/status/637304353158643712">August 28, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<p><br />
Whatever each student did, we hope each and every one of them enjoyed taking a breather and being AFK for the day :)</p>
<p>Stay tuned for upcoming posts about our 2nd Conference raffle, and some ‘kinda’ secret projects we’ve been undertaking at Orga HQ ;)</p>
How to survive your RGSoC as a studentLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-08-25T00:00:00+00:002015-08-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/how-to-survive-your-rgsoc<p>It’s already August and we’re now halfway through the program. This means that as a team, you’ve already had six weeks of working together, pair-programming, discussing ideas and new concepts. For a lot of you, this may be a completely new experience, and we realise that it’s difficult to cope with all these new tools and ‘to-dos’.</p>
<h3 id="rgsoc-is-about-your-own-learning-process">RGSoC is about your own learning process</h3>
<p>It’s great to contribute to Open Source Software, but it might be daunting at first. This is why we provide you with a direct contact to project maintainers – this program is made to, first and foremost, connect you to the Open Source community and to encourage you to try something new. Of course you want to produce high-level, durable code; but before producing great code, you have to produce code that’s a little less than great – and we think that’s perfectly okay. This is how you learn.</p>
<h3 id="every-student-is-different">Every student is different</h3>
<p>..And every team will have a different experience throughout the summer. <br />
A lot of teams are connecting to each other and communicating, or looking at how other teams’ projects are progressing. We think that’s amazing and love seeing all that activity and exchange taking place between teams. But don’t forget that everyone works at their own pace, even within a team: this isn’t a competition, and though it’s important to look at what the other students do, you shouldn’t necessarily always compare yourself with other teams. Every team is different and we embrace diversity: That’s what makes Rails Girls Summer of Code great!</p>
<h3 id="talk-about-your-goals">Talk about your goals</h3>
<p>What connects all of the students participating in the program is their common interest in programming. Different students have different goals for the end of the summer – some of you want to learn and contribute as much as you can, some of you want to experience ALL THE THINGS, and others want to find a job by the end of the summer. You might even want a combination of all three. The way you work on your project and with your team mate will help you achieve these goals, so talk about it openly with your team mate, supervisor, and your coaches. If they all know exactly what you want, it will be easier for them to help you through it.</p>
<h3 id="ask-for-help">Ask for help</h3>
<p>Asking for help is a whole skill in itself. You might have very high expectations of yourself and be certain that, in order to meet those expectations, you have to <em>make it by yourself</em>. But it’s really difficult for a single individual to achieve a lot of their goals on their own. Asking for help is nothing to be ashamed of: it’s not a sign of weakness, it just shows that you appreciate the skills that people have and trust them enough to help you.<br />
If you are stuck on a problem, give yourself a certain amount of time to think about it, to try things out, and to fix it on your own. If that doesn’t work, talk to your team mate or your coach. Tell them where it is that you’re stuck, and what things you have tried. Often a fresh perspective is all you need.<br />
We’ve also set up a helpdesk slack channel where you can ask specific questions if you are stuck or something doesn’t work, or even very basic or general questions that you have about programming or your tools. All the volunteers in the helpdesk channel are super happy to be of help, so don’t hesitate to drop in there and ask. Of course, if you see a fellow student needing help in there, you can help them out, too!</p>
<h3 id="keep-motivated">Keep motivated</h3>
<p>Keeping the motivation up for three full months is difficult. You spend a lot of time with your team mate and they might be starting to get on your nerves, or you might be a little behind on your project plan. Sometimes personal problems arise, or situations take an unexpected turn. There are a million little things that might go wrong during the program and keep you from staying motivated.<br />
If you’ve been doing a lot of pair-programming, shake it up by spending a day or two working on separate tasks. Take regular breaks during your work day when you feel that you can’t focus, maybe by going on a 10-minute walk to clear your head. Also try to ‘switch off’ in the evenings and on weekends by letting go of everything programming-related: There is only so much your brain can learn and ‘save’ at once. You have to let it rest sometimes!</p>
<p>Look back at your very first day of Rails Girls Summer of Code, and realise how much you have achieved since! We’re not just talking about code, but about all the things you’ve learned: setting up your project, having a daily routine and stand-ups with your team, using a lot of new tools. You, yes YOU, have achieved all of that in SIX WEEKS, and we think that’s pretty impressive. Give yourself a pat on the back, take a deep breath, and get ready for the remaining month and a half.</p>
Introducing Team Alpha Ruby (α ❤ ✌)Ariane and Ramyahttp://twitter.com/teamalpharuby2015-08-16T00:00:00+00:002015-08-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Introducing-Team-Alpha-Ruby<p>Hello everybody! We are <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/83">Team Alpha Ruby</a>, Ariane and Ramya - no team name pun intended ;-).</p>
<p>During Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015, we will be working on the <a href="http://docs.ruby-lang.org/">Official Ruby Documentation Redesign</a></p>
<p>Our team has wonderful support on this journey from our mentor Zachary Scott and our coaches Barbara Barbosa and Stella Miranda.
Furthermore Benedikt Deicke provides additional input and help as our team’s supervisor.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-alpha-ruby.jpg" alt="Team Alpha Ruby" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">The amazing members of Team Alpha Ruby - From top left to bottom right:<br />
Ariane, Ramya, Zach, Barbara and Stella (Photo credit: Team Alpha Ruby) </div>
<p><strong>Why ‘Team Alpha Ruby (α ❤ ✌)’? What does the name mean?</strong></p>
<p>It is not easy to come up with a name at first, then suddenly you have an idea and it just sounds right. Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and is used in formal and natural sciences.
Ruby is the programming language that we use for our project.</p>
<p>α ❤ ✌= Alpha loves victories
Team Alpha Ruby loves victories and we achieve these with our effort.</p>
<p>The resulting name ‘Alpha Ruby’ emphasizes the value and our goals during Rails Girls Summer of Code: learning and being successful during our journey.</p>
<p><strong>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</strong></p>
<p>Ramya: I was referred by my friend Ariane, and now we are successfully working as a team. We are two passionate girls, who like to learn new technologies and communicate with people.</p>
<p>Ariane: I had interest to learn Ruby and a friend shared information about this event. Rails Girls Summer of Code for me is about learning and improving my knowledge in programing by contributing to a great Open Source project.</p>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code allows to meet like-minded people and is a great opportunity to expand our knowledge. Furthermore the stipend provides a security and allows to concentrate and work full time on the project</p>
<p><strong>What are you working on?</strong></p>
<p>The goal of our project, the Official Ruby Documentation Redesign is to design an attractive and useful template for reading Ruby documentation, made available as the official ruby-lang.org language reference documentation <a href="http://docs.ruby-lang.org/">http://docs.ruby-lang.org/</a></p>
<p>Our goal is to become proficient with Ruby during this project, so that we can become contributors to the Ruby documentation.</p>
<p><strong>What is your happiest moment so far?</strong></p>
<p>The were several unique and very special moments:
First of all it was wonderful to know that we have been selected. The second moment was when we felt “it is the real deal :-)”: It was our initial kick off call with our entire team and the hangout with our organizers.</p>
<p>It was also such a wonderful and amazing moment to meet up with other teams and event organizers at the Kick Off Barbecue in Berlin.</p>
<p>Recently we noticed that we won the lottery, the jackpot…. (sorry, we are just too amazed here)
We were selected in the conference raffle to go to EuRuKo 2015 (European Ruby Conference) in October.</p>
<p><strong>What are you most looking forward for this summer?</strong></p>
<p>The three most important things for us are: Learning everyday, making new friends and having fun. Result: An amazing Rails Girls Summer of Code :-)</p>
<p><strong>Last but not least :-)</strong></p>
<p>It has been very rewarding to learn something new everyday. We are enjoying to discover new technologies and each day is a challenging, but very rewarding. We hope to deliver great product to the Ruby community at the end.</p>
<p>We would like to thank our mentor, coaches, supervisor and the Rails Girls Summer of Code organization for this wonderful experience.</p>
The RGSoC Day Off is back!Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:002015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-day-off-is-back<p>You’ve all been eagerly waiting for it and it’s finally here – the 2015 RGSoC Day-Off!</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-rgsoc-day-off">What’s the RGSoC Day Off?</h3>
<p>The Day Off marks the approaching end (sadface) of the summer. We usually organise it towards the end of August and see it as a way for you to turn off your computer for a day and recharge. Working and learning are great, but relaxing is just as important!</p>
<h3 id="how-does-it-work">How does it work?</h3>
<p>Seriously, just take a day off! We encourage all students to do something outdoors if the weather is nice, or something they’ve never tried before.. or to even just spend a whole day not doing anything special but also not thinking about methods or test-driven development! <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-day-off/">Here</a> are a couple of ideas if you’re feeling adventurous. You’re of course welcome to spend your day off with your team mate, but can also spend it alone, or with friends – or if you feel like it, with your coaches or nearby teams.</p>
<h3 id="sounds-great-when-is-it">Sounds great! When is it?</h3>
<p>The Day Off will be on August 27th – it’s a Thursday. Yay, this almost calls for a long weekend!</p>
<h3 id="will-you-organise-something-in-berlin">Will you organise something in Berlin?</h3>
<p>Like last year, there will also be a Day Off on August 27th in Berlin, with a boat party organised by two of our sponsors: <a href="http://www.hitfoxgroup.com/">HitFox</a> and <a href="https://soundcloud.com">SoundCloud</a>. Just like for the kick-off party, you’re welcome to join us if you’re in the area (or fly over if you really want to) – we just ask that you let us know in advance, because we have limited space on the boat: we wouldn’t want to be crammed like sardines in there ;)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rgsoc-day-off.gif" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(Image: <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/rossalynwarren/these-dogs-paddling-at-a-doggy-daycare-pool-party-are-ridicu" target="_blank">Buzzfeed</a>) </div>
<p>So go and make the best out of your RGSoC Day Off – and feel free to post pictures or tweet about it using the #rgsocdayoff hashtag! <3</p>
JRubyConf and eurucamp 2015Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-08-13T00:00:00+00:002015-08-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/jrubyconf-and-eurucamp-2015<p>On the last week(end) of July, some of us – Rails Girls Summer of Code core organisers – headed to Potsdam for <a href="http://2015.jrubyconf.eu/">JRubyConf</a> and <a href="http://2015.eurucamp.org/">eurucamp</a>. JRubyConf, a one-day conference, had reached out to us because they found themselves with a pretty terrible male to female speaker ratio. In order to make this problem more visible, they wanted to involve Sara and me as MCs and Anika as a speaker – talking about why we need diverse communities and how to achieve that. As the JRubyConf team explained very well in <a href="http://blog.eurucamp.org/2015/06/19/the-rails-girls-summer-of-code-team-at-the-jrubyconfeu/">this blog post</a>, it is everyone’s responsibility, especially conference organisers’, to try and change things.<br />
Knowing that JRubyConf is the only conference worldwide that focuses on JRuby and that it is a highly niche and technical conference, Sara and I were a bit intimidated about stepping out of our comfort zone into a community we didn’t know so well. Thanks to the organisers Tobi and Lucas, who answered all of our questions, introduced us to the speakers and trusted us to guide and entertain the audience, we felt at ease and discovered just how passionate and friendly the JRuby community is, too.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The MCs at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/jrubyconf?src=hash">#jrubyconf</a> complained that there are no <a href="https://twitter.com/jruby">@jruby</a> jokes. This being Twitter, I hope you can fix this quickly.</p>— Florian Gilcher (@Argorak) <a href="https://twitter.com/Argorak/status/627054069794893824">July 31, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p>It was great to see <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--hGo2Ff23U">Anika’s talk</a> be so well-received among the JRubyConf audience, and we surely hope that this was a first step towards a more diverse audience and line-up in the years to come.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">“Diversity is awesome” Great talk by <a href="https://twitter.com/langziehohr">@langziehohr</a> at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/jrubyconf?src=hash">#jrubyconf</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/JRubyConfEU">@JRubyConfEU</a> <a href="http://t.co/G9OKzx3jvf">pic.twitter.com/G9OKzx3jvf</a></p>— Irmela (@1rmela) <a href="https://twitter.com/1rmela/status/627142908819427328">July 31, 2015</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We did a <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/fridayhug?src=hash">#fridayhug</a> yesterday at the <a href="https://twitter.com/JRubyConfEU">@JRubyConfEU</a> and look how lovely it turned out. So many happy faces! 😍 <a href="http://t.co/prhZQEJ0gM">pic.twitter.com/prhZQEJ0gM</a></p>— Anika. (@langziehohr) <a href="https://twitter.com/langziehohr/status/627397778528931840">August 1, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p>eurucamp, which is run by the same orga team, is also familiar with the issue of diversity in tech – as a renowned fun and inclusive, but less technical, conference, it’s a good go-to conference for newcomers into our Ruby Community. Their initiative to reach out to <a href="http://rorganize.it/groups?utf8=%E2%9C%93&city=Berlin">Rails Girls Study Groups</a> and <a href="http://railsgirlsberlin.de">Rails Girls Berlin</a> surely helped to appeal to more women and the range of speakers and their topics made for a very varied and exciting talk roster (with <a href="https://50prozent.speakerinnen.org/de/events/265">54% female speakers</a>!)</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">With all the great talks <a href="https://twitter.com/eurucamp">@eurucamp</a> about stuff that actually matters, I feel a bit inadequate giving a boring old technical one later. 🙈</p>— NativeNeoWatchOS (@NeoNacho) <a href="https://twitter.com/NeoNacho/status/627832561109180416">August 2, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p>One great initiative that was started as an experiment and set up in the 48 hours before the conference started, was the idea of the “<a href="http://rubyweek.org/activities/18">eurucamp guides</a>”. Due to the high numbers of Study Group members who’d be attending the conference and needing guidance, <a href="https://twitter.com/svenfuchs">Sven Fuchs</a> (one of the RubyMonstas organisers) brought together a few “eurucamp guides” who’d be in charge of helping these newcomers. This meant being available to them to introduce them to people and show them around the venue. In the end, very few of the guides ended up needing to be around; however I feel that this is an interesting and helpful concept, and would love to see the idea of “conference guides” at other conferences as well and at the next eurucamp.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Aww! So many <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/rgsoc?src=hash">#rgsoc</a> people rocking <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/eurucamp?src=hash">#eurucamp</a> this weekend! Even a very tiny one! 😍 <a href="http://t.co/PyTlguu20a">pic.twitter.com/PyTlguu20a</a></p>— Anika. (@langziehohr) <a href="https://twitter.com/langziehohr/status/627479485265387520">August 1, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p>What I like most about eurucamp, apart from the good mix of technical and social talks, is the fact that at times it hardly ever feels like an ordinary, ‘just talks’, conference. A lot at JRubyConf and eurucamp is built around the conferences themselves: workshops, guided tours, screenings, all wrapped up into something called <a href="http://rubyweek.org">RubyWeek</a>. The Saturday afternoon siesta was a revelation for me the first time I attended eurucamp in 2013; the idea of breaking free from conference talks for a few hours in order to go swimming, socialise, hack away on a new project or learn cross-stitching and martial arts felt revolutionary and very welcome (especially in the middle of summer). As a newcomer to the Ruby community at the time, it gave me the possibility to discover that I am surrounded by people with interesting hobbies and to talk at length with them.<br />
I feel that this conference is a conference you should attend at least once. I love the idea that every year, new people attend not knowing what to expect and end their weekend being happily surprised at the amount of things they discovered and great people they met; and that some of them, like me, enjoy it enough to come back year after year.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">What did you do on the weekend? I went to <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/eurucamp?src=hash">#eurucamp</a>, a very serious conference for technology professionals. <a href="http://t.co/ctzGfERfOA">pic.twitter.com/ctzGfERfOA</a></p>— ⚛ Leon Weidauer (@lnwdr) <a href="https://twitter.com/lnwdr/status/627790949456977920">August 2, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p>Both JRubyConf and eurucamp are great at making attendees feel included; the offer of daycare for parents who come to the conference with their kids is a great example of making the attending of a conference easier for everyone. Another great example is the fantastic work of Kimberly Turnage, the live stenographer; converting live speech to text for three days in a row, for every speaker and each introduction, is not an easy task and her incredible speed and abilities allowed several people (for example the hearing impaired or people whose native language isn’t English) to be able to easily follow talks as well as discussions and not feel lost or left out.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">What a wonderfully creative, open and broad conference. Thanks <a href="https://twitter.com/eurucamp">@eurucamp</a> & all the wonderful organisers. Fantastic to provide childcare.</p>— Joseph Wilk (@josephwilk) <a href="https://twitter.com/josephwilk/status/627911745043058688">August 2, 2015</a></blockquote>
<p>My favourite moments in a nutshell: Seeing the Rubycorns on stage, Team AlsterHamburgers giving a lightning talk about Rails Girls Summer of Code, the screening of “Code: Debugging the Gender Gap” (and the group discussion that ensued), Lucas’ “bananas” announcements, and the fact that it only took asking the team for tea to get some delivered right away to the coffee stand (for non-coffee drinkers).</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">👏🏾💖💪🏽✨ Team <a href="https://twitter.com/alsterburgers">@alsterburgers</a> talking about <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/eurucamp?src=hash">#eurucamp</a> <a href="http://t.co/zAMpGgapEp">pic.twitter.com/zAMpGgapEp</a></p>— Anika. (@langziehohr) <a href="https://twitter.com/langziehohr/status/627798911579783168">August 2, 2015</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>Sadly, at the end of the conference, the organisers announced that there would be no eurucamp 2016 – at least not in this size. It is a mammoth task to organise a conference, and eurucamp (for all the pleasure it gives the attendees and organisers) is no exception. We should all show our gratitude to the unsung heroes and heroines of our community, who do everything to make these events possible. To all organisers, volunteers and extra hands that helped make eurucamp happen: Thank You! Your hard work is not lost on us. Enjoy your well-deserved break and know that your event has made a huge mark on many lives and that we are looking forward to the next one - whenever it will be.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/jrubyconf-and-eurucamp-team.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Photo: eurucamp/<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/134486457@N04/20082974339/in/pool-eurucamp-2015/" target="_blank">Fanny Krebs</a>)</div>
Fanxhe Team is broadcasting from RGSoCFanxhe Teamhttp://twitter.com/fanxhe2015-08-07T00:00:00+00:002015-08-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/fanxhe-team-is-broadcasting-from-rgsoc<h1 id="hello-world">Hello World</h1>
<h2 id="and-hello-everyone">…and hello everyone</h2>
<div align="center">
<img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe--logo.png" alt="Fanxhe Team" style="height: 300px; width: 300px" />
</div>
<div class="image-credits">Fanxhe logo by Gustavo Colorado.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/GustavoC2014">FanPageFB</a><br />
<a href="https://www.behance.net/GustavoColorado">Behance</a><br /> </div>
<p>We are Fany and Anye and together with our coaches, Ignacio and Jonathan, our supervisor Katrin, our mentor Nico and the Living Style Guide’s Content and Media Chief, Jen, we are Fanxhe Team and we collaborate with the Living Style Guide’s Ruby gem. We work from Crowd Interactive’s offices,where our coaching company -a software consulting agency that specializes in e-Commerce- have supported us since we decided to participate in this program. Crowd is based in Colima, a small city in the west coast of Mexico which has landscapes from beaches to volcanoes.</p>
<div align="center">
<img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe--team-map.png" alt="Fanxhe Team" style="height: 300px; width: 400px" />
</div>
<div class="image-credits"> Fanxhe Team around the world.
<a href="https://twitter.com/zazvick">By @zazvic</a> </div>
<p><br /></p>
<table align="center">
<thead>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: center" colspan="2">WHO WE ARE?</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: center">
<img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe--anyelina.jpg" style="width: 150px" /><p align="center">
<font color="grey">
<small>
<i>Anye</i>
</small>
</font>
</p>
</th>
<th style="text-align: center">
<img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe--fany.jpeg" style="width: 150px" /><p align="center">
<font color="grey">
<small>
<i>Fany</i>
</small>
</font>
</p>
</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: center">
My name is Anyelina and I’m 28 years old. I’m Spanish, but I’ve lived in México for the last three years. I graduated with a degree in Social Work, and am a nature-lover and I also like outdoor sports, and programming.
<br />
</td>
<td style="text-align: center">
My name is Estefania and I’m 25 years old. I’m Spanish, but I’ve lived in México for the last four years. I graduated with a degree in Social Work, and I’m a book-lover.I also like animals, dancing, music, and programming.
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: center" colspan="2">HOW WE MET?</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: center">
</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify">
We met in Mexico three and a half years ago, because both of us were participating in the same student exchange program. Since that moment we became friends and partners. Later, we started working together on a few projects, including programs of social character: for example, to prevent domestic violence.
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h2 id="how-did-you-hear-about-the-soc-and-why-did-you-apply">How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</h2>
<p>It was at one of the gatherings organized by us, the girls who attend to the workshops by Codificadas and Women Who Code, because besides learning to code we also know how to have fun. On this occasion our friend Lucy organized a cocktail night with Margaritas at her place; of course Erika and Viviana - part of the organizers - couldn’t miss it. They had an exciting message to share with us.</p>
<div align="center">
<img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe--codificadas.jpg" alt="Fanxhe Team" style="height: 300px; width: 400px" />
</div>
<div class="image-credits">Codificadas =) </div>
<p>Erika and Viviana work at Crowd Interactive and they had just been informed about the Rails Girls Summer of Code, so taking advantage of being at the gathering they transmitted a heartwarming message, offering us full support of Crowd Interactive for any of us interested. They invited us to their office, an appointment for the next day to talk about the summer of code.</p>
<p>With nothing else to say other than we were two passionate programmers, we were determined to participate since the very moment we received the invitation. It was an opportunity that arrived at the right moment and suited our characteristics.</p>
<p>And why not… the next day we were there, at Crowd Interactive, we decided to tackle this adventure. During the meeting, Esteban Cortes and Victor Velazquez gave us the requisites to apply. And even when the hopes of getting a sit weren’t high because we barely had a weekend to read through the proposed projects list, pick one, make a project plan and fill our application, we both continued with the attitude of striving night and day.</p>
<h2 id="why-fanxhe-what-does-the-name-mean">Why ‘Fanxhe’? What does the name mean?</h2>
<p>The day that we met to complete our application to participate in the Summer of Code, we hadn’t noticed that we had to pick a name for our team. We hadn’t come up with anything, and suddenly, we asked ourselves, what if we put our names together?</p>
<p align="center"> <b>Estefanía + Anyelina = …Estelina</b> </p>
<div align="center"><img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe--up.gif" alt="Fanxhe Team" style="width: 150px" height="120px" /></div>
<div class="image-credits">(Image: <a href="http://www.vayagif.com" target="_blank">vayagif.com</a>) </div>
<p>No, we better don’t. “But if what about putting the diminutives of our” names together?</p>
<p align="center"> <b>Fany + Anye = “FANXHE”</b> </p>
<div align="center"><img src="/img/blog/2015/fanxhe--ok.gif" alt="Fanxhe Team" style="width: 150px" height="120px" /></div>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: <a href="http://www.giphy.com" target="_blank">giphy</a>)</div>
<p>So, “Fanxhe”, it’s just the combination of our nicknames.</p>
<p>##<strong>What are you working on?</strong></p>
<p>We are working on the open source project, Living Style Guide.</p>
<h3 id="but-what-is-living-style-guide">But, what is Living Style Guide?</h3>
<p>Living Style Guide, is a ruby gem that generates front-end style guides using markdown, improving the documentation of front-end projects and being of great utility for web development teams.</p>
<p>If you want to know how easy and quick is to generate a style guide <a href="http://code.fanxhe.com/blog/2015-07-28-the_beginning_of_the_adventure.html">read this</a>.</p>
<h3 id="why-did-we-decide-apply-for-this-project">Why did we decide apply for this project?</h3>
<p>When we reviewed the proposed projects list and we found the Living Style Guide’s gem, we knew that it was our project. We believed in its potential, it suited our characteristics, knowledge and taste. We knew that this project would allow us to grow as programmers because the tasks that we could work on could make us improve our skills gradually, increasing the complexity every time.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-our-work-in-the-gem">What is our work in the gem?</h3>
<p>During these three months, our focus is to improve the usability of the generated style guides, adding small tools that will help the user navigating through the style guide with ease.
Our project plan poses a big challenge for us, because every task that we choose involves some effort and a lot of studying, to learn and take advantage of these three months working in the summer of code.</p>
<h2 id="what-is-your-happiest-moment-so-far"><strong>What is your happiest moment so far?</strong></h2>
<p>Every day since we started our participation in the program, we have learned something new, we get to do something different and we feel backed by every member of the team, so, each day is a new professional achievement for us, as well as personal and we feel happy for it. The very moment that we got selected to participate in this program was a great joy for both of us, as well as the fact of being able to work with a united team. Like they say:</p>
<p align="center"><i>“A team that has fun together, stays together”</i></p>
<p>Do you want to see half a day of Fanxhe Team at RGSoC ?</p>
<div align="center">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wWgvqLD0pWM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>
<div class="image-credits"><a href="https://twitter.com/zazvick">By @zazvic</a> </div>
<h2 id="if-you-could-code-anything-in-the-world-what-would-it-be"><strong>If you could code anything in the world, what would it be?</strong></h2>
<p>We can think several things. Have you seen the movie “Transcendence”? With technology they want to make our world a better place. We would love to program something like this… or, have you ever imagined a machine that is capable of mediating conflicts in an objective and impartial way? We would be able to end wars, disputes, fights, misunderstandings, etc. as with neighbors or friends, as between countries or their leaders.</p>
<p>We believe that we can summarize all of our ideas in programming something that has as a result to create a happier world for everybody. Although these ideas might sound crazy — inspired by science fiction films — every day the technology advances demonstrate that, practically, everything is possible.</p>
<p>You can follow our learning process on:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="http://code.fanxhe.com/">Blog</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Fanxhe">Twitter</a></p>
</li>
</ul>
Introducing Team Ruby'n' BugsRaluca and Thuyhttp://twitter.com/rubyandbugs2015-08-05T00:00:00+00:002015-08-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-team-ruby-and-bugs<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-rnb-all.jpg" alt="Team Ruby'n'Bugs" /></p>
<p>Hello everybody, we are Raluca and Thuy, located in Berlin, Germany.</p>
<p><strong>Raluca</strong>: When I moved 3 years ago in Germany with my family, I also decided to change my career, from Assistant Manager to Developer. I struggled a lot, but being geek helped me to learn by myself Python and Java. Last year I discovered the neat world of Ruby, and I love it since. I am also volunteer at Rails Girls Berlin, to whom I thank because they helped me discover I am part of a large community, and not alone.</p>
<p><strong>Thuy</strong>: I was working as an IT-buyer and a project manager in the design and tech industry before I decided to dive deeper into coding (first with html/css and a bit javascript). Apart from Rails Girls Berlin Team I volunteer in a few other non-profit projects focusing on Black and People of Color communities.</p>
<p>We have a Nuremberg based mentoring team of three people (Stella Rouzi, Christian Bruckmayer & Henne Vogelsang) in which Henne has the main role. And of course, we also have a team of coaches: Robert Siemieniec, Gustavo Guimarães and Hackership coaches.
When we applied for the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015, Hackership offered us a spot to stay and code, along with interesting workshops and talks during their summer batch in Berlin. Everything happens under the supervision of Qian Zhou who is currently located in Helsinki/Finland.
As you see, we have a lot of great people to help and to support us. Thank you all, and thank you, Rails Girls Summer of Code, for the chance to take part in this program.</p>
<h3 id="why-rubynbugs-">Why “Ruby’n’Bugs” ?</h3>
<p>Well, first of all, it is funny :). And because Ruby and Bugs is like Ying and Yang, cannot have one without another. Well, maybe you can have bugs without Ruby, but where is the fun in that?</p>
<h3 id="how-did-you-hear-about-the-rgsoc-and-why-did-you-apply">How did you hear about the RGSoC and why did you apply?</h3>
<p><strong>Raluca</strong>: I found out about RGSoC program during a Rails Girls Berlin beginners workshop. Lisa from Rubycorns presented the project with so much of enthusiasm and passion, that I entered the website to check what it is about. When I saw that it implies having mentors to guide you, working with experienced developers, and above all contributing to open source project (the dream of any beginner developer), I knew I have to try to be part of this program.</p>
<p><strong>Thuy</strong>: I know about the RGSoC program since last year but didn’t consider to apply because I was working in full-time and coding was just a ‘nice to know’ occasion for me next to my daily job. Since I decided to intensify my coding skills this year and Raluca asked me 1 week before the application closed, I thought: why not trying, you never applied for a grant or scholarship in your life and the Ruby community is the most welcoming environment for beginners!</p>
<p><em>Within a week, we were a full team, with coaches and a coach company.</em></p>
<h3 id="what-project-are-we-working-on">What project are we working on?</h3>
<p>The Project we are working on is called <a href="http://www.osem.io">Open Source Event Manager</a>.It is an event management tool tailored to Free and Open Source Software conferences, which helps event organizers with call-for-papers submissions, scheduling, marketing and analytics. Since we are also co-organizers of events, the reason we have chosen this project is obvious.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-we-most-looking-forward-to-this-summer">What are we most looking forward to this summer?</h3>
<p>At the beginning of this program, we thought that learning and contributing as much as we can to the project are the main goals. Meantime, we discovered another equal important goal: to learn how to work as a team. Having different backgrounds and interests is not always helping us to keep the team spirit. Not mentioning the lack of self-confidence, or stress, or a pesky bug to stubborn to be solved quickly. Perhaps the ultimate goal of this summer is: learn how to deal with any issue may occur, social- or code-related.</p>
<p><strong>If you want to read more about our <em>benefits</em>, <em>challenges</em> & <em>learning lessons</em> of working as a team, please find it <a href="https://medium.com/@rubyandbugs/rails-girls-summer-of-code-hackership-the-benefits-challenges-of-being-part-of-2-programs-at-fab267941568">here</a>.</strong></p>
<h3 id="instead-of-the-end">Instead of “THE END”</h3>
<p>Our journey just started, and we have a lot to share on the way. If you are curious about our progress, about our achievements and our struggles, please follow us on Twitter: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/rubyandbugs">@rubyandbugs</a>, on the <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/39">Teams App</a>, and read our <a href="https://medium.com/@rubyandbugs">Medium blog posts</a> from time to time.</p>
Introducing Team HackrgirlsNidhiya and Anjalyhttp://twitter.com/RGSOC_hackrgirl2015-08-03T00:00:00+00:002015-08-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team-Hackrgirls<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/Introducing-Team-Hackrgirls.jpg" alt="Team Hackrgirls" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(Image: Team Hackrgirls) </div>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>Who are we?</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/RGSOC_Hackrgirl">Team Hackrgirls</a> consist of two crazy coders from Cochin, Kerala, India namely –Nidhiya and Anjaly the two engineering students who believe in the awesomeness of “OPEN SOURCE“. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjalysaju">Anjaly Elizabeth</a> is a good front end developer and a passionate designer and<a href="https://about.me/nidhiya"> Nidhiya</a> – a developer who loves to experiment with front end technologies. To an added merit, although we are students we have been working on various commercial projects. Being open source enthusiasts, we actively volunteer for Mozilla. We consider RGSOC as one of our greatest achievement and we have already fallen in love with the amazing experience of learning, experimenting and the ultimate pleasure of fixing the bug ;)</p>
<p>Why <a href="https://twitter.com/RGSOC_Hackrgirl">Hackrgirls</a> ??</p>
<p>The term Hacking has always excited us and it pumps up adrenaline (dunno why :D). Since we are the girls who loves to code and chill out we thought of naming our team as <a href="https://twitter.com/RGSOC_Hackrgirl">Hackrgirls</a> – cute and nerdy name indeed right ? ;)</p>
<p>What are you working on ?</p>
<p>We are really excited to take up the<a href="https://github.com/impress/impress.js"> impress.js </a>( a 3D presentation tool) as our RGSOC project with <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/148">Bartek</a> as its mentor ! :D . First few weeks we tried to digest the code and started playing around. When we started to code, it was more like learning. We really enjoyed what we did daily and the learning experience is beyond explanation. And of course our mentor and coaches guided us well. Currently we work on various demo and the most recent one is a Solar system demonstrated using impress.</p>
<p>What will we do next for the project?</p>
<p>The main challenge is to implement the sub steps and we need to work on the various issues in the current system. By analyzing the user preferences we are trying to modify the tool to make it more creative and useful. Also, the preview models are under consideration.</p>
<p>If we could code anything in the world, what would it be?</p>
<p>If we can end a war/disputes while running lines of codes, we would like to program such an algorithm and use it for the world peace :) . It may seem like an impossible task for any of you, but we would like to make it happen at least in our imaginary world</p>
<p>What are you most looking forward to this summer?</p>
<p>Since it’s not summer in our region, we would love to make use of this monsoon to code for our future via <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">RGSOC</a> 2015. We look forward for having more challenging bugs in our codes. Our team is grateful to have <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/148">Bartek</a> as mentor and we are thankful to have wonderful coaches like <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/36">Harisankar</a>, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/433">Manu</a> and of course can’t miss out our lovely supervisor <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/17">Katrin</a> :)</p>
<p>The magical equation behind our team is</p>
<p>Rain + Code + <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">RGSOC</a>= Creativity + Fun !!! :D :)</p>
Introducing Ruby Girls QuitoEvy and Sofihttp://twitter.com/zeroknowledge92015-08-01T00:00:00+00:002015-08-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Introducing-Ruby-Girls-Quito<p>Hello, everybody! (¡Hola a todos!)</p>
<p>We are <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/90">Evy and Sofi</a> from team
RubyGirlsQuito and, as you might have guessed, we are based in Quito, Ecuador. We are
working on Project LEAP Encryption Access Project – Webapp. We’re a group of two
passionate young students who, oddly, love to learn about
cryptography.
<br /><br /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing_quito.jpg" alt="Team Ruby Girls Quito" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Team Ruby Girls Quito! (Image: Ruby Girls Quito)</div>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p><strong>Who we are?</strong></p>
<p>Sofi: My passion for coding comes from a very young age. When I was 15, I started
learning html, javascript and MS-DOS, and, as you might have guessed, this was a
breath-taking experience. I also have a bachelor degree on classical music and I’m
currently working on my Literature thesis (about an argentinian writer –Jorge Luis Borges-
and a French philosopher –Jacques Derrida-). When it comes to coding, I love everything
that has to do with encryption (and that, among others, is the reason why I love working
with LEAP) and I have taken many courses in that area. Peculiarly, I’m also very fond of
philosophy, especially, philosophy of mathematics.</p>
<p>Evy: And me? I come from the dark side of the business -haha-. I´m a business Engineer and
I work as a University Professor (well, I´m starting and learning). Currently, I´m
involved in researching, but I want to work with projects on Technology Management: I love
innovative projects. So, as you can imagine, I didn´t know absolutely nothing about
programming until recent years when due to my permanent atraction to the technology world
-even though I always thought that it was too late for me to study something technical-
I started to get involved on that world. My story starts exactly one year ago: one day
there was the opportunity to work with a project about e-learning, but the thing is, I
didn´t understand about what they were talking (all about developing), so I was a little
bit frustrated. Suddenly this event called Rails Girls appeared and I went there and met
incredible girls (Sofi included :) ), ate a lot of delicious food -haha-, practiced and
understood code; and that’s how history begin! I started to love it and now I´m here with
all of you in this amazing RGSoC ;)</p>
<p><br />
<strong>How did we hear about RGSoC?</strong></p>
<p>Our long-time coach, Batman (yeah! that is his nick name –pretty awesome, uh?-), told us
about this program. He said that this was an exquisite experience and a way to meet
awe-inspiring people (of course, he was not wrong). We took his advice and experience has
proven itself not to be wrong. After all, how can an advice be fallacious if it comes from
our silent guardian, our watchful protector: the Dark Knight.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/batman.jpg" alt="Batman" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">yep, that's our coach! (Image: <a href="http://picong101.deviantart.com/" target="_blank">picong101</a>) </div>
<p><br />
<strong>Why did we apply to the program?</strong></p>
<p>We think that RGSoC is the epitome of what coding society is like. It is a group of
passionate people committed to create a better world where knowledge is shared in an
equal manner between everybody. It is a way of creating a world where one can freely
help each other… so why does someone wouldn’t love to be involved in it?</p>
<p><br />
<strong>What project are you working on?</strong></p>
<p>We will be working with LEAP Encryption Access Project. LEAP, which is a project devoted
to give all Internet users access to secure communication. We will dedicate our summer
to implementing bitcoin payments to the app (pretty splendid!). Of course, we chose LEAP
as it is a project working on security, encryption, and, on a theoric level, with
cryptography. So far, it has been an awesome experience (yesterday, for example, we
learnt about Salt or random data used in cryptography) and we have loved working with our
mentors, who we usually refer to as “crypto mentors” or “the suicide squad” (even though
they still don’t know their names and, yes, we love comic books!).</p>
<p><br />
<strong>What are our expectations for this summer of code?</strong></p>
<p>We have really high expectations but the principal, among others, is to learn how does
an app built in rails work. We also expect to meet awesome people and so far we have done
so (we even get in touch with an Erlang’s maniac, with a Homebrew’s contributor and with
lovely Team Tessie).</p>
<p><br />
<strong>If we could code anything in the world, what would it be?</strong></p>
<p>Sofi: Definitely, something about cryptography, implementing zero-knowledge proof seems
awesome to me. Also, I’ll love to create an app that somehow helps with building massive
online education systems, as in my country, many people doesn’t have the resources to
attend universities. That’ll be a <a href="http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/Good-Thing.html">Good Thing</a>.</p>
<p>Evy: Definitely I would like to code music, I love music!! And in fact, there is
people who do that… but I would like to learn it first.</p>
<p><br />
Follow us on @zeroknowledge9, @claucece and @evy_navarrete</p>
<p><br />
Quick advice for anybody that wants to start coding to do awesome things and think that
it is really difficult:</p>
<blockquote>“sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do
the things no one can imagine”
(Alan Turing)</blockquote>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/turing.jpeg" alt="Alan Turing" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Long life inspiration: Alan Turing (Image: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#/media/File:Alan_Turing_Aged_16.jpg" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a></div>
<p>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=<br />
LITTLE GAME<br />
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-</p>
<p>A little game for cryptography’ geeks - <a href="http://www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk/hidden-messages/hiddenmessage1">taken from The Science of Deduction by Sherlock Holmes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Dearest Sherlock</p>
<p>A Roman Emperor will help you work out what this means.</p>
<p>DSPCWZNV T LX HLENSTYR JZF</p>
<p>xx’</p>
</blockquote>
Introducing Team BinaryLina and Angelahttp://twitter.com/TeamBinaryRG2015-07-30T00:00:00+00:002015-07-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/IntroducingBinary<p>Hello! We are <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/62">Angela and Lina</a> from Barranquilla, Colombia. During our summer, we will be working on a Project which is called “Rubygems Adoption Center”. For this project we have an incredible team working with us. Our coaches are Sebastian Sogamoso and Alfonso Mancilla and our mentors Nick Quaranto and Benjamin Fleischer. Our supervisor Ramon Huidobro. They have been very helpful for our growth and progress throughout the project because every day we have feedbacks that help us to complete our tasks in the best way possible.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-binary.jpg" alt="Team Binary" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">The amazing people of Team Binary </div>
<p><strong>Why Team Binary?</strong></p>
<p>The name was chosen thinking about the binary system and its importance in the computer science. The system, although, is apparently easy for being composed of only two digits is able to process complex instructions. Even though, we are a trainee team, we are capable of performing complex tasks and move forward with this project.</p>
<p><strong>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply for it?</strong></p>
<p><em>Angela</em>: I started learning Ruby on my own one year ago influenced by a friend who is Rails evangelist. After I started with the basics and learned some Ruby microframeworks I decided to learn Rails. At that time I heard about Rails Girls workshop in my city so I decided to go and learn from them. I got a lot of knowledge and there I met Lina. Whom presently is my partner in this Project. In the workshop, Paola and Melissa, two participants of last SoC, talked about the Rails Girls Summer of Code. The following year I prepared myself and studied hard and this year I took the decision to apply to be part of this wonderful experience.<br />
<em>Lina</em>: My beginnings with Ruby was in the university. I started with Web development. In the class, I could learn the basics and got interested. Then, I decided to participate in the workshop that was organized in my city and a year later I had the opportunity to enroll in the SoC with Angela (whom I met in workhsop). I became interested to participate in SoC because I met and became quite close with a friend who was a participant in 2013 and told me about the program. I took this opportunity as the beginning of a new stage in my professional life and the opportunity to acquire new knowledge. Today I’m happy to be working on this project with an excellent workgroup</p>
<p><strong>What project are you working on?</strong></p>
<p>Our project was born from the need to maintain an updated gem and all those who are forgotten by an owner, unable to continue keeping it. The project is named “Rubygems Adoption Center”. It consists of an application in which an owner that can’t continue maintaining or updating a gem, then he will be able to publish it for adoption and receive applications from people who can take the gem, the owner may accept or decline these requests. It is a project of the Rubygems organization and we are very excited to work on it.</p>
<p><strong>What are you most looking forward for this summer?</strong></p>
<p><em>Angela</em>: Is hard to say only one goal, this is my first time working on a big and important project, making it exciting and of course, I would like to continue contributing. I want to absorb all the experience of my coaches and mentors, I have learned many new things, I feel very comfortable in this community because all the people I have met here is really friendly, RGSoC is a great family.<br />
<em>Lina</em>: Primarily keep learning. The opportunity to participate in this Project which I have seen always as the beginning of something new and great in my life, so I would like to follow this way, now I’m relying on my team, and later I want to implement projects that allow me to improve my skills and background.</p>
<p><em>Our team twitter account is <a href="http://twitter.com/TeamBinaryRG">@TeamBinaryRG</a>.<br />
Follow us too in our <a href="http://teambinaryrg.tumblr.com/">blog</a>.</em></p>
Introducing ExercistasMixolidia & Sarahhttp://twitter.com/exercistas2015-07-29T00:00:00+00:002015-07-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Introducing-Exercistas<p>##Introducing Exercistas!
<img src="/img/blog/2015/exercistas_with_mentor_and_coaches.png" alt="exercistas with mentor and NIRD coaches" title="exercistas with mentor and NIRD coaches" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Image: Team Exercistas)</div>
<p>###Who are we?
<strong>Sarah</strong>: I am a biologist turned bioinformatician turned developer. I studied marine biology (<a href="http://people.oregonstate.edu/~meyere/res.html/" title="Integrative Biology | Meyer Lab">coral reefs genomics</a>) in college and grad school, and eventually decided that computers were more fun than endless nights in the lab. I am the organizer for Geek Girls Carrots Seattle and run a free project-based programming workshop for women, called Code Carrots. I’m originally from France, lived in Texas for a while, and am currently enjoying life in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Recently, I have been learning to make my own cheese. The way to my heart is through puns, Star Trek quotes, and facts about obscure invertebrates.</p>
<p><strong>Mixolidia</strong>: Miami transplant to Seattle, move to Seattle to become full-stack developer. I have a Bachelor in Fine Arts Photography. I’ve also worked in fundraising for the arts and community based organizations. Before deciding to become a developer, I worked in marketing and advertising. Software Development brings together the two things I love to do: problem-solving and making things.</p>
<p>###What project are you working on?
We are working on <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a> (<a href="https://github.com/exercism">Github</a>), a platform for crowd-sourced coding mentorship. Our mentor is <a href="https://github.com/kytrinyx/" title="Katrina Owen's Github Account">Katrina Owen</a>, <a href="http://www.kytrinyx.com/" title="Katrina Owen's Website">kytrinyx.com</a> . Our main goal for Rails Girls Summer of Code is to streamline the exercism.io onboarding process. We are making help and information pages on exercism.io. These pages will inform users of the available languages on exercism.io and how to access them.</p>
<p>###What have we achieved so far?
We’ve implemented a drop-down menu on <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a>’s home page. This drop-down menu lists all the languages available on <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a> and links to their corresponding help pages. This was a very interesting process. Our first week, we had to dive in, head first into <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a>’s code base. We learned how to make our logic work with the existing code. We learned about <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a>’s various APIs, how to use them to create the drop-down menu and link to each of the language’s help page. The new languages drop-down menu is dynamic. Meaning as <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a> adds more languages, they will automatically appear on the languages menu.</p>
<p>###What will we do next for the project?
We are currently working on two things: a detailed roadmap of the on-boarding process and language information pages for each language. For the road map, we are working through the steps a new user would take to start using <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a>. With this exercise, we hope to find what will work best for users. For the information pages, we are again working with <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a>’s APIs to dynamically create the information pages from the APIs.</p>
<p>###If we could code anything in the world, what would it be?
<strong>Sarah</strong>: An easy-to-use collaborative lab notebook platform for scientists, with functions like data import/export, data visualization widgets in R, maps, and sample and protocol tracking.</p>
<p><strong>Mixolidia</strong>: An app that visually interprets sign language to sound for those who don’t understand sign language. This app would make conversations between sign language users and non-users more organic.</p>
<p>###What are you most looking forward to this summer?
<strong>Sarah</strong>: Getting experience working on a live project with a team, dealing with existing code, and the freedom/limitations of open source.</p>
<p><strong>Mixolidia</strong>: Completing the goals we’ve set for <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a> this summer. Working with the open-source contributors supporting <a href="http://exercism.io/">exercism.io</a> and the Rails Girls Help Desk has been amazing. I think I’ve already achieved some of my goals which are to understand the open-source community better and learn how to contribute. Work with a live app that has checks and balances (<a href="https://travis-ci.org/">Travis</a>!) Learn how to take features from ideas to being live on an app or website.</p>
<p>We’re also looking forward to attending conferences. Rails Girls Summer of Code is helping, by giving us tickets to <a href="http://madisonpl.us/ruby/">Madison+ Ruby</a>! But we still need help with travel and accommodations. If you would be so kind to visit our <a href="http://www.gofundme.com/exercistas">GoFundMe</a> campaign, we’d really appreciate it. Every bit counts. Sharing is caring, so please share it with your friends. Thanks!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/exercistas_first_day.jpg" alt="exercistas with mentor and NIRD coaches" title="exercistas first day at NIRD" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">(Image: Team Exercistas) </div>
<p>Follow us on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/exercistas">@exercistas</a>.<br />
Read our <a href="https://exercistas.wordpress.com/">blog</a> on WordPress.</p>
Conference Raffle ResultsLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-07-28T00:00:00+00:002015-07-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/raffle-results<p>Last week, you sent us your conference wishlists via twitter, and the Conference Raffle Fairy Godmothers (Anika, Katrin, Sara and yours truly) sat down to – in true conference raffle fashion – pull out your team names from a jar and assign conferences to teams. This is what it looked like!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/raffle-results-laura.gif" alt="laura raffle" class="smaller" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: Anika Lindtner)</div>
<p><br />
<img src="/img/blog/2015/raffle-results-sara.gif" alt="sara raffle" class="smaller" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: Anika Lindtner)</div>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/raffle-results-sarakatrin.png" alt="sara katrin raffle" class="smaller" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> (Image: Anika Lindtner)</div>
<p>But enough suspense – here are the winners of our first conference raffle for the summer:</p>
<p>eurucamp (31 Jul–2 Aug): Alster Hamburgers<br />
OTSConf (15-16 Aug): Cheesy<br />
Madison Ruby (21-22 Aug): Exercistas<br />
Baruco (1-5 Sept): GirlsCodersWarsaw<br />
The StrangeLoop (24-26 Sept): CocoaGems<br />
EuRuKo (17-18 Oct): Delta Quadrant<br />
EuRuKo (17-18 Oct): Alpha Ruby<br />
Øredev (3-6 Nov): Rubyherzlein<br />
GoTo (3-4 Dec): Techylite<br />
dotJS (7 Dec): RGEnthusiasts</p>
<h3 id="congratulations">Congratulations!</h3>
<p>It’s now time to get booking your flights and accommodation and to get ready to have the time of your life at these amazing conferences. We have some tips on <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conference-tips/">how to rock that conference</a> plus <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/talk/">tips</a> and <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-07-29-talk-tips/">tricks</a> for those who will be giving lightning talks! We will of course introduce all students to the conference organisers, but should you want to meet some people from the local Rails Girls community, let us know! We’ll try our best to connect you.</p>
<p>And if you ended up empty-handed, worry not! We will have a second raffle in August with more conferences. On this note, we’d like to thank again all of the conferences who offered tickets for our first round conference raffle:</p>
<p>♥ <a href="http://2015.eurucamp.org/">eurucamp</a> ♥ <a href="http://2015.jrubyconf.eu/">JRubyConf</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.deccanrubyconf.org/">Deccan RubyConf</a> ♥ <a href="https://otsconf.com/">OTSConf</a> ♥ <a href="http://madisonpl.us/ruby/">Madison Ruby Conference</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.fullstackfest.com/">Barcelona Ruby Conf</a> ♥ <a href="http://rejectjs.org/">Reject JS</a> ♥ <a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/">The Strange Loop</a> ♥ <a href="http://railsclub.ru/">RailsClub</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.euruko2015.org/">EuRuKo</a> ♥ <a href="http://oredev.org/">Øredev</a> ♥ <a href="http://gotocon.com/berlin-2015/">GoTo Conference</a> ♥ <a href="http://www.dotjs.io/">dotJS</a> ♥</p>
Introducing Team CodeBendersJayasi and Meghahttp://twitter.com/teamcodebenders2015-07-28T00:00:00+00:002015-07-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-team-codebenders<p>We are <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/469">Jayasi</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/26">Megha</a>, a.k.a. <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/54">Team CodeBenders</a>. We have started our Summer of Code in Delhi, India with our coaches <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/306">Kashyp</a>, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/144">Bharti</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/247">Shobhit</a>, mentor <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/111">Erik</a> and supervisor <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/474">Benedikt</a>.
We are Computer Science students from <a href="http://www.iiitd.ac.in/">IIIT-Delhi</a>. Jayasi graduated this year and is currently working. Megha is now a senior and is excited to start her last year as an undergrad.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-codebenders.jpg" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Our amazing team! <3 (Image: Team CodeBenders)</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong>Why ‘CodeBenders’? What does the name mean?</strong><br />
The word bender means person/object that bends something. We were going to bend a lot of code this summer, hence the name CodeBenders. According to another meaning of the word ‘bender’, CodeBender also refers to a coding spree. We fell in love with that name as soon as it came up in one of our discussions!</p>
<p><strong>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</strong><br />
When we heard about the program via Twitter, we loved the concept and how it welcomes beginners to the open source world. In the overwhelming list of projects, we came across some frameworks and gems which we use. The prospect of contributing to one of those projects was absolutely riveting. The team behind RGSoC is magnificent and inspiring. We saw RGSoC as the perfect platform to begin our open source journey.</p>
<p><strong>What are you working on?</strong><br />
We are working on the <a href="https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin">RailsAdmin</a> project. RailsAdmin is a rails engine which provides a user-friendly interface for managing data. Having used RailsAdmin in a few of our projects and thoroughly going through the code, we have realised the power it provides to easily interact with the application data. After talking to a few people and discussing with our mentor we came up with a list of problems which users face, and we are trying to make valuable additions to the project by solving some of these problems.</p>
<p><strong>What is your happiest moment so far?</strong><br />
Everytime we get something to work, or fix a broken piece of code, it makes our day. Interacting with our coaches and learning from them on a daily basis is turning out to be a great experience.</p>
<p><strong>If you could code anything in the world, what would it be?</strong><br />
-Jayasi: Delhi is so famous for it’s traffic and it takes me an hour and a half to travel back and forth from work. If I could, I’d code to build a teleportation machine. One second you’re at home, and the next you reach anywhere you want to! ^.^ Imagine the amount of time that can be saved, and oh, oh .. I could see Florence, and Belgium and Ireland! Yes, a teleportation machine, definitely! B| Maybe that can even take me to Mars…<br />
-Megha: We know 42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, which was first calculated by the supercomputer Deep Thought after seven and a half million years of thought. This shocking answer resulted in the construction of an even larger supercomputer, named Earth, which has been tasked to resolve the mystery. I would want my code to solve this mystery! :D</p>
Meet Team DEIGirlsRosa & Inêshttp://twitter.com/teamdeigirls2015-07-26T00:00:00+00:002015-07-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/meet-team-deigirls<h3 id="introducing-team-cookiemonster-err-i-mean-team-deigirls">Introducing team CookieMonster… err, I mean, team DEIGirls</h3>
<h3 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h3>
<p>Hello world! We are Inês and Rosa, two crazy girls from <a href="http://worldheritage.uc.pt/">Coimbra</a>, Portugal.<br />
Together with Christian Weyer, Pablo Porto and Tiago Mendes-Costa (our beloved coaches) we make the <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/66">team DEIGirls</a>, under the supervising of Alex Williams!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-teamDEIGirls-team.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> The elements of Team DEIGirls (Image: Team DEIGirls)</div>
<h4 id="rosa">Rosa:</h4>
<p>I’m the craziest and cookie-addicted 27-year-old girl who has a Master’s Degree in some other engineering stuff that decided that programming was her thing.<br />
I learned programming in my previous degree and was fascinated. When I finished it I wasn’t satisfied so I enrolled in Computer Science, in the University of Coimbra. That’s where I re-met Inês (we had crossed paths before but never actually talked, isn’t the world a crazy place?). I looooove my dog <a href="http://i.imgur.com/yCRZ2dj.jpg">Nancy</a> (she’s the love of my life) and dancing (someone told me I’m amazingly light for my sturdy build hehehe).</p>
<h4 id="ins">Inês:</h4>
<p>I’m the calmer one, the centerpiece of this team… who am I kidding, I am as crazy as Rosa!<br />
So, I’m currently doing the Master’s Degree in Software Engineering, at the University of Coimbra. Before that, I studied Biochemistry and performed scientific research in toxicology and neuroscience. But that was not the life for me, so here I am, turned into a programmer ;) I’m also involved with the Girls community in Coimbra: I organize <a href="http://www.girlsleanin.com/">Girls Lean In</a> events, regular meetups were we invite powerful women from our community to talk about their experience in order to empower others and inspire them to pursue their goals, and I take part in IEEE Women in Engineering group at Coimbra. My long-time flatmate is a <a href="http://i.imgur.com/pfR5o3m.jpg">Cookie</a>. Don’t worry, I keep Rosa away from him.</p>
<h3 id="how-did-you-two-meet">How did you two meet?</h3>
<p>Actually Coimbra is a small city so we kind of bumped into each other a lot before we really talked. Our first conversation was in a washing room at the Department of Informatics Engineering where we both studied. Althought the department is a crowded place, there are not that many girls around so when we met in the washing room we were both like “wow, this is the first time I’ve ever seen another girl in the washing room in this building.” And that was the beginning of a great friendship!</p>
<h3 id="how-did-you-hear-about-rgsoc">How did you hear about RGSoC?</h3>
<p>I (Inês) learned about the RGSoC when I participated in a Rails Girls event at Braga where Erik Michaels-Ober and Duana Stanley from SoundCloud did a talk about their involvement in the program. When I found out that the applications for this summer edition were open, I contacted Rosa and made her an offer that she could not refuse! A few hours later we were together in a cafe, contacting the Rails community and starting our application.</p>
<h3 id="why-team-deigirls">Why team DEIGirls?</h3>
<p>Because we study in the Department of Informatics Engineering (in Portuguese, Departamento de Engenharia Informática - DEI) and we are girls (surprise!). Simple as that!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-teamDEIGirls-girls.jpg" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">The girls from Team DEIGirls (Image: Team DEIGirls) </div>
<h3 id="what-project-are-you-working-on">What project are you working on?</h3>
<p>We are working on <a href="http://lotusrb.org/">Lotus</a>, a web framework for Ruby. We will be doing the mailer gem for that project, guided by our mentors Luca Guidi and Trung Lê.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-this-summer">What are you most looking forward to this summer?</h3>
<p>Learning a lot and contributing to an open source project, while having an immense amount of fun. And eat cookies!</p>
Introducing Team The TremorsNelly and Mercyhttp://twitter.com/teamtremors2015-07-25T00:00:00+00:002015-07-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Introducing-Team-TheTremors<p>##Introducing Team The Tremors</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/Introducing-Team-The-Tremors-students.png" alt="Nelly and Mercy" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Mercy and Nelly (Image: Nelly Kiboi) </div>
<p>Hi guys, we are Nelly and Mercy from Nairobi, Kenya. We are working on the RapidFTR project. We are supported by three coaches here at Nairobi; Paul Bombo, Hungai Kevin and Diana Wanjuhi. Paul and Hungai school with us and they are amazing developers. Diana is a software engineer at Maramoja transport. We also work with our mentors, Sri Prasanna from India and Anne Mwangi from Uganda, who are the engineers and developers behind RapidFTR. All these people are wonderful :-)</p>
<h4 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h4>
<p>We are two young women who have a different background but have a common interest in programming.</p>
<p><strong>Nelly</strong>:<br />
Jambo!!(Hello)<br />
I’m Nelly the older one :-) , I am currently doing my MSc in Information Technology at United States International University- Africa and I am a professional software developer (I create android apps). I am also the Google Developer Groups lead for United States International University-Africa.<br />
When I joined the tech world, it was out of passion and love for technology, and how it can transform lives. I had not yet done programming before in my life. but when I encountered it in my undergraduate class, I knew that was what I wanted to do all my life. I am currently learning Ruby on Rails and it’s awesome working as a team for a common goal to change people’s lives.</p>
<p><strong>Mercy</strong>:<br />
Hi, Mercy here. I am currently studying Applied Computer Technology in United States International University- Africa. My area of interest is in Information Security and Mathematics. I like to program but coding has not always been easy for me. I have been learning html5, css3 and programming languages like C++, Python and Java. I am learning Ruby on Rails at the moment and the experience is amazing.</p>
<h4 id="why-the-name-team-the-tremors">Why the name “Team The Tremors”?</h4>
<p>We choose the name Tremors because we want to cause a disruption. We intend to disrupt the norm and do something new, exciting and breaking barriers.</p>
<h4 id="how-did-you-hear-about-the-rgsoc-and-why-did-you-apply">How did you hear about the RGSoC and why did you apply?</h4>
<p>We had a hackathon event that happened on March 14th 2015 in the University. It was during the event that one of our friends, Hungai (also our coach) mentioned to us about it.<br />
We thought it would be great to participate in RGSoC and also work on a real open source project. By this, we would not only learn and grow but also encourage and motivate other upcoming programmers.</p>
<h4 id="what-are-we-working-on">What are we working on?</h4>
<p>We are working on the RapidFTR project. RapidFTR is an android and web-based application that assists in gathering and sharing of information about children in emergency situations so that they can be reunited with their families. This open source project has been developed for a long time.</p>
<p>We will be implementing the following issues:<br />
Mark a child as “Not Matching” a potentially matched enquiry<br />
Separate highlighted fields for web from mobile<br />
Display ‘no potential matches found’ message</p>
<p>We chose this project because we are familiar with the emergency situations like terror attacks, refugees and displaced persons. Losing a loved one is a painful experience but this application helps in reuniting people in such situations.<br />
We also want to learn the most about Ruby and Rails.</p>
<h4 id="what-are-you-looking-forward-to-this-summer">What are you looking forward to this summer?</h4>
<p>We want to learn as much as possible and improve our programming skills and move to a higher level with our programming experience.<br />
We thank our Mentors: Sri and Anne, Coaches: Paul, Hungai and Diana, Supervisor: Cathy for their positive support. Not forgetting the RGSoC Team.</p>
<p>Follow us on twitter @teamtremors<br />
Thank you RGSoC Community</p>
Rubyherzlein <3Nynne and Franzihttp://twitter.com/RubyherzleinRG2015-07-23T00:00:00+00:002015-07-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rubyherzlein<h2 id="who-we-are">Who we are</h2>
<p>Hi, we are the Rubyherzlein Team! We are working out of the SoundCloud office in Berlin, and our summer project is called SoundDrop. Our team consists of Franzi from Hamburg and Nynne from Copenhagen.</p>
<h2 id="why-rubyherzlein">Why Rubyherzlein</h2>
<p>While deciding on a name, we talked about how the Rails Girls Society is so full of hearts! Its the logo for most events and also quite often used as an emoji within the RGSoC community. As we are beginners, we thought of calling ourselves Rubyherzlein, which in German means ‘little Ruby heart’! <3<3<3</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein.JPG" alt="Team Rubyherzlein" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">Rubyherzlein Team + extended Team: Erik, Duana, Hannes (Image: Rubyherzlein Team) </div>
<h2 id="how-we-met">How we met</h2>
<p>We both live in Berlin and have attended multiple RG events, but nonetheless never bumped into one another. We got to know each other via the internet - like real programmers ;) Tweeting and sharing on twitter led to a coffee in a cute café in Berlin-Mitte. We really hit it off - it was like love at first sight! Shortly thereafter we were on track with our application, with much help from our coach, Erik, and mentors, Duana and Tam.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/rubyherzlein_team.jpg" alt="Team Rubyherzlein" width="600" /></p>
<div class="image-credits"> Rubyherzlein - on our 1st Day (Image: Rubyherzlein Team)</div>
<h2 id="how-we-heard-of-rgsoc">How we heard of RGSOC</h2>
<p>Nynne: I learned about RGSoC through the grapevine. When I started learning to program, the Rails Girls society was one of the first communities I heard about. I immediately knew I wanted the RGSoC experience! I learned about the program last summer, and was first super bummed out that it was way too late to apply. But then I decided to do everything I could to prepare for this years’ application and I’m so happy I made it!<br />
Franzi: I heard about RGSoC the first time on a Rails Girls meetup last winter. Learning about Rails Girls was a big coincidence. During lunch with a friend someone at the other table talked about it. As I had been looking for a community like this for some time, I signed up for the next RG workshop immediately.</p>
<h2 id="which-project-we-are-working-on">Which project we are working on</h2>
<p>We work on the SoundDrop Project. It was submitted by Duana, who is now our mentor at Soundcloud. Two years ago another RailsGirls Team worked on it. At that time it was an app which linked QR - Codes to audio files. In the Soundcloud office it was used to have funny little stories linked to coffee machines (marked with an QR Code). We will continue their work and transform the app into a mobile map where places are linked to audio files using geo-tagging! By the end of the summer, you’ll be able to ‘drop’ sound (SoundCloud-hosted audio files) anywhere in a landscape and anyone using the SoundDrop app can find it there when they go to the physical locality. This can be used for creating guided tours (city guides!) and for making audio exhibitions. The app will also be used as a mobile app for Soundcloud employees, who will be encouraged to link their most favorite spot in Berlin to a Soundcloud song.</p>
<h2 id="our-goal-for-the-summer">Our goal for the summer</h2>
<p>First and foremost we want to learn as much as possible! We want the SoundDrop app to get to a point where we can invite people to use it, and we want to continue to build our network within this awesome open source community.</p>
<p>Learning to program as a beginner can feel a bit overwhelming at times. The biggest goal is that we actually improve so we handle the workload with ease and are able to grasp even more input. We’d like to evolve to a level where we are comfortable seeking out solutions to problems and are able to clear the roadblocks that are inevitably a part of being a programmer.</p>
<h2 id="our-happiest-moment-so-far">Our happiest moment so far</h2>
<p>Every morning when we enter the office, get a big glass of orange juice and start the day with Erik’s awesome coaching session! Honestly its hard to single out specific moments. There are so many good ones! So far we are really enjoying the summer, and are super happy to be learning in this incredibly supportive community.</p>
<h2 id="if-we-could-code-anything-in-the-world">If we could code anything in the world</h2>
<p>Franzi: I would build an app which makes people smile.<br />
Nynne: If I could make anything in the would, I’d like to build a huge platform with images and data on all the works of art in all the museums in the world! Yes I know, I’m a huge art history nerd…</p>
<p>follow us –> <a href="http://rubyherzlein.github.io/">Rubyherzlein Blog</a></p>
Teams of 2015Anikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-07-23T00:00:00+00:002015-07-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/meet-the-teams<p>Since July 1st our teams already wrote 320 <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">log entries</a>, spent more than 128 hours coding and are contributing to Open Source projects like Speakerinnen, Lotus, Ruby, Discourse, CocoaPods, Exercism <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams">and many more</a> - and this is only the beginning of the summer!</p>
<p>It’s been now 22 days since Rails Girls Summer of Code officially started and here are the students of 20 teams saying “hello world” from across the globe. Say hello to our teams from Melbourne, Sofia, Coimbra, Seattle, Berlin, Nairobi.. to name only a few.</p>
<p><a href="/img/blog/2015/all-teams.jpg"><img src="/img/blog/2015/all-teams-small.jpg" alt="RGSoC 2015 Teams" /></a></p>
<p>Thanks to everybody who made this happen; to all our sponsors, private donors, and <a href="/about/team">everyone</a> who is helping to build this program; to coaches, mentors, coaching companies, supervisors, organizers, designers, helpdesk coaches and friends. All in all, we are now over 140 people contributing to the program and we couldn’t be happier to have so many helping hands. Welcome the RGSoC teams of 2015 who are changing the world of Open Source day after day: Greet them, read their <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">daily logs</a> and follow their Twitter streams, which you can find via our <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/lists/rgsoc-2015-teams">public twitter list</a>.</p>
<p>Here is to a wonderful Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015!</p>
Hello we are CocoaGemsKarla and Emmahttp://twitter.com/cocoagems2015-07-22T00:00:00+00:002015-07-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/hello-we-are-cocoagems<h3 id="an-introduction-who-we-are">An introduction. Who we are.</h3>
<p>We are Karla and Emma, a Californian and a Swede. Together with our mentors from <a href="https://cocoapods.org/">Cocoapods</a>, Orta Therox, Samuel Giddens, Kyle Fuller, and our coaches from <a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a>, Rachel Myers, Rob Rix, Ross McFarland, Jesse Toth, Jake Boxer, and our private coaches Nevyn Bengtsson and Sean Mackesey we make up the team CocoaGems.</p>
<p>Karla and Emma met at various workshops, meetups and study groups in San Francisco this year to discover they were on a similar mission: learning to code.</p>
<p>Emma: After finishing my bachelor degree in social science focusing on digital and interactive media in 2009 I have been working with media production and IT. I was engaged in <a href="http://geekgirlmeetup.com/">GeekGirlMeetup</a> in Sweden at the time and did <a href="http://video.geekgirlmeetup.com/">live streaming</a> of events where nerdy, fun and talented woman talked about code and startup related subjects. I also worked at the Stockholm University with media production, IT support and management. In the beginning of this year me and my husband moved to San Francisco. I took a leave of absence from my work I decided to pick up on learning how to code. I did an online course in Python and got really hooked. I’ve been interested in what technology can do for us as human beings for quite some time now. It feels really empowering to extend that interest by learning to code and being able to build applications that people can use.</p>
<p>Karla: Since graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology in 2013 I worked a variety of jobs including working as a geographical researcher for Nokia Maps, tutoring and working in the Organic beverage channel. After my move to Berkeley in August 2013, I enrolled in a Computer Networking and Information Technology class at City College of San Francisco and a few months later I began working for Instacart a startup that provides on demand grocery services. While delivering groceries to offices in San Francisco I was introduced to many innovative products made possible with mobile software. During my time at Instacart I enjoyed pointing out bugs and doing small write ups for issues that I encountered. At several company gatherings I found myself talking to the engineers and asking them about the languages they used and about version releases and features that could improve the app. These conversations in addition to attending Women 2.0, Quantified Self and Women in Science and Engineering meetings at my UC fueled my desire to take my social science skills and combine them with a new set of technical skills to build products with the potential of improving people’s lives. I decided to try out some Ruby tutorials on Code Academy and soon after found myself hooked on Python tutorials. Half an hour long stints turned into 3 hour long sessions after work. To further grow my skills I attended my first Girl Develop It workshop - which was an Intro to HTML and CSS workshop led by Pamela Fox at the Mozilla back in February. That first workshop led me to enroll in a JavaScript series and soon after I also began attending tri-weekly study groups and meetups.</p>
<h3 id="why-team-cocoagems-what-does-it-mean">Why “Team CocoaGems”, what does it mean?</h3>
<p>CocoaGems is a combination of the words Cocoa and Gems. Since we are working on CocoaPods, which is written in Ruby and built by a collection of Gems we wanted to combine those two words into one to describe our project.</p>
<h3 id="how-did-you-hear-about-the-soc-and-why-did-you-apply">How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</h3>
<p>Emma: I met Karla at various meetups, workshops and study groups in San Francisco where I had moved beginning this year. I had decided to apply to a developer boot camp to transfer my career and was preparing my applications. A friend of my husband who is also learning to code told me about Rails Girls Summer of Code. It sounded really cool to be able to work on an Open Source project while learning to code and on top of that receive a scholarship to cover living costs while doing so. Almost too good to be true. The only concerned was that it was only two weeks to due date. I asked Karla if she wanted to apply with me as a team and off we went to read up on the suggested Open Source projects, reaching out to mentors, coaches and companies that would be willing to work with us. We had a blast and finished our application at the very last minute.</p>
<p>Karla: The first time I came across Rails Girls Summer of Code was back in late February 2015. I was sitting out on my deck at night and looking for more coding resources. Rails Girls Summer of Code came up when I was looking for additional Ruby Tutorials. It looked like an amazing program! I looked at the site wishfully. Fast-forward to April 2015 – nearly two months after coming across the site – I walk into Haus Cafe in the Mission to meet up with my programming study buddy Emma Koszinowski and she asked me if I was interested in applying to Rails Girls Summer of Code together. Without hesitation I accepted.
I decided to apply because I figured that regardless of the outcome – applying would be a great learning experience. I had no idea what the odds of getting in would be but I knew that the only way to find out was to try. There is an endless list and reasons as to why I decided to apply. Mainly I love the idea of learning more about open source and reaching out to potential project mentors to learn about their projects. Reading through their project proposals allowed us to learn a ton just by trying to figure out what each project was about. Our learning speed accelerated before being admitted to RGSoC by the mere act of applying. And that is precisely why I would encourage everyone who is interested in growing their skills through mentorship and Open Source contribution to apply.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CocoaGemsCoaches.jpg" alt="Team CocoaGems" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i> Credit to all of our coaches!! Upper from is left Nevyn Bengtsson, Rob Rix, Sean Mackesey, Middle from left Jesse Toth, Bottom left Jake Boxer, In the bigger picture from left Rachel Myers, Emma Koszinowski, Karla Sandoval and Ross McFarland (Image: all github avatars. The bigger picture by <a href="https://twitter.com/mtodd">Matt Todd</a>)</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="what-project-are-you-working-on">What project are you working on?</h3>
<p>We are working on <a href="https://guides.cocoapods.org/">CocoaPods</a>, a dependency manager for iOS development. Cocoa is apple’s native object-oriented API for making applications for OS X. Pods are third party libraries that can be used in an Xcode project for making iOS and Mac applications. Before CocoaPods existed, these libraries had to be installed and maintained manually. CocoaPods enables an automated way to install and keep Pods up to date. <a href="http://cocoapods.org/summer-of-code-2015">Our project aim</a> is to make CocoaPods more modular by moving modules out of the main CocoaPods project into plugins so that they are easier to change without affecting the rest of the CocoaPods project.</p>
<p>Karla: Currently I am working with Samuel Giddins one of our CocoaPods coaches on a repo called Cork. We are extracting banner and text wrapper from CLAide and creating a new gem to better architect the code and add better tests. Later this summer we are working on CocoaPods issue 2279 to take the CocoaPods project and parse it into a collection of gems organized by functionality.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/CocoaGemsMentors.jpg" alt="Team CocoaGems" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i> Credit to all our mentors!! Upper left Orta Therox, Karla Sandoval and Emma Koszinowski. Down from left, Samuel Giddens, Boris Bügling and Kyle Fuller.</i></small></font></p>
<h3 id="what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-this-summer">What are you most looking forward to this summer?</h3>
<p>Emma: It’s hard to pick one thing. It so much fun to get to know the CocoaPods members and our coaches at GitHub. This is also my first time working on a larger code base, which is really exciting. This project really enable us to get the best out of both the Ruby and iOS community.</p>
<p>Karla: I am looking forward to contributing to CocoaPods and getting to know our CocoaPods and Github coaches and mentors better.Developing my programming skills in Ruby and Swift is also at the top of my list as is developing making some progress on the Audio BookMark Tool project -Panel Power. Some other equally important qualities I look forward to developing during RGSoC include learning how to work effectively as a team by practicing SCRUM and test driven development.</p>
Conference-raffle time!Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-07-21T00:00:00+00:002015-07-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conferences<p>We are three weeks into the program and it’s that time of the summer again for.. Yes, you’ve guessed it: our first conference raffle!</p>
<p>As in the last <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conference/">two</a> <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-06-09-conference-tickets/">years</a>, some pretty wonderful conferences have donated free team tickets for you, dear RGSoC students. Attending conferences is one of our favourite things about the field we work in: we just love the conference vibe, meeting new people (and old friends), and sipping coffee while learning tons about Ruby, web development, and the newest tools out there. We think this is one of the most <a href="http://rapidrailsgirls.weebly.com/home/baruco">valuable experiences</a> for newcomers – and we want our students to witness that exhilarating conference vibe, too!</p>
<p><img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzB2OFAIcAAz8Hw.jpg" alt="CodePadawans" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Last year’s RGSoC team CodePadawans at Arrrrcamp (Image: <a href="https://twitter.com/langziehohr/status/518043950679347201" target="_blank">Anika Lindtner</a>)</i></small></font></p>
<h4 id="our-selected-conferences">Our selected conferences</h4>
<p>As of now, we have over 30 tickets to give away for 13 conferences located all around the world. We are incredibly grateful to these conferences and their amazing organisers, who put a lot of effort and hard work into making these events happen and into making them accessible to everyone. We’re glad to have them support us in promoting diversity in tech, and they deserve all the love in the world <3</p>
<p>Thank you to:</p>
<p><a href="http://2015.eurucamp.org/">eurucamp</a><br />
Potsdam, Germany<br />
31 Jul 15 - 02 Aug 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://2015.jrubyconf.eu/">JRubyConf</a><br />
Potsdam, Germany<br />
31 Jul 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://www.deccanrubyconf.org/">Deccan RubyConf</a><br />
Pune, India<br />
08 Aug 15<br />
4 tickets</p>
<p><a href="https://otsconf.com/">OTSConf</a><br />
Dortmund, Germany<br />
15 Aug 15 - 16 Aug 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://madisonpl.us/ruby/">Madison Ruby Conference</a><br />
Madison, WI, USA<br />
21 Aug 15 - 22 Aug 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://www.fullstackfest.com/">Barcelona Ruby Conf</a><br />
Barcelona, Spain<br />
01 Sep 15 - 05 Sep 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://rejectjs.org/">Reject JS</a><br />
Berlin, Germany<br />
24 Sep 15<br />
6 tickets</p>
<p><a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/">The Strange Loop</a><br />
St. Louis, MO, USA<br />
24 Sep 15 - 26 Sep 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://railsclub.ru/">RailsClub</a><br />
Moscow, Russia<br />
26 Sep 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://www.euruko2015.org/">EuRuKo</a><br />
Salzburg, Austria<br />
17 Oct 15 - 18 Oct 15<br />
4 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://oredev.org/">Øredev</a><br />
Malmø, Sweden<br />
03 Nov 15 - 06 Nov 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://gotocon.com/berlin-2015/">GoTo Conference</a><br />
Berlin, Germany<br />
03 Dec 15 - 04 Dec 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://www.dotjs.io/">dotJS</a><br />
Paris, France<br />
07 Dec 15<br />
2 tickets</p>
<p>We’ll announce the winners of the conference raffle later this week. We are still talking to more conference organisers, so if you don’t get a ticket for this first raffle, don’t worry! We will be doing a second one next month with the remaining conferences. Hooray!</p>
<p><em>Are you an organizer of a Rails, Ruby, JavaScript or web development-related conference – and would you like to give our students an unforgettable experience and join the list of awesome conferences above? Let’s talk!<br />
Shoot us an email: contact@rgsoc.org</em></p>
Introducing Team Alster HamburgersAnke and Ayahttp://twitter.com/alsterburgers2015-07-20T00:00:00+00:002015-07-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-team-alster-hamburgers<h2 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h2>
<p>Hello, we are <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/472">Aya</a> and <a href="http://www.twitter.com/ankonym">Anke</a> and together with our awesome coaches and mentors at <a href="http://www.thoughtworks.com">ThoughtWorks</a>, we’re <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/52">Team Alster Hamburgers</a>. As you can guess from our team name, we’re based in Hamburg, Germany.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/team-alsterhamburgers.jpg" alt="Team Alster Hamburgers" width="600" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>The students: Aya & Anke (Image: Anke)</i></small></font></p>
<p><em>Aya</em>: Hi, I’m 19 years old and I’m studying Computer Science and Economy in Nuremberg at the moment. I’ll be living in Hamburg during the Summer of Code though - pretty exciting to live in a new city and get to know so many people! I’ve been learning a few programming languages like Java and C for a year now but it’s all still very new to me, so I’d still consider myself a noob when it comes to programming!</p>
<p><em>Anke</em>: While my university degree wouldn’t suggest it (I once studied cultural science and wrote my thesis on witch persecutions), I’ve always been interested in more technical jobs. I remember how a university class on the internet’s cultural impact first got me interested in HTML (the internet was still shiny and new back then!), and I built my first website in Pico, a not-so-comfortable text editor under Unix. After university, I worked as a technical editor, in tech support and as a product owner. I started to feel more and more coding envy while working with programmers, so I decided to do something about that and started studying in my free time. I’m also still very much a beginner but really excited to learn more over the course of the summer! When not near a computer, you often find me behind a camera or a sewing machine.</p>
<h2 id="why-alster-hamburgers-what-does-it-mean">Why “Alster Hamburgers”, what does it mean?</h2>
<p>The Alster is a nice big lake in the middle of Hamburg - not far from the ThoughtWorks office and perfect for relaxing after a long day of coding when Hamburg doesn’t shower us with the rain that it is famous for. Maybe while eating a well-deserved tasty hamburger, too! :hamburger:</p>
<h2 id="how-did-you-hear-about-the-soc-and-why-did-you-apply">How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</h2>
<p><em>Anke</em>: I attended a Rails Girls workshop in 2012 in Cologne and got really curious about learning more. I continued studying by myself and followed the Rails Girls news - the Summer of Code always sounded really awesome but it was only this year that everything fell into place: I was able to take the summer off, met another interested Rails Girl at the Hamburg meetup, and we quickly found our coaches at ThoughtWorks who were just as excited to help a RGSoC team for the summer as we were about getting involved. Yay! But that would have been almost too easy, and my first teammate suddenly changed her mind and dropped out right before the deadline. Oh no! Was this the end to my SoC dream? But thanks to the magical powers of the internet (in this case, Facebook and Twitter), the news of the open position reached Aya and we were able to team up, and luckily, she was happy to move to Hamburg for the summer.</p>
<p><em>Aya</em>: … and I heard about the RGSoC program via a desperate Facebook post by Anke. I thought to myself “Wow, I really don’t get why somebody would drop out of the Rails Girls program! I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby because we only learn Java and C in my computer science course at university. It’s such a cool thing to work on an open-source project and learn a new language for the summer!”. So I decided to write Anke and apply for the SoC. Luckily she was still looking for a partner at that time! Yay!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/alsterhamburgers-with-coaches.jpg" alt="Team Alster Hamburgers" width="600" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>Team Alster Hamburgers! Clockwise from top left: <a href="https://twitter.com/lukasingelheim">Lukas</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/kaeff">Klaus</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/mananbharara">Manan</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/anastasia_a_b">Anastasia</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/jriehn">Jan</a>, Anke, Aya (Image: Anke). Our mentors (not in the picture): <a href="https://twitter.com/cz8s">Christoph</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/349">Thorsten</a></i></small></font></p>
<h2 id="what-project-are-you-working-on">What project are you working on?</h2>
<p>We will be contributing to the <a href="http://leap.se">LEAP Encryption Access Project</a>. LEAP is a project to give all internet users access to secure communication, and we will dedicate our summer to helping out on its <a href="https://leap.se/en/docs/design/overview#web-app">email web app</a>. We’re just getting started with our first <a href="https://leap.se/en/docs/get-involved/project-ideas#add-support-for-token-based-user-registration">project</a>, which will add a token-based user registration feature to the web app’s signup functionality. We chose LEAP because we find it important that people on the internet can choose who they want to communicate with, without wondering in the back of their minds who may be eavesdropping on their conversations.</p>
<h2 id="what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-this-summer">What are you most looking forward to this summer?</h2>
<p><em>Aya</em>: I’m really looking forward to working with all these experienced programmers and building something on my own! I think it’s just really cool to be able to ask questions almost any time of the day (thanks to the different time zones of our mentors/coaches). That way you’re never left alone for too long and can get on pretty fast and I love that!</p>
<p><em>Anke</em>: I can only agree with Aya: We got a really warm welcome to the project and have a great group of coaches and mentors to help us. I also look forward to meeting more of the other SoC teams! I’m excited to get involved in a real project and contribute to open source, and after only a few days into the summer, I already feel like I’ve learned a ton of new things - so it will be great to look back at the end of it and marvel at all that knew knowledge!
You can follow our RGSoC adventures at <a href="https://twitter.com/alsterburgers">@alsterburgers</a>.</p>
Introducing Team RailsGEnthusiastsBoryana & Sophiahttp://twitter.com/RailsGEnthusia2015-07-19T00:00:00+00:002015-07-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Meet-Team-RailsGEnthusiasts<p>###The Beginning of a Wonderful Journey</p>
<p>Hello to everyone from Sofia, Bulgaria :)<br />
We are Sophia and Boryana - Team RailsGirlsEnthusiasts (RailsGEnthusiasts)
and our coaches Andrew R., Marta R., Tsvety M. :)</p>
<p>###Who are we?
<img src="/img/blog/2015/meet-team-railsgenthusiasts-students.jpg" alt="Sophia & Boryana" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i> Sophia & Boryana, RailsGEnthusiasts Team (Image: Sophia & Boryana)</i></small></font></p>
<p>#####Sophia:
After finishing my Master degree in Economics, I have worked mostly for IT companies as I was engaged mainly with sales & marketing activities. Last year I decided that it is time to get knowledge inside, I mean to know how the software programs and systems work. That is why I took the decision to start learn programming and to learn how to create apps myself.
First I started to learn HTML & CSS at the beginning of 2014.
I learned about the Rails Girls Sofia event, but I missed the one held in March 2014. I applied for the next one in October 2014. I was really very happy to see the confirmation e-mail and it was the beginning of my learning process. After the event I started to visit the local study groups in Sofia, which were organized by the main organizer of the Rails Girls Sofia event – Dimitar Dimirov. I have visited the study groups each week since then.</p>
<p>#####Boryana:
My work has nothing in common with my education and my education has nothing in common with programming :) Everything started all of a sudden :) By chance I saw a friend of mine I haven’t seen from a very long time. Her name is Siana and few days later she called and told me about Rails Girls Sofia and the study groups and wanted to take me there. I didn’t want to go but I had promised, so I went, luckily :) The people there changed my life :) I’ve never thought I would be doing something like that, but here I am studying, learning, coding, smiling and feeling wonderful :)</p>
<p>###How did we hear about RGSoC?</p>
<p>Actually, our coaches (Dimitar Dimitrov and Marta R.) from the study groups told us about this program just before the Easter Holidays. They said “It would be a great opportunity for a fast start in the world of technologies.” So, during the holidays we were busy preparing our applications for RGSoC and successfully applied at the very last day :)</p>
<p>###Why RailsGirlsEnthusiasts?</p>
<p>Well, the name of our team speaks for itself about our big enthusiasm for learning how to code :)
<%= we_believe_in_our_skills %></p>
<p>###What are we working on?</p>
<p>Our project is RubyGameDev.com with owner and our mentor Andrew Havens. It’s a community-driven, information hub designed to help people build games in Ruby.
Some of our tasks are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Create guides/tutorials section</li>
<li>Improvements on current features</li>
<li>Creating new features</li>
<li>Updating pages, etc.</li>
</ul>
<p>###What are our expectations for this summer of code?</p>
<p>We have big expectations and we know we have to work hard to achieve them. We really want to learn coding, to create different software programs and apps. We want to lay the basis of our future career development as RubyonRails developers.<br />
Thank you TheOryx.com for inviting us to share your great working atmosphere.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/meet-team-railsgenthusiasts-team.jpg" alt="Team RailsGEnthusiasts" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i> In the left - Petar (TheOryx), Boryana & Sophia sitting in the middle, behind us our coaches Tsvety and Andrew (Image: Sophia & Boryana)</i></small></font></p>
<p>###If we could code anything in the world, what would it be?</p>
<p>#####Sophia:
I would like to create an app for people with different disabilities which can connect to each other. The app will have many features and will offer to the people different possibilities, which can make their life easier.</p>
<p>#####Boryana:
I don’t know yet… Let’s learn first… :)</p>
<p>#####Thank you RGSoC for giving us this great opportunity!!! :):):)</p>
Introducing Team GirlsCodersWarsawAnia&Basiahttp://twitter.com/girlscoderswars2015-07-16T00:00:00+00:002015-07-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Introducing-Team-GirlsCodersWarsaw<h2 id="introducing-team-girlscoderswarsaw">Introducing Team GirlsCodersWarsaw</h2>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-girlscoderswarsaw-students.jpg" alt="Ania and Basia" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>L-R: Basia, Ania and a RGSoC cake (Image: Magda, CodeQuest)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Hello! It’s Ania and Basia and we are team GirlsCodersWarsaw from Poland. We work at the <a href="http://codequest.com">CodeQuest</a> office in Warsaw on the <a href="http://rubyclerks.org">RubyClerks</a> project. We are supported by two coaches here at CodeQuest - Jarek and Łukasz and also by two remotely coaches - Tomasz and Piotr.</p>
<p><strong>Who we are?</strong></p>
<p>Two young women with different background and different life experience, but with the same idea for life: become a coder.</p>
<p><strong>Ania</strong>: Coding was always in my blood. I built my very first webpage about twelve years ago. It was written in Windows Notepad, pure HTML with a little bit of CSS. Though, when I went to high school I forgot about it. Because, as I believed, web development was not for girls. I graduated from Psychology but started to work as an editor and copywriter. About a year ago I decided to attend the Rails Girls workshop in Łódź. There I saw a completely different world and found out, that I could be whoever I wanted to. I continued learning coding and decided to go for broke and apply for the RailsGirls Summer of Code program. And here I am! :)</p>
<p><strong>Basia</strong>: Hi, I’m Basia, I am 31 years old and I have been learning programming for more than a year :) Before that I was managing a yoga school and a company producing artistic cakes. I have background in humanities; I graduated from Polish philology. I’m a mom and I raise my daughter myself (she’s 12). This is a very important experience in my life! For the year I have been learning programming I have worked as the creator of artistic cakes. I baked the cake that is visible on the picture above :) Now I’m here, intensively learning and finally I can focus exclusively on coding. This is what I needed, yay!</p>
<p><strong>Why “Team GirlsCodersWarsaw”, what does it mean?</strong></p>
<p>Our team’s name is pretty straightforward. We are girls, who have become coders as well, and are located in Warsaw, so the choice was simple. Later we came up with the name SzynyDziewczyny which is just a literal translation of Rails Girls and it sounds really funny in polish. But unfortunately, it was too late to change the name.</p>
<p><strong>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Ania</strong>: I heard about RGSoC during the RailsGirls workshop in Warsaw in February. There was a lightning talk given by one of the coaches, Karolina, who took part in the program last year and was very enthusiastic about it. I thought I also would like to take part in such a program, but it was just a pie-in-the-sky idea until I started attending <a href="http://dotclass.org">.Class workshops</a>. There, I met Basia again, with whom I got acquainted with at the RailsGirls workshop in Łódź last year. She asked me, if I wanted to become her teammate for the RGSoC this year. I agreed without hestitation, as I already planned to quit my current job.</p>
<p><strong>Basia</strong>: I heard about the RGSoC last year after my first Rails Girls workshop. I applied then, but didn’t get accepted. Today I’m not upset about it, because I really needed this year (or even more) to become friends with rails and ruby. That time gave me confidence and ensured me that I really want to code. I realized, that I like it more and more. For over a year I have been doing everything to become a programmer. RGSoC is my bridge between self-learning and real programming. I’m very happy that I am where I am.</p>
<p><strong>What project are you working on?</strong></p>
<p>We are working on RubyClerks which is a web application built in Rails. The application allows to run an e-shop. We will be working on payment engine based on stripe, but first we want to review our knowlegde of rails and frontend by building our own training apps step by step. Then we will dive into rails engines, stripe, haml, and test driven development - rspec. We chose this project because it is mainly about rails and we want to learn most about it.</p>
<p><strong>What are you most looking forward to this summer?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Ania</strong>: I really want to learn as much as possible in order to be ready to work as a programmer in the future. What’s more, I want to get to know RubyClerks app well because I aim at building an e-shop for my dad’s business. I’m also looking forward to meeting a lot of positive people from rails community and it has been already happening. It’s going to be an exciting summer!</p>
<p><strong>Basia</strong>: This is a really big adventure for me! I want to learn learn and learn, I want to take advantage of the expertise and big experience of our coaches. I hope that this Summer of Code will help me to become a junior web developer in some awesome company like code quest <3 I also take a lot of energy from this program. I love to read daily logs of other teams - it’s very supportive, that there are so many amazing women who learn intensively just like me right now. I’m going to get drunk with that atmosphere, it is great fuel! Rails Girls community is really the best!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-girlscoderswarsaw-team.png" alt="Our big team" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>L-R: Piotr, Tomasz, Ania, Basia, Jarek, Łukasz, Tomek. (Image: Magda, CodeQuest)</i></small></font></p>
<p>Our team twitter account is <a href="https://twitter.com/GirlsCodersWars">@girlscoderswars</a>. Follow us to keep updated on our progress!</p>
Introducing Team Techylite from NairobiResla and Estherhttp://twitter.com/Techylite2015-07-14T00:00:00+00:002015-07-14T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Introducing-Team-Techylite<p>Hello Everyone, it’s Esther and Resla working on Speakerinnen. We come from Nairobi, Kenya: The Green City Under the Sun.</p>
<p><strong>Introduction</strong></p>
<p>Team Techylite is originally made up of three ladies, Resla Wesonga, Esther Monchari and Dorcas Adhiambo. To get a clear picture, think about The Three Musketeers, The Three Stooges or Destiny’s Child. For the summer of code, however, Resla and Esther will be working on Speakerinnen.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-techylite-students.jpg" alt="Esther, Resla, Dorcas" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>L-R: Esther, Resla, Dorcas (Image: Resla Wesonga)</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong>Why “Team Techylite”, What does it mean?</strong></p>
<p>Early last year, on a chilly Tuesday morning, we met in a small room that then housed the Nairobi Developer School. We were all new to Ruby programming and all the the new things our instructor, Njira Perci, told us sounded foreign and cool to know. Within a week we were friends. We took the less traveled path and decided to keep on with programming even when our peers dropped out along the way. We expanded and even learnt about Android and created a few mobile actions. Esther and Dorcas had previously done Programming with Android and they kept working on this path.</p>
<p>How we came up with this name is actually a funny story. It was inspired by the word “socialite”. Just as socialites attend social events we attend all tech events thus the name Techylite. There are a few women in the Kenyan tech space so the women who are present are conspicuous. When we attend events, we always show up in three and we have even been nicknamed the three musketeers. There is a Swahili proverb that says ‘Ukiona zinduna na ambari i papo’ that applies to us. If you see one of us, the other two are just round the corner.</p>
<p><strong>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</strong></p>
<p>About May this year, we came to hear about Rails Girls Summer of Code(RGSoC) in two different and related ways. Esther read a post on the iHub blog that encouraged women to apply for this year’s edition of RGSoC. Resla was encouraged by a friend who had read the blog post to apply for it. Dorcas was out of town working on a different project. When we(Esther and Resla) met to catch up on what we had been doing, we had a similar idea of what we wanted to do. We both wanted to improve our Ruby on Rails Skills.We decided to put up our application and as luck may have it, we got a spot in this year’s batch. We went ahead and asked our first teacher of Ruby Programming, Perci, to continue what she had started and she gladly accepted to be our coach during the period.</p>
<div class="smaller"><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-techylite-celebration.gif" alt="Celebration" /></div>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Image: <a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google Images</a></i></small></font>
<p><strong>What project are you working on?</strong></p>
<p>This summer (It’s actually the Cold Season in Kenya.) we will be working on <a href="https://speakerinnen.org/en">Speakerinnen</a>, a website that helps conference organizers find women speakers and moderators. We chose to work on Speakerinnen because we personally identify with the problem they are solving. We attend tech conferences and most of them have very few female speakers or none at all and when we saw what Speakerinnen was doing, it was our first bet. Shout out to Maren Heltsche, our mentor, and the rest of the team for the wonderful work you are doing.</p>
<div class="smaller"><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-techylite-goodjob.jpg" alt="Good Job" /></div>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Image: <a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">Google Images</a></i></small></font>
<p>We will start the summer by first learning and running tests on our own mini programs, both TDD and BDD. The current speakerinnen tests are written in Cucumber and we want to change them to RSPEC. Afterwards, we want to work with Ruby Internalization to create a Swahili version of the site so we can help East Africans find women in tech speakers for their conference. We are generally new to the idea of Internalization and we are looking forward to learning a lot about it.</p>
<p><strong>What are you most looking forward to this summer?</strong></p>
<p>We are looking forward to an awesome summer of code. We hope to improve our programming and learning curve. We have already had several meetings with the awesome team we are going to work with: Maren, our mentor; Alex, our supervisor; Percilla, our coach, and the entire RGSoC team. They are all friendly and eager to help us through the whole process. We look forward to an exciting summer.</p>
<p>Follow us on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/Techylite">@Techylite</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/NiWrestler">@NiWrestler</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/esy_mo">@esy_mo</a></p>
Introducing Team DeltaQuadrantJulia and Marenhttp://twitter.com/anderspree2015-07-13T00:00:00+00:002015-07-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/IntroducingDeltaquadrant<p>Hello! We are Maren and Julia of <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/23">Team Delta Quadrant</a>. We’ll work on <a href="https://diasporafoundation.org">Diaspora*</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-delta-quadrant.gif" alt="Team Delta Quadrant" />
<br /><font color="grey"><small><i>L-R: Lisa, Julia, Finn, Maren, Christophe (Image: Anika Lindtner)</i></small></font></p>
<p><strong><em>Why “Team Delta Quadrant”, what does it mean?</em></strong></p>
<p><em>Julia</em>: I’m a Star Trek fan! <a href="http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Voyager">Voyager</a> is my favourite Star Trek Series and is really worth watching. It’s about <a href="http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Kathryn_Janeway">Captain Janeways</a> crew getting lost in the <a href="http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Delta_Quadrant">Delta Quadrant.</a> which means 70 years away from earth (Alpha Quadrant) and their search for a way home. That was the inspiration for the team name.</p>
<p><strong><em>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</em></strong></p>
<p><em>Julia</em>: A friend of mine went to the Rails Girls Beginners’ workshop and told me afterwards about this cool summer programme, that I should apply for. Currently I’m in my last year of university (studying applied computer sciences) so it is nearly time to find a ‘real’ job. But I didn’t feel ready yet for a developer position so three months of intense coding would be excellent!
I teamed up with my friend <a href="https://twitter.com/Autofocus">Lucie</a>. A few days before the application closed I had to heavy-heartedly part with Lucie since she got an amazing job offer. I didn’t really think that I could find someone else with only two days left to meet the deadline but I <a href="https://twitter.com/anderspree/status/586940329649184769">tweeded anyways</a>. And that’s how I met Maren :)</p>
<p><em>Maren</em>: I am part of one of the <a href="http://rubymonstas.org/">Rubymonstas</a> one of the first Rails Girls Berlin learning groups. Sven Fuchs one of our coaches was one of the initiators of Rails Girls Summer of Code. So I saw it developing over the last years. Last year I was already part of the programme as a mentor of <a href="www.speakerinnen.org">speakerinnen.org</a>. This year I saw <a href="https://twitter.com/anderspree/status/586940329649184769">Julia’s tweet</a> as she was spontaneously looking for a new pair to work with. I think it was fate :) - two days before the deadline. I finally applied because I wanted to spend more time coding as I did until now. On the one hand to have more time to learn and on the other hand to get more routine in coding.</p>
<p><strong><em>What project are you working on?</em></strong></p>
<p>We are working on <a href="https://diasporafoundation.org/">diaspora</a> - a decentralized and privacy oriented social network. We picked some open issues that we will work on during the next months: show the geo-location of a user on an Open Street Map, improve picture uploading, create a moderator role and improve the interaction with the tumblr API. We published our project plan <a href="https://github.com/TeamDeltaQuadrant/project_plan/blob/master/plan.md">here</a>.</p>
<p><strong><em>What are you most looking forward to this summer?</em></strong></p>
<p>We are very happy to have the opportunity and the luxury to spend a lot of time on learning new things and to improve our programming skills and routines. We also like working in a team with different people and so we are really looking forward to work with our lovely coaches <a href="https://twitter.com/A5308Y">Andi</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/bastianalbers">Bastian</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/finnpauls">Finn</a>, our mentor <a href="https://wk3.org/people/97af6df26ecc6c55">Lisa</a> our special-supporter and diaspora developer <a href="https://wk3.org/people/6afb9a20cafd8f6d">Christophe</a> and our supervisor <a href="https://twitter.com/viddity">Verena</a>. Not to forget <a href="https://twitter.com/aakritiagupta">Aakriti</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/troessner">Timo</a> who offer us desk space and support in their office at <a href="https://www.blacklane.com/">blacklane</a>!</p>
<p><em>Find us on twitter to keep updated on our work <a href="https://twitter.com/anderspree">@anderspree</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/zaziemo">@zaziemo</a>.</em></p>
Introducing Team Melbourne!Vi and Sarahhttp://twitter.com/TeamMelbKoala2015-07-12T00:00:00+00:002015-07-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Team-Melbourne<p>Hello from Aussie! We are Sarah and Vi, and together we make up the student part of Team Melbourne. We will be spending the summer working with the wonderful people from Discourse.org and our coaches, Jo, Adel and the amazing people from Redbubble.com</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-melbourne-team.jpeg" alt="" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Vi and I with the MacBooks. Redbubble coaches, and our 2 female coaches Jo and Adel (Image: Vi)</i></small></font>
<p>#####<strong>Who are we?</strong></p>
<p><em>Sarah</em>: Pursuing a degree from Melbourne that has zip nil to do with Computer Science. I took up a concurrent diploma of Informatics in order to receive formal instruction. Just returned from a semester abroad in Philadelphia where I trained in the despair of C language and was amazed at the strong emphasis and seemingly endless opportunities for technology and coding in the U.S. I love adventure sports and yoga!</p>
<p><em>Vi</em>: I run a very small online business selling exam preparation content and look for projects that look interesting (and hopefully have the opportunity to do). I started to learn to code in late 2013 to be able to support my online business and have been addicted since. I love how creative programming is and was blown away by the generous open source community.</p>
<p>#####<strong>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</strong></p>
<p><em>Sarah</em>: There’s a lot of emphasis on connections, many times my friends assume I find out about opportunities through personal connections. But no, that’s not how I found out about this. <strong>The internet is my best connection!</strong> On the net one link led to another, and I found out about the Google Summer of Code. I was curious, and more searching led me to many other open source programs - RGSoC being one of them. I applied straight-away once I found a lovely pair (Vi) and a very supportive community in Melbourne.</p>
<p><em>Vi</em>: I heard about Rails Girls Summer of Code through a google search and via the Rails Girls Community. I wanted to apply ages ago, but could never find a pair that could take 3 months off. Luckily, I got hooked up with Sarah through the Rails Girls Melbourne community - Yay! Around the same time, I was playing around with using Discourse to create an accounting forum and also wanted to serve ads on it, so I sent an email off to Sam, one of the co-founders of Discourse as to whether they’d be interested in advertising as a project for Rails Girls Summer of Code. They were! and so we made an application - it seemed like the right time, right project and right pair to apply.</p>
<p>#####<strong>What project are you working on?</strong></p>
<p>We’ll be working on making an advertising plugin for Discourse.org. Discourse is a 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the internet that works as a mailing list, discussion forum and long-form chat room. We know it’s simple purpose, but advertising is something that users of Discourse want because it makes the operating of their forums financially sustainable. It’ll be interesting and challenging technically because we get to look at Discourse, Ember.js - a javascript framework and learn javascript and various advertising platform APIs.</p>
<p>#####<strong>What are you most looking forward to this summer (winter in Melbourne)?</strong></p>
<p><em>Sarah</em>: Winter in Melbourne is Spring-like temperature in Canada/New York. It’s erratic with cold winds, but it won’t snow. Isn’t that cruel? :-( Why go through all that when there isn’t going to be any reward (the snow)? Jokes aside, I’m looking forward to learning, breaking and making things happen!</p>
<p><em>Vi</em>: Not getting the flu… nah, I’m looking forward to learning about new things and most importantly, contributing to open source. I’ve used open source so much in different web apps and am grateful to those who make open source. I’m also grateful to have to opportunity to be able to contribute to it, with such fantastic coaches and mentors. Also… working with Sarah (who is an absolute delight!) is another thing I look forward to.</p>
<p><em>Our team twitter account is @teammelbkoala - Do follow us to keep updated on our progress.</em></p>
Hello from AmsterdamRoos de Bildthttp://twitter.com/team_cheesy2015-07-10T00:00:00+00:002015-07-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Hello-from-Amsterdam<p>We are Maud and Roos, better known as Team Cheesy. Proud to be Dutch, we identify with our country’s best, and some argue even only, culinary treat. Greasy, smooth and tasty, that’s us! Also, we love to make people smile (“Say cheese!”) and joke around with a little cheesiness.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/hello-from-amsterdam-students.jpg" alt="Team Cheesy" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i></i></small></font>
<blockquote><em>Fun Fact #1: Psst… don’t tell, but “Kaaskoppen” or “Cheese Heads” is a not so friendly nickname for Dutchies.</em></blockquote>
<p>But what we love most is… coding! Making stuff work and work even better. Back and front. So if we could choose anything in the world, why not start by making the Rails Girls’ lives easier? That’s why we chose to work on the one and only Rails Girls Summer of Code Teams App. For noobs: that’s the web application where everybody who is involved in the SoC is working with the application process, the team, activity updates, et cetera. As a back- and front-end combo, we can add some fantastic features that will improve the experience of this summer of code and the next ones to come.</p>
<blockquote><em>Fun Fact #2: Maud’s favourite cheese is Dutch blue cheese made out of raw milk. Brrrr.</em></blockquote>
<p>But we weren’t always as melty as we are now. Actually, we just met on Twitter before the summer. After Maud heard about the SoC at the RailsGirls workshop in Utrecht and Roos on a JavaScript meetup in Berlin, we started looking for a teammate on Twitter. Co-organizer Lieke Boon (now our supervisor!) did the math and 1 + 1 became Team Cheesy.</p>
<blockquote><em>Fun Fact #3: Did you know we started a campaign #thingsrailsgirlssay on Twitter? Send your own RailsGirls proverbs @team_cheesy!</em></blockquote>
<p>And holy cheese, do we have a pro-team of coaches to support us. The top coding superheroes of our small country got together. We’ve got:</p>
<ul>
<li>Thijs Cadier who’s “monitoring the crap out of Ruby apps”</li>
<li>Hans Gerwitz who’s way (!) too humble about his full-stack superpowers</li>
<li>Andre Medeiros our Screenhero who’s always there for the rescue</li>
<li>Yorick Peterse, “general geek” and simply too smart for his age (ENVY!)</li>
<li>Shannon E. Thomas our UX and front-end superGIRL</li>
<li>The Artifical, the brand-new-skippybal-rooftop-terrace-daily-snacktime-equipped palace Roos may call her office this summer</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/hello-from-amsterdam-team.jpg" alt="Team Cheesy" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Artwork: Roos de Bildt</i></small></font>
<p>Even though this might become a little cheesy, we want to thank all of our coaches, our supervisor Lieke Boon, our mentor Carsten Zimmerman and the Rails Girls Summer of Code organisation for all of their time, dedication, effort and kindness. Because honestly, the happiest moment so far has been to meet everybody and realize what an amazing team of people we have who voluntarily put so much effort in our learning process. Heartwarming! <3</p>
<p>So everybody, keep cool and keep coding. We wish you a cheesy summer!</p>
<blockquote><em>Fun Fact #4: [by ghost editor] Did you know Roos finished Team Cheesy's first Pull Request? Yes, you do! Hint: take a look at your team's activities page...</em></blockquote>
Introducing Team TessieShelly and Pilarhttp://twitter.com/teamtessie2015-07-06T00:00:00+00:002015-07-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/IntroducingTessie<p>Hello! We are Shelly and Pilar, and together we make up the student part of <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/18">Team Tessie</a>. We will be spending the summer working with the wonderful people from <a href="http://hood.ie/">Hood.ie</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/introducing-team-tessie-team.jpg" alt="Team Tessie <3" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>L-R BR: Aaron, Clemens, Ramon; FR: Shelly, Pilar, Igor (Image: <a href="http://kondens.at/" target="_blank">Michael Emhofer</a>)</i></small></font>
<p><strong><em>Why “Team Tessie”, what does it mean?</em></strong></p>
<p>When we first met up to discuss applying for Summer of Code, we did so in the cat cafe (Cafe Neko) here in Vienna. As a result, we named ourself “Team Neko” but discovered a couple of weeks thereafter that there was already a gaming blog with that name so we were once more back to the drawing board!
We spoke about our shared love of sea monsters. Not only did we both fondly remember Tessie from Earthbound, but we both had similar memories of stories of Kelpies. We weighed up calling ourselves either “Team Kelpie”, or else “Team Tessie” and decided on the latter when we realised it might not be the best idea to name ourselves after the evil one!</p>
<p><strong><em>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</em></strong></p>
<p><em>Shelly</em>: I started learning programming languages by myself in an effort to kickstart a career change. I was learning alone which gets a bit difficult after a while. My partner travelled to San Francisco for the very last GoGaRuCo and met @cczona there. From ever so far away, and with the magic of twitter, Carina put myself and Floor Drees in touch. I heard of Summer of Code through Floor, who also introduced me to Pilar as a prospective team mate. Summer of code struck me as such a fantastic (and supportive!) programme so I knew there and then that I wanted to do what I could to get to take part in it.</p>
<p><em>Pilar</em>: I had been studying genetics at the University of Vienna when out of the blue my brother invited me to go with him at a local developer conference, DevFest. Floor Drees gave a lightning talk about RGSoC there. At this conference I was just completely captivated by how inviting, open and friendly the people working in tech are. At a later conference, Kod.io, Anika Lindtner gave a talk on RGSoC where a member of the audience, Mirjam Zenz, mentioned she was organizing a Rails Girls event in St. Pölten. I just had to go! So I applied, got accepted and had a magical time. RGSoC was brought up, yet again, and it already sounded amazing but this was like a sign, RGSoC wouldn’t stop chasing me so I decided to pursue it myself.</p>
<p><strong><em>What project are you working on?</em></strong></p>
<p>We will be working with the lovely folks of Hoodie. We are beginning with building an app, first using JS, HTML, and CSS. We will then make the same thing using Hoodie. This is to give us a deeper understanding of Hoodie’s capabilities, as well as show us how much easier things are with Hoodie!
After this, we will be diving into pouchdb, and then onward deeper and deeper into Hoodie. We are both really excited to get into all of this!</p>
<p><strong><em>What are you most looking forward to this summer?</em></strong></p>
<p><em>Shelly</em>: It’s hard to pinpoint one thing! I am really excited about working on Hoodie, both in terms of the project itself as well as working with the hoodie folk. I’m quite a fan of how welcoming, friendly, and interesting they all are! It’s going to be great to do all of this with Pilar, I’m really lucky to have her as a teammate! We clicked right away and have so much in common so I know this summer will be a great one! I’m also looking forward to getting to know the other teams. Hurrah for new international friends!</p>
<p><em>Pilar</em>: I am extremely excited about getting to know the feel of what it’s like to work in tech, but above that to work with this amazing group of people. Everyone is so enthusiastic, supportive and helpful, I can’t get over how lucky I am to be working with such a great team. I also happen to have the best partner in the program. We get along so well and have so much in common that working together is not only going to be easy, but loads of fun as well. I feels as though the RGSoC teams and organizers are one big family, so I’m definitely looking forward to meeting all the awesome people involved with RGSoC this year.</p>
<p><em>Our team twitter account is <a href="http://twitter.com/teamtessie">@teamtessie</a>. Do follow us to keep updated on our progress, not to mention bonus goat gifs!</em></p>
2015 Kickoff DayAnikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-07-01T00:00:00+00:002015-07-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/kickoff<p>Happy Rails Girls Summer of Code Kickoff Day, everyone! ♥</p>
<p>Today is the beginning of a three-month adventure we are going on with all <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams">20 teams</a> of this RGSoC 2015! All in all over 130 people - coaches, mentors, supervisors, organizers, helpdesk coaches, designers - are excited to start this journey today. All over the globe there are going to be hangouts and “LET’S DO THIS!!”-outcries and a lot of love through twitter.</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8454937/388506e8-2001-11e5-9bb2-0a18d6d81542.png" alt="screen shot 2015-07-01 at 14 55 05" />
<img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8454940/38892d7c-2001-11e5-95ef-9621eaceb43e.png" alt="screen shot 2015-07-01 at 14 54 44" />
<img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8454938/38853b0e-2001-11e5-9412-a33d8243ad63.png" alt="screen shot 2015-07-01 at 14 54 23" /></p>
<p>We are collecting all the team’s twitter accounts in a <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC/lists/rgsoc-2015-teams">twitter list</a>, so you can follow them there as well.</p>
<p>Timezone fun fact: The first ones to kickoff their Summer (or actually Winter ;) ) of Code were <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/15">Team Melbourne</a> from Australia (UTC+10) and they have written a wonderful blog post <a href="http://team-melbourne-rgsoc2015.github.io/daily-log-first-day/">about their first day</a>!</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8455833/cef10342-2007-11e5-9315-89a2c0e7f805.png" width="200" /></p>
<p>The last ones to start into the day are our Teams from the US, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/40">Team Expat</a> from Seattle and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/84">Team CocoaGems</a> from San Francisco (UTC-7).</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8455175/ff227b5e-2002-11e5-8f9c-624e8da561d4.png" alt="screen shot 2015-07-01 at 15 05 31" /></p>
<p>Another fun fact is that today is also the birthday of Shelly from <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/18">Team Tessie</a>. What better way to start your Summer of Code with an awesome cake and confetti! We are working on shipping all the confetti gifs we can gather to Austria today (be sure to wish Shelly a happy birthday in our <a href="rgsoc-slack-inviter.herokuapp.com">RGSOC Community Slack channel</a> if you are around) - in the meantime, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/56">Team GirlsCodersWarsaw</a> are doing great on the cake front and are kicking off their summer with the most delicious looking cake.</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8454844/a1ea8b4a-2000-11e5-988b-a352b7cc1356.png" width="600" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8455733/1d009026-2007-11e5-9769-48838526d59f.png" alt="screen shot 2015-07-01 at 15 37 17" /></p>
<p>This is looking to be a wonderful start to a magical three months adventure! Stay tuned for blog posts about the teams, more fun facts and a lot of magic. So, hop on over to our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams">teams app</a> to see all our teams and what they are working on during the summer.</p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams"><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8455178/0aebc562-2003-11e5-82cd-6da902360169.png" /></a></p>
<p>LET’S DO THIS!! Have a happy happy happy summer everyone. Let’s change the future of Open Source together ♥</p>
Closing the crowdfunding campaignLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:002015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/closing-the-campaign<p>Whoohoo! They said the third year will be the hardest – but in the end, we broke all records with our crowdfunding campaign. We still can’t wrap our heads around the fact that we can fund 16 teams this year: that’s 6 more than in the last two years.</p>
<p>As our goal for the summer has been met and all the teams have already been selected, we’ve decided to “close” our crowdfunding campaign for the summer. What this means: you will still be able to donate on our donation page and all the money will go towards next year’s efforts. You can never really start early enough ;)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-hangout.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Thank you so much!</i></small></font>
<h3 id="donations-in-numbers">Donations in numbers</h3>
<p>We’re glad so many of you, sponsors and private contributors, have donated. We would not make it without your support and the support of our lovely community – and for that, we simply can’t thank you enough. Before we start thinking about the next step (getting ready for the kick-off), here are some fun facts from the campaign.</p>
<p>With <strong>53</strong> sponsors on board this year, we’ve hit the jackpot (and our highest number of sponsors to date). Hooray!<br />
After last year’s Tobias’, Jeremys and Patricks, this year’s most common supporter first name is… *drumroll*… CHRIS! We counted 3 of them, and an additional Christoph, as well as a Christopher. We’ve also had contributions and visitors to our campaign page from all over the world: Berlin to New York, Helsinki to Philly. Now that’s what we call global!</p>
<h3 id="we-love-emojis">We love emojis</h3>
<p>As always, our private contributors were always very creative with their comments – we counted 14 messages with emojis alone! Our favourites: a story, an overload of hearts, a panda and even.. some code! And because we love kittens, someone also posted a nice little kitty face for us. =^.^=</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-screen3.png" width="600" />
<img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-screen5.png" width="600" />
<img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-screen2.png" width="600" />
<img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-screen4.png" width="600" />
<img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-screen1.png" width="600" /></p>
<h3 id="we-3-user-groups">We <3 User Groups</h3>
<p>We’ve also received donations from user groups: <a href="http://ruby.org.vn/">vietnamrb</a> (thank you Trung!) and Ruby Slovenia, who have set up a <a href="http://www.rug.si/donations/">donation system</a> for their attendees with beautiful Ruby Slovenia stickers for every donation. How amazing is that? Thank you so much, Miha and the whole of the Slovenia User Group! You rock! And so do your beautiful <a href="http://www.rug.si/stickers/">stickers</a>.</p>
<h3 id="a-very-special-supporter">A very special supporter</h3>
<p>One of our most recent newcomer sponsors is the <a href="https://jamesgolick.bitmakerlabs.com/">James Golick Grant for Women in Computology</a>. We are incredibly touched by their support and most importantly, by Jill’s decision to set up a grant to honour her son’s memory. If you can, please take a minute to <a href="https://jamesgolick.bitmakerlabs.com/">read more about the story behind the grant</a> and consider donating, too.</p>
<p>Once again, THANK YOU from the whole RGSoC team – we couldn’t have proved that “third year is the hardest” saying wrong without you. Now let’s get this summer started – so we can prove those other stereotypes wrong.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-anika.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Image: Anika Lindtner)</i></small></font>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-katrin.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Image: Katrin Kampfrath)</i></small></font>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-claudi.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Image: Claudia Gehn)</i></small></font>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/closing-the-campaign-ramon.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>You're all awesome! (Image: Ramón Huidobro)</i></small></font>
Meet the 2015 Teams of Rails Girls Summer of CodeAnikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-06-04T00:00:00+00:002015-06-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2015-teams<p>It’s finally today! The day we can proudly introduce you to this year’s edition of awesomeness and Open Source coding power. Please meet the official 2015 teams (and yes! we could sponsor 16 (!) teams this year, thanks to this most amazing community we are all part of). Thank you all for making this happen:</p>
<p><a href="/img/blog/2015/2015-teams-map.png" target="_blank"><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/8426799/dcbbe168-1f12-11e5-9f6e-45c3953a9282.png" width="600" /></a></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Our 2015 sponsored teams are spread all over the globe!</i></small></font>
<h3 id="sponsored-teams">Sponsored teams</h3>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reddelta-quadrant-julia--marenspan"><span class="color-red">Delta Quadrant (Julia & Maren)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://diasporafoundation.org/" target="_blank">diaspora</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redtessie-shelly--pilarspan"><span class="color-red">Tessie (Shelly & Pilar)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Vienna, Austria
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://hood.ie/" target="_blank">Hoodie</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redfanxhe-angelina--estefaniaspan"><span class="color-red">Fanxhe (Angelina & Estefania)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Colima, Mexico
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://livingstyleguide.org/" target="_blank">LivingStyleGuide</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redgirlscoderswarsaw-anna--barbaraspan"><span class="color-red">GirlsCodersWarsaw (Anna & Barbara)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Warsaw, Poland
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://rubyclerks.org/" target="_blank">RubyClerks</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redbinary-angela--lina-marcelaspan"><span class="color-red">Binary (Angela & Lina Marcela)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Barranquilla, Colombia
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://rubygems.org/" target="_blank">RubyGems Adoption Center</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redtechylite-esther--reslaspan"><span class="color-red">Techylite (Esther & Resla)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Nairobi, Kenya
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://speakerinnen.org/" target="_blank">Speakerinnen</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-reddeigirls-ins--rosaspan"><span class="color-red">DEIGirls (Inês & Rosa)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Coimbra, Portugal
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://lotusrb.org/" target="_blank">Lotus</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redexercistas-mixolidia--sarahspan"><span class="color-red">Exercistas (Mixolidia & Sarah)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Seattle, USA
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://exercism.io/" target="_blank">Exercism.io</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrubyherzlein-franziska--nynnespan"><span class="color-red">Rubyherzlein (Franziska & Nynne)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://sounddrop.audio/" target="_blank">SoundDrop</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redhackrgirls-anjaly--nidhiyaspan"><span class="color-red">Hackrgirls (Anjaly & Nidhiya)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Kochi, India
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://github.com/bartaz/impress.js" target="_blank">impress.js</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redcheesy-roos--maudspan"><span class="color-red">Cheesy (Roos & Maud)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Amsterdam, Netherlands
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/" target="_blank">RGSoC Teams App</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redalpha-ruby-ariane-paola--ramyaspan"><span class="color-red">Alpha Ruby (Ariane Paola & Ramya)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Luxembourg, Luxembourg
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://docs.ruby-lang.org/" target="_blank">Official Ruby Documentation Redesign</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redcocoa-gems-emma--karla-isabelspan"><span class="color-red">Cocoa Gems (Emma & Karla Isabel)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: San Francisco, USA
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://cocoapods.org/" target="_blank">CocoaPods</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrails-girls-enthusiasts-sophia--boryanaspan"><span class="color-red">Rails Girls Enthusiasts (Sophia & Boryana)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Sofia, Bulgaria
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://rubygamedev.com/" target="_blank">RubyGameDev</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redmelbourne-sarah--vispan"><span class="color-red">Melbourne (Sarah & Vi)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Melbourne, Australia
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://discourse.org/" target="_blank">Discourse Advertising Plugin</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redthe-tremors-mercy--nellyspan"><span class="color-red">The Tremors (Mercy & Nelly)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Nairobi, Kenya
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://rapidftr.com/" target="_blank">RapidFTR</a></p>
<h3 id="volunteer-teams">Volunteer teams</h3>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redrubynbugs-raluca--thuyspan"><span class="color-red">Ruby’n’Bugs (Raluca & Thuy)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Berlin, Germany
<em>Project</em>: <a href="http://osem.io/" target="_blank">Open Source Event Manager</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redalster-hamburgers-anke--ayaspan"><span class="color-red">Alster Hamburgers (Anke & Aya)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Hamburg, Germany
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://leap.se/" target="_blank">LEAP Encryption Access Project</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redcodebenders-jayasi--meghaspan"><span class="color-red">CodeBenders (Jayasi & Megha)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Delhi, India
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin" target="_blank">RailsAdmin</a></p>
<h4 id="span-classcolor-redruby-girls-quito-claudia--evelynspan"><span class="color-red">Ruby Girls Quito (Claudia & Evelyn)</span></h4>
<p><em>Location</em>: Quito, Ecuador
<em>Project</em>: <a href="https://leap.se/" target="_blank">LEAP Encryption Access Project</a></p>
<p>Welcome to the summer, everyone! We are so happy to have you on board and are looking forward to a wonderful experience. It was extremely hard to select the teams out of 58 teams that applied, since everybody basically put in a great application. We will publish a blog post about how we selected the teams and what we were looking for this year soon. So stay tuned!</p>
<p>CHEERS to a wonderful summer. We can’t wait for July 1st to come - only 27 sleeps to go!</p>
Your Summer of CodeLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-05-29T00:00:00+00:002015-05-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/your-own-soc<p>We love it when people contribute to Open Source, and hopefully someday there will be no need for a “Rails Girls Summer of Code”, or similar programs, to make that happen. With that in mind, the fact that your team was not selected for this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code doesn’t mean that you can’t have <strong>your own Summer of Code</strong>! And it certainly shouldn’t stop you from contributing to the project you had chosen (or to any other one, really).</p>
<p>Take a look at platforms such as <a href="http://openhatch.org">Open Hatch</a>, <a href="https://www.codemontage.com/">Code Montage</a> and <a href="http://www.codetriage.com/">Code Triage</a>, which list Open Source Projects actively looking for more contributors. Take some time to familiarize yourself with the code of a couple of projects there, and then ask if you can contribute. See if your coaches are still able to help you, and maybe check if a coaching company or local co-working space is able to host you for the 3-month period.</p>
<p><em>Dear (coaching) companies - you should definitely take up this opportunity and offer internships or other possibilities to these awesome, motivated women!</em></p>
<p>Whichever way you decide to work, make sure you find a safe environment for yourself and your team mate, and that you set up a professional relationship with everyone on your team. We can only recommend having a Code of Conduct; <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/code-of-conduct">here</a> is ours, if you need inspiration. You can invest as much time into your project as you have available this summer (or winter, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere!), and it might be a good base to apply again next year. You could also get in touch with the project maintainer of the project you applied with and see if they are able to take on one more team – but be aware they might be quite busy with their RGSoC team already.</p>
<p>If you’re a beginner at the language of the project you’ve chosen, you can give yourself time to learn the basics at your own pace until the program starts – or, take the first couple of weeks to get learning before you make your very first contribution. Either way, we suggest you talk to the project maintainers at some point before the summer to figure out if there are some beginner-friendly issues you can help out with. Trust us, a lot of maintainers really appreciate having newcomers around, and they’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.</p>
<p>We’ll try to give you appropriate support – unfortunately we cannot be there for everyone, which is why we cannot take on an unlimited amount of volunteer teams, but we’re hoping to provide guidance when needed and a dedicated communication channel where you can chat with the community.</p>
<p>Start contributing to Open Source and make this summer your Summer of Code! <3</p>
We've survived the selection process!Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-05-18T00:00:00+00:002015-05-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/selection<p><em>Les jeux sont faits – The chips are down!</em><br />
We know most of you were eagerly and almost compulsively checking your email last Friday – on the day we said we’d send all acceptance letters to applicants. Choosing wasn’t easy: We received more than 60 team applications in April, and our selection committee took a lot of time to rate every application according to several criteria.</p>
<p>During the selection process, which spanned over two weeks, every single member of the committee looked at every application and at the learning history and skill level of each student and made notes and comments, to later be discussed within the whole group. Part of our google hangout conference call for the selection discussion was even done from an airport – if that’s not commitment, then we don’t know what is..</p>
<p>What we looked for, among other things, was an involvement within the community, a strong motivation to learn, and a solid project plan that showed initiative and understanding of the project. As stated in our requirements, we also strongly gave preference to two-women teams and non-remote teams that have found local support in the form of coaches and study groups. In spite of our criteria and requirements, we also understand that every applicant is an individual with different personal histories and goals, and that it being a global program, not all the criteria might apply everywhere. This is why we attempted to get to know the applicants through their applications and carefully read each one several times.</p>
<p>It truly breaks our hearts not to be able to accept everyone, as we have limited funding and resources. In spite of all the students we had to reject, we also have some good news. This year we broke a personal record by having the <strong>highest amount of sponsored teams to date</strong>!</p>
<p>To all the students who did not make into into the program this year: we encourage you to try again next year. If you’ve sent us an email about wanting extra feedback regarding your application, you will hear from us soon, but please be patient. We are truly hoping that you will not give up – there are a ton of <a href="https://gist.github.com/anikalindtner/9524950">great initiatives</a> and programs out there, and we encourage you to get involved in your community and find like-minded people who will join you on your learning path.</p>
<p>We’re looking forward to an amazing summer with all of you: students, coaches, supervisors, volunteers. Thank you for being a part of this – here’s to the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/selection-dance-party.gif" alt="dance party" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Looking forward to the summer! (Image: <a href="http://reactiongif.org/gifs/dance-party-gif/" target="_blank">reactiongif.com</a>)</i></small></font>
RGSoC @ ROSS ConfSarahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-05-09T00:00:00+00:002015-05-09T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/ross-conf<p>Imagine one weekend full of Open Source and then imagine spending it with the most amazing people ever! Add some imaginary electric atmosphere and that’s how we felt about being at the first Ruby Open Source (ROSS) Conference in Vienna. On the weekend of the 25th and 26th of April, some of us from the RGSOC Core Orga team attended this Conference which consisted of a mix of tech-talks in the morning and a hands-on, energetic hackathon session in the afternoon – allowing for some very special interaction between speakers and attendees. With an excellent line up of Open Source Software maintainers and contributors (two of them being potential mentors for our 2015 edition of RGSoC), there was no shortage of inspiration and energy.</p>
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<div class="fb-post" data-href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562487450559273/?type=1" data-width="500"><div class="fb-xfbml-parse-ignore"><blockquote cite="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562487450559273/?type=1"><p>copyright Manuel Gruber</p>Posted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf">ROSSConf Vienna</a> on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562487450559273/?type=1">Monday, 27 April 2015</a></blockquote></div></div>
<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="4" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:658px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"><div style="padding:8px;"> <div style=" background:#F8F8F8; line-height:0; margin-top:40px; padding:50% 0; text-align:center; width:100%;"> <div style=" background:url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACwAAAAsCAMAAAApWqozAAAAGFBMVEUiIiI9PT0eHh4gIB4hIBkcHBwcHBwcHBydr+JQAAAACHRSTlMABA4YHyQsM5jtaMwAAADfSURBVDjL7ZVBEgMhCAQBAf//42xcNbpAqakcM0ftUmFAAIBE81IqBJdS3lS6zs3bIpB9WED3YYXFPmHRfT8sgyrCP1x8uEUxLMzNWElFOYCV6mHWWwMzdPEKHlhLw7NWJqkHc4uIZphavDzA2JPzUDsBZziNae2S6owH8xPmX8G7zzgKEOPUoYHvGz1TBCxMkd3kwNVbU0gKHkx+iZILf77IofhrY1nYFnB/lQPb79drWOyJVa/DAvg9B/rLB4cC+Nqgdz/TvBbBnr6GBReqn/nRmDgaQEej7WhonozjF+Y2I/fZou/qAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC); display:block; height:44px; margin:0 auto -44px; position:relative; top:-22px; width:44px;"></div></div> <p style=" margin:8px 0 0 0; padding:0 4px;"> <a href="https://instagram.com/p/171w5Ezccu/" style=" color:#000; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none; word-wrap:break-word;" target="_top">Also @railsgirlssoc is worked on at #rossconf</a></p> <p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;">A photo posted by Floor Drees (@floordrees) on <time style=" font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px;" datetime="2015-04-26T10:35:54+00:00">Apr 26, 2015 at 3:35am PDT</time></p></div></blockquote>
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<p><br />
Laura, Anika and I got to meet up and even managed to smuggle in some RGSoC work , which we tackled together, as well as participate in the Hackathon. As a vast majority of our coaches, supervisors, mentors and orga team members are remote from one another, having a chance to meet face-to-face feels truly special. We also met and work with these potential RGSoC mentors, namely Katrina Owen of Exercism.io, and Lisa Passing of Diaspora*.</p>
<p>Katrina Owen, among other things, is the maintainer of Exercism.io which is a platform where you can get feedback on your coding exercises. Katrina started this when working with students who would never complete their warm up exercises at college. She figured out that without the potential of getting feedback, there was no real incentive to completing their coding exercises. Exercism received 30 pull requests during the weekend, which goes to show just how much interest there is in keeping it flourishing.</p>
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<div class="fb-post" data-href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562489040559114/?type=1" data-width="500"><div class="fb-xfbml-parse-ignore"><blockquote cite="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562489040559114/?type=1"><p>copyright Manuel Gruber</p>Posted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf">ROSSConf Vienna</a> on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562489040559114/?type=1">Monday, 27 April 2015</a></blockquote></div></div>
<p><br />
Lisa Passing (RGSoC mentor, coach, supervisor, and developer - yes she is THIS awesome), presented Diaspora*, and the many challenges of maintaining the world’s biggest open source, distributed Social Network . With all issues being decided democratically, maintaining a project with such a diverse user base can be extremely complex. But it’s all worth it - since it’s such an amazing communtiy and a wonderful alternative to ehem some other big social network.</p>
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<div class="fb-post" data-href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562487300559288/?type=1" data-width="500"><div class="fb-xfbml-parse-ignore"><blockquote cite="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562487300559288/?type=1"><p>copyright Manuel Gruber</p>Posted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf">ROSSConf Vienna</a> on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rossconf/photos/a.562487283892623.1073741828.544720819002603/562487300559288/?type=1">Monday, 27 April 2015</a></blockquote></div></div>
<p><br />
We also met with friends and long time supporters of Rails Girls and Rails Girls Summer of Code; Michal Papis (of RVM), Piotr Szotkowski (of Reek, and RGSoC coach), and Arne Brasseur (of Yaks, formely a supervisor and core organiser).</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">How about helping <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> fund one more team before the May Day? <a href="http://t.co/3KCo5Dqb5v">http://t.co/3KCo5Dqb5v</a> Please <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/donatebecause?src=hash">#donatebecause</a> <a href="http://t.co/yzqD8IsPUo">pic.twitter.com/yzqD8IsPUo</a></p>— Piotr Szotkowski (@chastell) <a href="https://twitter.com/chastell/status/593398292261777408">April 29, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<p>Events like this reminded us again just how important Open Source Software is to developers and non-developers alike and how many great projects there are which you can support. Even huge projects like RVM need a diverse set of skills to help maintainers continue their amazing work in providing software that everyone can use.</p>
<p>Our heartfelt thanks go to Floor, Aaron and the entire organisational team who made ROSSConf happen and had the vision to put something like this on. It is no easy feat being a community organiser, and they deserve so many hugs for taking the time to create events.
<img src="/img/thankyou.gif" /></p>
<p>Oh, and did we mention that the conference was completely free? That’s right, free, thanks to the <a href="http://www.rossconf.io/#sponsors">excellent sponsors</a> who covered the costs, and to <a href="http://www.sektor5.at/">Sektor5</a> for offering to host the event free of charge.</p>
<p>If you’re reading this thinking, “But I can’t contribute to open source as a designer/content writer/lion tamer”, take a look at a few of these resources. It can’t be said enough that we need more than code to make awesome open source projects and most projects need those <a href="http://opensource.com/life/14/1/get-involved-open-source-2014">writing/designing contributions badly</a>!</p>
<p>The first edition of ROSS Conf may be over, but you can follow their social channels for updates on future events. Rumor has it there might be a ROSSConf in a big german city this year still. But psssshhhht. We’ll keep you posted.</p>
Application Wrap-upLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-04-19T00:00:00+00:002015-04-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/application-wrap-up<p>Our application period has officially ended a few days ago; some of us (I’m looking at you, Sara and Anika) stayed up past the deadline to answer all of your questions. The last 24 hours before a deadline tend to be wild, and we’ve witnessed a lot of last-minute applications coming in – but we made it!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/wrap-up-cheering.gif" alt="cheering" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>We made it! (Image: <a href="http://www.teen.com/2013/07/23/celebrities/daniel-radcliffe-birthday-july-23-2013-harry-potter-gifs/" target="_blank">teen.com</a>)</i></small></font>
<p>We’ve received 61 applications from 19 different countries and all continents (okay, except for Antarctica). At the time of closing, there were still 46 application drafts(!!). It makes us so happy to see there is such a huge interest in our Rails Girls Summer of Code <strong>worldwide</strong>, and now it’s time for the next step: we’re looking forward to reading all of your applications.</p>
<p>Here’s a rundown of what’s going to happen in the next few weeks:</p>
<p><strong>April 16th — April 24th: Mentor Sign-off</strong><br />
The mentors will have a few days to “sign off” on your applications, to certify that you’ve contacted them about your project plan.</p>
<p><strong>April 25th — May 10th: Selection</strong><br />
Our selection committee will go through all the applications several times and select the best ones. We are foreseeing some long days and nights, but we will hopefully get through it unharmed, just in time for…</p>
<p><strong>Mid-May: Acceptance letters!</strong><br />
By mid-May, we will hopefully have made a final decision on the selected teams, and each one will receive an email from us. \o/</p>
<p><strong>Mid-May: Closing the crowdfunding campaign</strong><br />
As much as we <3 seeing just how many people are willing to support us in order to fund our students, by the time we will have sent the acceptance letters, it will also be time to close the <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">crowdfunding campaign</a>.</p>
<p>THANK YOU again to all of you who applied – you will hear from us soon!</p>
Help us fund the last 5 students!Laurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-03-30T00:00:00+00:002015-03-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/donatebecause<p>On March 5th, we opened up our crowd funding campaign. What a ride! Before we go on and give you the full rundown of what happened in the last 25 days, we’d just like to share how proud we are of our amazing community and sponsors with a gif:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/donatebecause-dancing-raccoon.gif" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>Thank you so much! (Image: <a href="http://imgur.com/gallery/N02TC3x" target="_blank">imgur</a>)</i></small></font>
<p>Now let’s get down to the cold, hard facts. Since March 5th, <strong>98 individual donations</strong> were made and <strong>25 sponsor packages</strong> were purchased. The strongest days for individual donations were the first two days of our campaign (March 5th and 6th) with 23 and 14 donations, respectively. The strongest week for donations was the first crowd funding week (44 donations), and the second strongest was last week (23!). In the last 25 days, there were only four days on which no donations at all were made; on all the other days, we were happily flooded by wonderful tweets such as these:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>can’t wait to see the next <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> generation 💜 everyone,please donate!this initiative is life changing!!! <a href="http://t.co/m183nh6PHq">http://t.co/m183nh6PHq</a></p>— nerdbabe (@nerdbabe) <a href="https://twitter.com/nerdbabe/status/581467204560007168">March 27, 2015</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Feels good to see <a href="https://twitter.com/engineyard">@engineyard</a> sponsoring <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a>! Go donate, help fill those seats with aspiring developers! <a href="http://t.co/iEqXQHd2wQ">http://t.co/iEqXQHd2wQ</a></p>— Sebastian Gräßl (@bastilian) <a href="https://twitter.com/bastilian/status/581203205540995072">March 26, 2015</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>sudo donate to <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> here: <a href="http://t.co/Ufzbpe6MJB">http://t.co/Ufzbpe6MJB</a></p>— Herr Lucas Pinto (@medk_) <a href="https://twitter.com/medk_/status/580769034871971842">March 25, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<p>Our most popular sponsor package seems to be the Bronze package, followed by the Silver. And believe it or not: with the donations collected thus far – totalling <strong>76516 USD</strong> – you funded 7.5 teams! <strong>But it’s not over yet, and we want to be able to fund at least 10 teams – this means we still need your help to achieve our goal</strong>!</p>
<p>We’ve asked some of our team members why you should donate to RGSoC, and here’s what they said.</p>
<h3 id="donatebecause">#donatebecause..</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/donatebecause-anika.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Photo: Anika Lindtner)</i></small></font>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/donatebecause-ramon.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Photo: Ramón Huidobro)</i></small></font>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/donatebecause-laura.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Photo: Laura Gaetano)</i></small></font>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/donatebecause-sara.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>(Photo: Sara Regan)</i></small></font>
<p>We’re sure you can think of a lot more reasons why anyone would want to donate to the Rails Girls Summer of Code. Tweet about them with the hashtag #donatebecause; make sure you mention us (<a href="http://www.twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a>) so we can retweet! And don’t forget to go to our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign">campaign page</a>, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign">make a donation</a>, and help us reach our goal <3</p>
2015 Applications Open Today!Sarahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-03-13T00:00:00+00:002015-03-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/applications-now-open<p>After a few months of very diligent work on our Teams App, we’ve made preparing your
application for Rails Girls Summer of Code a whole lot more straightforward. Here’s the low down on applying in 2015!</p>
<h3 id="check-out-if-youre-eligible">Check out if you’re eligible</h3>
<p>This year, we have made the eligibility criteria for applicants a bit clearer.</p>
<p>As our focus is on providing opportunities for further learning post Rails Girls workshop, we do require that applicants have attended at least a Rails Girls or similar
community-driven workshop.</p>
<p>While no one is discouraged from applying on the basis of gender, preference will be given to applicants who identify or have been socialized as female. To see the full criteria
please <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/#eligibility">take a look at our application guide</a>.</p>
<p>If you’re not sure about any of the eligibility criteria, please <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/">contact us</a>.</p>
<p>Another thing to keep in mind is that the program is full-time for three months,
for sponsored teams, so you may have to save any long holidays for post-program ;)</p>
<h2 id="establish-your-team">Establish Your Team</h2>
<h3 id="find-a-pair">Find a Pair</h3>
<p>One of the requirements of the Summer of Code is that you are a two-person team.</p>
<p>Establishing a team means not just finding someone else to lodge an application
with, but someone who you will be able to get along with over three months of
intense project work. Establishing a team that will be able to deal with and work
through moments of stress and conflict will be extremely important to the success
of your summer. For more about finding a pair, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/#pair">take a look at our guide</a></p>
<h3 id="find-a-coach">Find a Coach</h3>
<p>Teams will also need to have at least one coach who is able to give them active support throughout the summer. While coaches can be approached a number of ways, we have some advice on finding coaches <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/#pair">here</a>, and a blog post on <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/where-to-start/">‘Where to Start’</a>.</p>
<p>If you want to provide potential coaches with more information on what you will
need from them over the summer, you can direct them to our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching/">guide for coaches</a>.</p>
<h3 id="finding-a-coaching-company">Finding a coaching company</h3>
<p>Finding a coaching company who can offer you a place to work from, and a team of
coaches on hand to support you is a terrific boost to your application. To start
approaching and asking companies for the help over the summer, share with them our
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">guides for coaching companies</a>.</p>
<h2 id="select-a-project">Select a project</h2>
<p>Thanks to the invaluable feedback from last year’s teams, mentors, coaches and
supervisors, we have improved the way students can select a project for their
application.</p>
<p>This year, applicants will be required to select from projects on our approved
list, that can be found in our <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/projects/issues">projects repository</a>.</p>
<p>If you know of an amazing project you want to contribute to that is <strong>not</strong> yet on our
list, you will need to contact the maintainers to submit the project to us. Check
out our
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">guide for mentors and submitting projects</a>.</p>
<h2 id="work-on-your-application">Work on Your Application</h2>
<p>We’ve added some fantastic functionality to our application system, which will be
extremely helpful as you complete your application.</p>
<p>You now have the ability to save your application as a draft. It may
not seem like much, but being able to save and go back to your application to add
coaches, coaching companies, and further clarity to your project goals may be the
difference between lodging an awesome or average application.</p>
<p>The deadline for submitting your application is Tuesday 14th April, 2015. So take your time to create the best application you can using our drafting feature, before submitting.</p>
<p>Project Mentors will be required to sign off on your application in the week after submissions close; 15th - 22nd April, 2015.</p>
<h3 id="assess-your-coding-level">Assess your coding level</h3>
<p>We know that trying to outline your coding level can be pretty subjective. Therefore,
this year’s application form contains ‘skill level
guidelines’ to help guide you in your self-assessment.</p>
<p>While there can still be grey areas in your learning that you will want to tell
us about in your application, these guidelines should provide more clarity
on what we expect your skills to be at each level, instead of just a number on a scale.</p>
<p>This post is just the basics and new stuff about the application process. Get
on over to our Students Section to check out the full
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application/">application guide</a>, and
start getting your team and application together!</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
Support the Rails Girls Summer of Code with your companyLaurahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC2015-03-10T00:00:00+00:002015-03-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/support-rgsoc-with-your-company<p>We love making things easy for our supporters - YOU -, which is why we’ve compiled a list to help you help us make the upcoming RGSoC great! Here are a few ideas to get you started.</p>
<h3 id="sponsoring">Sponsoring</h3>
<p><em>Making it all possible</em><br />
Just like last year, we have several sponsoring packages for you to choose from: tiny to bombastic, we’ve got it all. Perks for sponsorships include having your swag in the care packages we send to all of our teams, your logo on our presentation slides and website, a mention in our Hall of Fame page, and mentions in our tweets, facebook posts and on the blog. Of course, being an early bird sponsor will qualify for some extra buzz! If you are interested in a sponsoring slot for the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015, you can find all the detailed information <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/packages">here</a>.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/support-with-your-company-swag.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>ALL the sponsors! ALL the partners! ALL the swag! (Photo: Wiktoria Dalach)</i></small></font>
<h3 id="supporters">Supporters</h3>
<p><em>Like sponsors, but different</em><br />
Outside of the monthly stipend itself, we also try to enable learning for our accepted students during and after the Summer of Code. And what better way to learn than to be part of a study group, to read books on interesting new topics, or to join an online class? In the previous editions of the Rails Girls Summer of Code, we’ve been very lucky to find supporters in the form of conferences, online learning platforms, book publishers, and the like, who offered what they do best: conference tickets, vouchers for free classes, and great free books to keep the learning going. We know that education can come in the most diverse form, and we welcome any offer or support that we feel will help our teams get the best out of their learning experience. Willing to commit to leading a study group for a year? Got a special deal on educational material for our teams? We want it all! <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a>.</p>
<h3 id="coaching">Coaching</h3>
<p><em>Coaches are our hidden gems</em></p>
<p>If your company wants to support us in donating time, this is your way to go! We are eternally grateful to all coaches who are dedicated to the teams during the summer. They are one of the core features a team needs in order to apply and have a successful experience.</p>
<p>Allowing your devs dedicated time to coach a team will support a great cause, let you stay in touch with the Open Source community and help advertise that you are working together with us towards getting more Women in to Software Development. A good example for this are Soundcloud, Absolventa, 6Wunderkinder or Travis CI, who have supported teams as companies and stood by them with all the coach power they could give.</p>
<p>Your devs can work as local or remote coaches, or help out in our helpdesk-channel. We’ll write a blog post about your engagement and give you opportunities to reach out to our students with Job/Internship opportunities.</p>
<p>Your Coaches can register here: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/</a> and be sure to check our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching/">Guides for coaches</a>.</p>
<h3 id="and-more">And more..</h3>
<p><em>all the other ways to help</em><br />
In the past, we have also had people on our core team being supported by their companies not only to coach, but also to work on Rails Girls Summer of Code issues and tasks, such as main coordination, design work and development work on our website or teams app, supervising teams, and so on. This is a great way to support us, because there is always a lot to do for the RGSoC (and a lot of the work can be done remotely).</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/support-with-your-company-jump.png" width="600" /></p>
<font color="grey"><small><i>We need all the support we can get! (Photo: Anika Lindtner)</i></small></font>
<p>Hopefully, we have given you a couple of ideas to support us this summer. <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">Contact us</a> if you have more questions.</p>
<p>Help us make Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015 happen: <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign">crowdfunding campaign</a>!</p>
Donate to Rails Girls Summer of Code!RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-03-03T00:00:00+00:002015-03-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/donate-to-rgsoc<p>The Rails Girls Summer of Code crowdfunding campaign
is officially open! And you
thought that christmas only came ONCE a year! ;) We’re opening up our campaign
page to the wider public today, so spread the word and
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donate</a>!</p>
<h3 id="no-amount-is-too-little">No amount is too little!</h3>
<p>Over the last two years we’ve learned quite a lot about how to run a global fellowship
program. However, one thing has always been consistent; the generous support (both financial and otherwise) of the programming and technology community.</p>
<p>Whether you have a little, or a whole lot to give, every cent raised makes a huge difference to
creating a bigger and more expansive program in 2015.</p>
<p>If you want to sponsor a larger amount, take a look at our <a href="/sponsors/packages">sponsor packages</a>
and <a href="/sponsorship-guidelines">guidelines</a>.</p>
<h3 id="the-early-birds">The Early Birds</h3>
<p>Over the last few months we’ve been talking to some of our most ardent supporters
to get on board with some early sponsorship. Many thanks to our <a href="/sponsors">earlybird sponsors</a>,
Travis CI, GitHub, SoundCloud, Google Open Source, Basecamp, Turing School of Software and Design, Keen IO,
Site5, and TeaLeaf Academy for supporting us with their sponsorship before we even opened
our crowd funding campaign!</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/6504654/dea443f6-c339-11e4-9dea-1894fd2fe616.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>To top it off, a number are even coming back for
their <a href="http://2014.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">second</a> or <a href="http://2013.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors-thanks/">third year</a> of sponsorship! Not only do these early bird sponsors ensure that
our crowd funding can really start with a bang, but also to remind us
of the consistent help we’ve had from the tech community in making Rails Girls Summer of
Code a reality.</p>
<h3 id="want-to-help-out-in-other-ways">Want to help out in other ways?</h3>
<p>If you are the maintainer of an open source project, please consider <a href="/guide/projects">submitting it</a>
to our list!
A developer looking for a way to use your coding powers for good? Find out more
about <a href="/guide/coaching">coaching a team</a>?</p>
<p>If you are an organizer whose conference is on during or after the northern Summer of 2015,
why not offer a ticket to your event for our ‘ticket giveaway’. <a href="/blog/2014-06-09-conference-tickets">Read about the
awesome conferences that donated tickets last year!</a></p>
<p>Have a number of other super powers you think we need? Take a look at our <a href="/about">about page</a> for more
info about how to get involved.</p>
<p><a href="/campaign">Get on over to our crowd funding page</a>,
to make a donation!</p>
Call for ProjectsRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2015-02-03T00:00:00+00:002015-02-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/call-for-projects<p>Happy post-Superbowl-weekend Tuesday!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2015/call-for-projects-superb-owl.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<p><strong>Is this the superb owl everyone keeps talking about? (Photo: <a href="http://www.funelf.net/a-cute-owl/">funelf</a>)</strong></p>
<p>It’s only February, but the whole team is already hard at work to make the upcoming Summer of Code the best one yet! In order to do this we need you. <strong>Yes, you, awesome-project-maintainer</strong>! Last year we had a huge variety of projects our students got to work on such as Bundler, Spree, Species+, and Rubinius; for each project, one or more maintainers were “project mentors”: the go-to people if students had questions that were specifically about the project. We want to make this happen in 2015, too. For this we want <strong>you and your project</strong> on board!
We’ve made it super-duper easy for you and put together a small and handy guide to submitting your project for the Summer of Code. <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects/">Here it is</a>! It will hopefully answer most of your questions; and if it doesn’t and you are still confused about something, don’t hesitate to get in touch.</p>
<p>Start right now and read <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/projects">how to propose your project</a> - we simply CAN NOT WAIT to get your submissions!</p>
Last days of Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-10-06T00:00:00+00:002014-10-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/finale<p>It’s real. We can’t believe it, it’s been such a wonderful journey. These were the last days of the Summer of Code!</p>
<p>The program came to an official end as of the 30th of September, so we took a few days to think about the things we enjoyed most about this year’s proceedings. We asked the people behind RGSoC to take some selfies to share their favorite moment/lesson/thing of their summer or a message for you.</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1307818/4518721/2c3f7ac4-4c9b-11e4-86d0-053e714cbcb7.gif" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1307818/4518712/bebdc762-4c9a-11e4-853d-ccead0640894.jpg" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1307818/4518713/bee5f4bc-4c9a-11e4-8e24-17d4413f41a0.jpg" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1307818/4518722/2c3fd140-4c9b-11e4-8a8e-8bd5a160add2.png" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1307818/4518723/2c47e1dc-4c9b-11e4-8c32-b35b06f9c727.JPG" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/4524907/3f3726e4-4d4b-11e4-9eda-20c92024571f.png" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1307818/4518742/89615fd8-4c9b-11e4-8f47-25adff9ce3a9.png" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1307818/4518726/2c5a5dda-4c9b-11e4-99a1-d80440282844.jpg" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/4525639/0b88bbc2-4d56-11e4-8d16-df81d2cdcbdc.jpg" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1307818/4518724/2c4bf60a-4c9b-11e4-9b9b-7750d5c0788a.jpg" width="700" /></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/4524932/a813b7d6-4d4b-11e4-8a71-e56e38ea671b.jpg" width="700" /></p>
<h3 id="if-not-me-then-who">If not me, then who</h3>
<p>As awesome as it sounds, RGSoC is not just willed into existence by the magical powers that be. It’s achieved through the hard work and dedication of organisers, supervisors, coaches, mentors and helpdeskers. It’s achieved through the incredible financial support of sponsors and the wider community and last, but not least, the <a href="http://foundation.travis-ci.org/">Travis Foundation</a>.</p>
<p>So, scratch that. There <strong>was</strong> a whole lot of magic happening. Everyone involved spread their unique mix of fairy dust on whatever they took on, from blog posts, to tweeting, to finding sponsors, and gathering conference tickets, to answering queries on the helpdesk in the middle of the night.</p>
<p>It’s this spirit of working together as a community that reminds us why we make RGSoC happen. All of you are the magical spark who made this fairy tale come true again.</p>
<p>Emma Watson made a very eloquent and timely observation in her speech for the launch of the ally-campaign, #HeforShe, a few weeks ago; “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?”</p>
<p>To everyone who said <em>“It’s going to be me.”</em> - to supporting RGSoC, to supporting more women and more diversity in Open Source - you deserve no less than a standing ovation. You are our heroes and heroines, and have made it clear the sort of place you want the Open Source community to be.</p>
<h3 id="new-beginnings">32 new beginnings</h3>
<p>With the help of the wonderful community we raised $95 k, and with that money we were able to provide sponsorship to 10 teams - that’s 20 participants. We also had 6 amazing volunteer teams this year, wich brings us to 32 students in total. <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">32 stories to tell</a>, 32 new beginnings.</p>
<p>The teams worked on projects such as Rubinius, Spree, Bundler, Diaspora*, BrowserSpree CMS, Speakerinnen, Species+, created a tool for documentation testing or started a migraine tracker - to only name a few. Meet the teams here: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams</a>.</p>
<h3 id="something-to-remember-the-summer">Something to remember the summer</h3>
<p>To fight any post-summer-of-code-blues, we began to creating a mixtape dedicated to this year’s RGSoC, and we want your song to be on it! Which song made your summer? Just <a href="https://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc">tweet to us</a> with the link to the song on <a href="https://soundcloud.com">SoundCloud</a> and we will make it a part of the mixtape.</p>
<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/railsgirlssummerofcode/sets/rails-girls-summer-of-code">https://soundcloud.com/railsgirlssummerofcode/sets/rails-girls-summer-of-code</a></p>
<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/railsgirlssummerofcode/sets/rails-girls-summer-of-code"><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/4528144/92f90c5e-4d6c-11e4-9692-74da1c0fb4c5.png" width="700" /></a></p>
<p>This is something to remember us and your summer of code by. To listen to and rock your post-RGSoC-blues away. Enjoy!</p>
<p>Because these last days are not the end, they are the beginning of 32 new stories.</p>
Meet The Standard LibrariansThe Standard Librarianshttp://twitter.com/StdLibrarians2014-10-02T00:00:00+00:002014-10-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/the-standard-librarians<h1 id="the-standard-librarians">The Standard Librarians</h1>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/meet-standard-librarians-team.jpg" alt="team picture" /></p>
<p>The core RGSoC team was <a href="http://thestandardlibrarians.herokuapp.com/team-bios/jen-diamond">Jen Diamond</a>
and <a href="http://stephaniebetancourt.com/">Stephanie Betancourt</a>. We had a lot of friends in
our study group and other people who wanted to contribute as collaborators so we opened
up the project to them as well. <a href="http://thestandardlibrarians.herokuapp.com/team-bios/omowale-oniyide">Omowale Oniyide</a>
and <a href="http://thestandardlibrarians.herokuapp.com/team-bios/josh-loper">Josh Loper</a>
joined on as core collaborators from the inception of the project and presented with us
at Rocky Mountain Ruby 2014. We had other contributors throughout the summer including
Rob Wilkinson, Jalil Mohammed, Ashok Modi, Kobi Levy and Eric Mathison.</p>
<h2 id="feats-of-daring---a-new-way-to-explore-the-ruby-standard-library">Feats of Daring - A New Way to Explore The Ruby Standard Library</h2>
<p>The Standard Librarians have been creating a new learning tool for the Ruby community over
this summer called Feats of Daring. A user will be able to go to our site and learn
about the Ruby Standard Library in a very similar way as you would go to TryRuby to
learn some Ruby. The user will go through a series of adventures where they will learn
about the top twenty libraries. The libraries are also broken down into chapters so you
can easily browse through and see what is available.</p>
<h2 id="we-built-it-from-cali-to-texas">We Built it, From Cali to Texas</h2>
<p>When we started on this project all members and collaborators were based in or near
Los Angeles, CA. Midway through we had one member work remotely. The rest of us met
in person from 4:00 - 9:30pm, Monday through Thursday at Pivotal Labs Los Angeles
from July to September.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/meet-standard-librarians-mrchips.jpg" alt="Mr. Chips and Cuddy the Cat" /></p>
<h2 id="solving-a-need-while-learning-ruby">Solving A Need while Learning Ruby</h2>
<p>A good way to learn Ruby is to explore the Ruby Standard Libraries. The libraries
however can be a little dense for people new to programming and Ruby. We decided to
make learning about the libraries a fun experience by creating a tool that breaks
them down by using common, real life experiences and relating those
experiences to the functions of the libraries.</p>
<h2 id="how-we-did-it">How we did it</h2>
<p>From developing user profiles, to building features centered around our user’s experience,
and to creating stories that our users can actually relate to - this was a massive
project. We are grateful for the amazing support we had from our sponsors and coaches
at Pivotal Los Angeles, our mentor Pat Maddox, and our story coach Mike Bonifer.
We had an inception of our project where we broke our ideas down into stories,
identified our users and created wireframes. Pivotal LA coaches worked with us four
nights a week from 6-9:30. We worked with a different Pivot each night so we were able
to see many different teaching styles and methods. Everyone had their own git tricks
and ways to break stuff down so we could understand it. They were also great at standing
back and letting us work on the project ourselves until we had a question or were about
to fall into a giant hole. We did retrospectives and iteration planning meetings to
keep us on a roll with the project. We all know how lucky we were to be able to work
there and are so incredibly grateful to have had that experience. Not only did we make
progress with the project but we learned their Agile/XP ways of working.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/meet-standard-librarians-on_stage.jpg" alt="The Standard Librarians at Rocky Mountain Ruby" /></p>
<h2 id="rocky-mountain-ruby-2014">Rocky Mountain Ruby 2014</h2>
<p>After we finished our proof of concept for Feats of Daring we presented our experiences
with Summer of Code at Rocky Mountain Ruby in Boulder, CO. It is an amazing conference
full of great speakers and discussions. We met a lot of other developers who have
inspired us throughout the years including Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei. For a few of us
it was our first professional conference. It was great to see professional developers
in action gathered from all over the world, sharing their creations and learning
from each other.</p>
<h2 id="our-mentors">Our Mentors</h2>
<p>Our amazing mentor <a href="https://rubysteps.com/">Pat Maddox</a> really changed the shape of our
project by suggesting that we use <a href="http://mobprogramming.org/">mob programming</a>.
It helped us even the playing field between people with different levels of programming
knowledge, helped stay on the same page and accelerated our learning. He took us on
a field trip to San Diego to meet the pioneer of mob programming,
<a href="http://mobprogramming.org/">Woody Zuill</a>, who let us work with his team. We
experienced a well oiled machine of a team working together seamlessly. They
allowed us to join in their mob rotation. Each of us worked on a C# project for the
first time ever and actually made contributions.
<a href="http://www.gamechangers.com/about/">Mike Bonifer</a> was our story coach who helped us
define the scope of the stories that we are using to accompany the code as Emerald
moves along in her journey through the Ruby Standard Library. He also came to
San Diego with us to mob and dropped by Pivotal to give us some team building
techniques. Pat, Mike and Woody all really helped shape how we worked together.</p>
<h2 id="our-coaches">Our Coaches</h2>
<p>The coaches we had from <a href="http://pivotallabs.com/">Pivotal Labs Los Angeles</a> are
some of the greatest teachers we have ever had the opportunity to learn from.
We can’t thank them enough for taking time out of their busy schedules to share
their knowledge with us. Special thanks to Ross Hale for opening up Pivotal LA
and allowing it to become our second home during the summer, and thank you to our
coach Mike McCormick for being our lighthouse throughout this process. He helped us
through various hurdles and was our main advocate. Also thank you to our main coaches
John Ryan, Ryan Moran and Eric Hu. who worked with us tirelessly as we build the project.
Others Pivots who helped us along the way: Mariana Lenetis, Ian Ornstein and Peter Alfvin
who worked with us a few nights, Abby Sturges who helped us with our UX, Nikki Thayer
who helped us with our CSS, Dave Belotti, Zachary Girshman who joined in on our
inception, our Director of happiness Elizabeth Miller.</p>
<h3 id="thank-you-to-rails-girls-summer-of-code-for-this-amazing-opportunity">Thank you to Rails Girls Summer of Code for this amazing opportunity.</h3>
<p>We have all individually grown from this experience in so many ways. We hope to coach
a team to work on Feats of Daring next year for RGSoC and pay it forward. Continue
to watch as Feats of Daring grows at our <a href="http://thestandardlibrarians.herokuapp.com/">blog</a>
where we will be continuing to post updates on our progress.</p>
GitHub and Travis CI: Our Platinum SponsorsRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:002014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/platinum-sponsors<p>###GitHub and Travis CI are major supporters of Rails Girls Summer of Code</p>
<p>The program, in the magnitude we have reached for our second year, would not be
feasible without the lead support from organizing partner, Travis CI, and continuing support from founding sponsor, GitHub.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/github.png" width="500" /></a></p>
<p>Over six million people use GitHub to build amazing things together, and no doubt
our students will add to this vibrant development community. GitHub is big on education,
offering Web-based Classes and In-person Training, for people of all experience levels.
GitHub Explore allows you to browse topics like design essentials, CSS preprocessors,
machine learning, and learn a thing or two about topics you’re curious about.
To top it off, the GitHub Guides help to understand the GitHub workflow, from writing
the first ‘hello world’, to mastering issues, to playing with markdown and deploying with GitHub pages.</p>
<p>John Britton and Kate Guarente at GitHub on their support:<br />
<em>“We can’t wait to see what the Rails Girls participants build and ship this summer. The entire Open Source community is going to benefit from these women joining and contributing to meaningful projects, and we’re honored to be a part of the program!”</em></p>
<p><a href="https://travis-ci.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/travis-2014.png" width="500" /></a></p>
<p>Inherently and always an Open Source company, Travis CI builds their hosted continuous integration service integrated with GitHub, and supports a multitude of programming languages. Followers of the Rails Girls Summer of Code no doubt recall the huge role Travis CI played in getting this program off the ground.</p>
<p>Konstantin Haase at Travis CI on their support:
<em>“Rails Girls Summer of Code is an amazing opportunity for diversifying the open source community. It paves a path from your first Rails Girls workshop to becoming an open source developer. We love to support women and open source at the same time with this project.”</em></p>
Google, SoundCloud and Basecamp Take The Gold!RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:002014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/gold-sponsors<h3 id="all-are-repeat-sponsors-for-second-year-in-a-row">All are repeat sponsors for second year in a row.</h3>
<p>This year’s gold supporters are all returning sponsors. We’re so happy to have their continued support, both financially and for their continued interest in making the program the best it can be!</p>
<p><a href="https://developers.google.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/google.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>Recognizing the vital role that open source software plays at Google, <a href="https://developers.google.com/">Google</a> heavily supports the open source software development community. One of the ways they do this is by running student outreach programs such as Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in. It’s no secret that Rails Girls Summer of Code is loosely based on <a href="https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/">Google Summer of Code</a>, a global program that offers student developers to write code for various open source software projects. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together over 7,500 successful student participants and over 7,000 mentors from over 100 countries worldwide to produce over 50 million lines of code.</p>
<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/soundcloud.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>The wonderful people at <a href="https://soundcloud.com/">SoundCloud</a> get real excited about the challenge of bringing all the world’s sounds to the internet. With everyone at SoundCloud being a hacker at heart, they host company <a href="http://blog.soundcloud.com/2012/08/20/we-hack/">We Hack</a> weekends as well as <a href="http://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/stop-hacker-time">Hacker Time</a> (much like the 20% time concept made famous by Google) for their engineering team. SoundCloud believes that life gets boring if you don’t keep learning - and we couldn’t agree more! We bet that’s why they are the biggest evangelists for our program and offered to be a <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">coaching company</a> no less!</p>
<p>Erik Michaels-Ober and Duana Stanley from SoundCloud on their support:
<em>“SoundCloud is incredibly proud to support the Rails Girls Summer of Code for the second year in a row. We’ve already started to see the impact that sponsoring and coaching Rails Girls can make in these womens’ lives and careers. For us, this is an investment in the future of our industry.”</em></p>
<p><a href="https://basecamp.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/basecamp.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>Last year (back then still under the 37signals flag) <a href="https://basecamp.com/">Basecamp</a> was on early in the program. Spread out across 26 different cities around the world, Basecamp is a distributed community of designers, programmers, tinkerers, writers, speakers, analysts, … a bit of everything really. 2014 marks their 15th year in business (happy , Basecamp!), yet their goals remain the same - and fit amazingly well to Rails Girls Summer of Code: <em>“Have fun, do exceptional work, build the best product in the business, experiment, pay attention to the details, treat people right, tell the truth, have a positive impact on the world around us, give back, and keep learning.”</em></p>
<p>Oh, and we love their <a href="https://basecamp.com/team">team page</a>.</p>
<p>Andrea LaRowe from Basecamp on their support:
<em>“Basecamp is the world’s #1 project management tool. For the last ten years, companies have been switching to Basecamp because it’s famously easy to use, reliable, and it has the best customer service in the biz! We’re sponsoring RGSoC because we are excited to help a worldwide community of women “learn by doing” while meaningfully contributing to quality open source projects.”</em></p>
Get to Know our Silver SponsorsRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-09-30T00:00:00+00:002014-09-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/silver-sponsors<p><a href="http://www.envato.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/envato.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>Our friends from down under at <a href="http://www.envato.com/">Envato</a> are passionate about the web, and about enabling creators to make a living doing what they love: teaching. Envato is founded on the idea of community and are passionate about putting the community first. Which explains their continued support for Rails Girls Summer of Code.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.digitalocean.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/digitalocean.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.digitalocean.com/">DigitalOcean</a> offers ‘simple cloud hosting’ - how simple? Well, they claim to be able to deploy an SSD cloud server in 55 seconds. With ‘community’ and ‘love’ making up for two of their core values, there’s no doubt that their support keep learning - love learning</p>
<p>Etel Sverdlov from DigitalOcean on their support:<br />
<em>“We love the community that Rails Girls Summer of Code is building with their mentorship initiatives. The best way to learn is by doing, and this gives many students a fantastic opportunity to jump in there and get coding. Can’t wait to see the awesome projects that come out of the program this year!”</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.engineyard.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/engineyard.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.engineyard.com/">EngineYard</a>’s technology is used and loved by thousands of customers. Its team loves exploring new technologies and standards in automation, deployment, cluster management and all aspects of the cloud. What’s more is that EngineYard love Open Source - and so do we! EngineYard sees the communities they work with and for as their lifeblood, and aim to do everything they can to stimulate them and keep them healthy.</p>
<p><a href="http://orcasnet.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/orcasnet.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://orcasnet.com">Orcas Net</a> is the golden oldie amongst the silver sponsors. Their team began building relational database applications back in the 1970s and became an early leader in using the Internet as a platform for business applications. Through ongoing innovation inhouse and stimulating projects such as Rails Girls Summer of Code, Orcas Net continues to have a finger at the pulse of the Tech world.</p>
<p><a href="http://hashrocket.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/hashrocket.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://hashrocket.com">Hashrocket</a> builds solutions for the Web, iPhone and iPad, specializing in Ruby on Rails, iOS, and Android development. Their Rocketeers aim to design, build, train, and learn and are always looking for ways to contribute to the development & design community. Exactly the reason why they sponsor a number of meetups and support Open Source projects that bring value to the community. Hashrocket will also <a href="">help manage our remote helpdesk</a>.</p>
<p>Marian Phelan from Hashrocket on their support:<br />
<em>“Hashrocket is thrilled to sponsor Rails Girls Summer of Code this year – we’re always looking for ways to help the Rails community evolve and expand, and Rails Girls is on the forefront of that progress. We’re excited to see all of the great code (and coders) that will come out of this year’s program!”Hashrocket is thrilled to sponsor Rails Girls Summer of Code this year – we’re always looking for ways to help the Rails community evolve and expand, and Rails Girls is on the forefront of that progress. We’re excited to see all of the great code (and coders) that will come out of this year’s program!”</em></p>
<p><a href="http://cognitect.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/cognitect.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cognitect.com">Cognitect</a> design products and services specifically designed for the requirements of the cloud environment. Cognitect is positioned to advance the platform and engage the community to continue improving it for all developers. We build simple tools to solve complex information problems.</p>
<p>Justin Gehtland from Cognitect on their support:<br />
<em>“The programming community as a whole benefits from having the most possible participation within it. Ideas are only tested when exposed to new brains. We love programs like RGSoC because they don’t just swell the ranks of programmers, they grow the diversity (and therefore quality) of thought within the community.”</em></p>
Meet our 2014 bronze sponsorsRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-09-29T00:00:00+00:002014-09-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/bronze-sponsors<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code’s Bronze sponsors make up the most numerous contingent in our roll call for 2014. Listing them out doesn’t really do them justice, so here’s a little about each of them.</p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://www.wooga.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/wooga.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>For social gaming giant <a href="http://www.wooga.com/">Wooga</a> learning and working go hand in hand. They support (their team to attend) meetups and conferences.</p>
<p>Maike Kronenberg and Jesper Richter-Reichhelm from Wooga on their support:<br />
<em>“Technology is something that everyone should be able to participate in. There’s an increasing amount of attention paid to diversity within tech companies, particuarly when it comes to engineers. The numbers still aren’t up to scratch. Projects like RailsGirls will change that.”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="https://www.honeybadger.io/"><img src="/img/sponsors/honeybadger.png" width="500" /></a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.honeybadger.io/">Honeybadger</a> is exception, uptime, and performance monitoring for Ruby. Built as the honeybadgers needed a better way to track errors in their own projects.</p>
<p><br />
<a href="https://plan.io/"><img src="/img/sponsors/planio.png" width="350" /></a></p>
<p><a href="https://plan.io/">Planio</a> is engineered to make your projects more successful and fun! How? Well, with great project management of course.</p>
<p>Jan Schulz-Hofen from planio on their support:<br />
<em>“What you do at Rails Girls Summer of Code is absolutely amazing! Developing in Ruby and being part of such a welcoming and inspiring community has benefited us so much, both as a company and as individual team members here at Planio. Hence, we’re always happy to help and give back as much as we can. It is awesome to see more and more women and girls joining over the years since we started doing Ruby and Rails back in 2006. Thanks Rails Girls for making this happen. Much <3 from your friends at Planio!”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://carbonfive.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/carbonfive.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://carbonfive.com/">Carbon Five</a> has more than 10 years of experience building great software for startups, non-profit organizations and enterprise companies. And they like to share.</p>
<p>David Hendee and Courtney Hemphill from Carbon Five on their support:<br />
<em>“So much of our ability to learn and progress in our craft comes from an inspiring and supportive environment. RGSoC has created a program that brings together all the necessary elements for success and Carbon Five is honored to support that initiative and help it grow.”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="https://www.articulate.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/articulate.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>With <a href="https://www.articulate.com/">Articulate</a> anyone can create online and mobile courses with great e-learning authoring tools.</p>
<p>Arlyn Asch from Articulate on their support:<br />
<em>“We love that Rails Girls Summer of Code is inspiring more women to experience the power of coding and embrace careers in technology. We’re thrilled to support this life-changing program.”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="https://www.shopify.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/shopify.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>With <a href="https://www.shopify.com/">Shopify</a> you don’t need to have any technical or design experience to easily create a beautiful online store. Yet Shopify supports learning fully.</p>
<p>John Duff from Shopify on their support:<br />
<em>“Rails Girls gives Shopify the opportunity to help drive communities we care about forward. We get to help open source projects, which we depend heavily upon, and at the same time help aspiring developers learn and gain experience. It doesn’t get much better than that.”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://www.gotealeaf.com/"><img src="/img/sponsors/tealeaf.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.gotealeaf.com/">Tealeaf</a> offers professional grade Ruby on Rails online bootcamps. They are all about teaching. Plus: <a href="">Tealeaf helps us (wo)man our remote helpdesk</a>.</p>
<p>Chris Lee Tealeaf on their support:<br />
<em>“RailsGirls is one of the shining examples of what makes the Ruby and Rails community amazing. Of course, the mission of introducing women to web development is important and critical to the long term health of our young field. But what makes RailsGirls truly amazing is the people involved with it. The organization is filled with smart, passionate and caring do-gooders. This is exactly the type of organization Tealeaf Academy aspires to become. We’re a business, but we’re not a profit-at-all-costs organization. The first and foremost value at Tealeaf Academy is being an organization centered around helping people and being a positive force in the world. RailsGirls has shown us what an organization that values ‘goodness’ first looks like.”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://www.nugg.ad/"><img src="/img/sponsors/nuggad.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.nugg.ad/">Nugg</a> is Europe’s largest targeting platform with cutting edge real-time technology for audience targeting, efficient brand advertising and data management. Powered by machine learning.</p>
<p>Stephan Ziep, Director Development at nugg.ad on their support:<br />
<em>“At nugg.ad we believe it is important and necessary to have more women in IT-related jobs and to close the gender gap in this industry. We are really happy to be part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014, as we believe that putting professional coaches at the side of female beginner students and providing them with a full time scholarship will have a great impact. We are excited to enable students to expand their knowledge and coding skills and look forward to seeing the many great developers and Open Source projects that will arise out of it!”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://www.eng5.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code"><img src="/img/sponsors/site5.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.eng5.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code">Site5</a> believes that our students have a lot to offer the development community and hope to encourage other companies to surround these potential, future web developers with a sense of community and help them gain confidence in their skills.</p>
<p>Justin Mazzi from Site5 on their support:<br />
<em>“Site5’s legacy of using and creating Open Source software on a daily basis gives us strong motivation to invest in the future of these projects by supporting programs like Rails Girls Summer of Code, who are expanding the diversity in the Open Source community.”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://www.zweitag.de/en"><img src="/img/sponsors/zweitag.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.zweitag.de/en">Zweitag</a> is technology consulting and software development since 2008. Their team of 25 smart arses can’t wait to see a ‘neue welle’ in the tech world.</p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://www.messe.de"><img src="/img/sponsors/de_messe.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>Did you know that the <a href="http://www.messe.de">Deutsche Messe</a> has been around since 1947? Neither did we.</p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://agileanimal.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/agileanimal.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://agileanimal.com">Agile Animal</a> specializes in iterative software development and consulting
with a focus on web-based and mobile applications and APIs. And they have a <a href="http://agileanimal.com/pages/open_source">loving working history with Open Source software</a>.</p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://www.hitfoxgroup.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/hitfox.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.hitfoxgroup.com">HitFoxGroup</a> is a fast growing incubator with over 200 professionals in Berlin, San Francisco and Seoul. HitFox is committed to grow companies within the fields of Big Data, Advertising & Game Distribution and puts a strong focus on professional and personal growth opportunities.</p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://newrelic.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/newrelic.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://newrelic.com">New Relic</a> knows it: we are all data nerds. A Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps, New Relic cares about learning.</p>
<p>Noelle Daley from New Relic on their support:<br />
<em>“New Relic is thrilled to support Rails Girls Summer of Code and the amazing work they do in the community. The Rails Girls mission to increase diversity within Open Source is an imperative cause - one in which New Relic is proud to stand behind. We look forward to seeing the projects that students come up with!”</em></p>
<p><br />
<a href="http://www.malwarebytes.org"><img src="/img/sponsors/malwarebytes.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p>In 2008, <a href="http://www.malwarebytes.org">Malwarebytes</a> was founded on the belief that you and everyone have a fundamental right to a malware-free existence. And we couldn’t agree more!</p>
<p>Rebecca Kline from Malwarebytes on their support:<br />
<em>“Malwarebytes from founders on down is comprised of people who are self-taught and have the desire to learn. We believe education should be available for all and not come at a hefty price. aaand we love open source! The Rails Girls Project is an awesome opportunity to learn something new and break out of the mold. Have a blast this summer!!”</em></p>
<p><a href="http://keen.io"><img src="/img/sponsors/keenio.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://keen.io">Keen IO</a> believes that custom analytics shouldn’t be a pain in the backend. That’s why Keen IO’s powerful APIs do the heavy lifting for you. Yay.</p>
<p>Josh Dzielak from Keen IO on their support:<br />
<em>“I met Sven Fuchs (Travis-CI) on a developer evangelism trip to Berlin. He told me all about Rails Girls Summer of Code, and the very next day Keen IO became a sponsor! Why wouldn’t we? Rails Girls SoC is an opportunity for Keen to support several movements we’re passionate about: open source advocacy, mentorship, and the empowerment of women and all less-represented groups in technology. Good luck this summer, coders!”</em>
<a href="http://www.innoq.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/innoq.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.innoq.com">innoQ</a> offers technology consulting, software development, architecture know-how and trainings and is keen to share.</p>
<p>Phillip Ghadir, CTO at InnoQ on their support:<br />
<em>“We strongly believe that tech careers begin with curiosity and love for programming. We support Rails Girls Summer of Code because we’d like to help the participants to discover their passion for coding like we did ourselves. In the long run, everybody will benefit from increasing diversity in IT.”</em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.thoughtworks.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/thoughtworks.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.thoughtworks.com">ThoughtWorks</a> is a bunch of passionate technologists. Providing software, pioneering tools and consulting for organizations with ambitious missions. Thoughtworks has provided a welcoming workplace for at least one of our former SoC participants.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.dawanda.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/dawanda.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.dawanda.com">Dawanda</a> is no-doubt THE marketplace for unique and handmade items. Not only were they Bronze Sponsors, they also hosted us for our awesome kickoff BBQ,
and made sure we got the program off to a great and memorable start!</p>
<p><a href="http://carnesmedia.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/carnesmedia.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://carnesmedia.com">Carnes Media</a> is a five strong group of designers, developers, and troublemakers with secret lives as jugglers, archaeologists, dancers, and novelists. Hanging out around Bellingham, Washington, they follow our program closely.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cloudcontrol.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/cloudcontrol.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.cloudcontrol.com">Cloud Control</a> supercharges development with their European Platform as a Service.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Osterloh and Philipp Strube at Cloud Control on their support:<br />
<em>“We think this is the perfect way to get more women involved in software development – and we’re proud to be one of the sponsors for such an excellent initiative.”</em></p>
<p>They even wrote <a href="https://www.cloudcontrol.com/blog/rails-girls-summer-of-code-2014">a blog post on Summer of Code</a>!</p>
<p><a href="http://paymill.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/paymill.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://paymill.com">Paymill</a> makes online payments fast and easy. With a diverse international team, and a passionate drive to bring even more diversity to tech, the wanted to help make Summer of Code of code happen.</p>
<p>Jörg Sutara, Co-Founder PAYMILL on their support:<br />
<em>“We believe that developer communities help us in improving our products through their interaction & curiosity. We support Rails Girls Summer of Code as it is an great initiative for awesome people and for the future - we’re wishing everyone a great time and that you’ll never stop being curious!”</em></p>
<p><a href="http://groupon.com"><img src="/img/sponsors/groupon.png" width="450" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://groupon.com">Groupon</a> needs no introduction.</p>
<p>Shannon Welling from Groupon on their support:<br />
<em>“Groupon is a company built largely with open source software - from rails, ruby, java, node, and others, we rely heavily on open source technologies to innovate in our daily work and encourage our engineers to give back to the OSS community. Community matters to us on an internal, local and global scale. It’s fundamental to our company’s growth, and to the well-being of the world at large, which is why we’re excited to once again sponsor Rails Girls Summer of Code.”</em></p>
<p>Our bronze sponsors deserve a huge thank you for coming out in number to support Rails Girls Summer of Code.
We salute them for the contributions. Next up, our silver sponsors!</p>
Introducing Team MigraineRocio Paezhttp://twitter.com/migraine_io2014-09-28T00:00:00+00:002014-09-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-migraine<h2 id="about-me">About Me</h2>
<p>My name is <a href="http://www.rociopaez.com">Rocio Paez</a>, I’ve been working in technology related logistics my entire professional life (I was very bored). And I always loved working with computers.
In November 2013 I took a 3-month course in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and I loved it.
I discovered how a website is built, and the proper way to give styles to a page.
It made me want to keep learning, so I quit my job and decided to learn Ruby and apply to the Rails Girls Summer of Code in 2014.</p>
<p>One of my hobbies is dancing flamenco, I’ve danced every night (Mon-Sat) since 2007, it’s my passion.
At 32 years old I discovered that I have a second passion; programming. It came at a time in my life I felt discouraged because I did not love my job, and I did not know what it was that I really wanted to do in life. I know now that it’s programming.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/introducing-team-migraine-rocio_flamenco.jpg" alt="rocio" /></p>
<h2 id="my-project">My Project</h2>
<p>I suffer from migraines, so I thought it would be interesting to develop an application for tracking migraines, and learn how to program by developing this application.
The app attempts to help understand the causes of migraines more clearly.
There are inputs and outputs. Inputs are what you put in your body (like food and beverages) or the way you feel (your mood, physical symptoms). You can configure your input types, too.
Outputs are the headaches, with a way to measure a pain score and duration.</p>
<h2 id="my-coaches-and-supervisor">My Coaches and Supervisor</h2>
<p>I have 2 coaches. One is my husband, <a href="https://github.com/goddamnhippie">Gustavo Beathtaye</a> and the other one is <a href="https://github.com/frodsan">Francesco Rodríguez</a>. My supervisor is <a href="https://github.com/FrauBienenstich">Susanne Dewein</a>.
Originally our way of working together was through Campfire, but we have now discovered <a href="https://gitter.im/">Gitter</a>. Gitter is very cool; it works with Github, and you can even write code in the chat window. I really recommend it!</p>
<p>This photo is one of the meetings (to talk about the plan for the app, in Barranco, Lima - Peru)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/introducing-team-migraine-coaches.jpg" alt="coaches_photo" /></p>
<h2 id="framework">Framework</h2>
<p>This app was initially made with Rails, but we wanted to try a different framework: <a href="http://cuba.is">Cuba</a>.
It was quite interesting to learn Cuba, and how it operates, but it has also given me a great interest in learning how Rails works (go figure!).
So, after I finish my app, I’ll rewrite it with Rails.</p>
<h2 id="my-training">My Training</h2>
<p>I applied initially with a partner, but she had a problem and could not continue.
This means I have completed most of the program by myself, but I would have liked a partner; I think would have been more fun and the app could be more complete.</p>
<p>I remember my early days, the slow progress I was making and posting about it.
One of the things I loved was when I did my first pull request, it was pretty exciting to contribute to open source.
I had to use a great deal of my newly learned CSS skills, dtoo.
What has taken me longer to learn is to know the difference between class and instance methods.</p>
<p>While my Summer of Code ends next week, I’ll keep learning. I have heaps of plans in mind,
and the skills I need to achieve them thanks to the program.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/introducing-team-migraine-seinfeld.gif" alt="gif_alright" /></p>
<p>Take a look at my <a href="http://www.migraine.io">blog</a>, and project <a href="https://github.com/migraine-io/migraine-app">repository</a></p>
RubyConf AU Gifted Us Two Tickets...RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-09-28T00:00:00+00:002014-09-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/ruby-conf-au<h2 id="and-the-spree-girls-are-going">… and The Spree Girls are going!</h2>
<p>The wonderful <a href="http://www.rubyconf.org.au/2015">RubyConf Australia</a> organizing team decided to gift our Sydney-based volunteer team, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/spree-girls-downunder/">Tracy and Catherine of The Spree Girls</a> tickets to their conference, taking place early February next year.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.rubyconf.org.au/images/ruby_conf_logo.svg" align="center" width="400" /></p>
<p>All the conference sessions will be held at the amazing Deakin Edge theatre
in Federation Square Melbourne CBD.</p>
<p>With Rails Girls very own <a href="https://twitter.com/lindaliukas">Linda Luikas</a>, the amazing <a href="https://twitter.com/rachelmyers">Rachel Myers</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/sarahmei">Sarah Mei</a> amongst the currently confirmed speakers, we’re certain our team down-under will have a great time.</p>
<p>Fun fact: RubyConf Australia is hosting a Rails Girls workshop as part of their program. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirls_AU">@railsgirls_au</a> for updates on that.</p>
<p>Travelling to Australia for RubyConf? Make sure you give those SpreeGirls a big hug from us!</p>
A Summer full of CodeCode_Padawanshttp://twitter.com/code_padawans2014-09-27T00:00:00+00:002014-09-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/the-padawans<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/cf_slide1-e1411132632956.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<h2 id="hello-from-the-codepadawans">Hello from the Code_Padawans</h2>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/cf_magda-e1411132825482.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p>I’m 28, living in Berlin since Oct 2011. After obtaining degrees in Psychology(MA) and Cultural Studies(BA) in Poland I’ve been working mainly in cultural management and non-profit sector in London and Berlin. While in Tactical-Tech Collective, 2013, (organization teaching online security, targeting especially human rights advocates), surrounded by researchers, developers and hackers I became familiar to some security tools, gained some more insight into the technical world, its importance and various implementations in a range of fields. There I also had my first peer-to-peer HTML and CSS classes. Nov 2013, I joined Rails Girls Berlin organizers team, finding the idea behind Rails Girls worth supporting. Also, although I still thought of myself as being far from the programming world, I wanted to get closer to it. I participated in Rails Girls workshop in Dec 2013 and with my study colleagues formed a project group the very same day. It was new and exciting. We began meeting regularly in January. I started taking online courses in HTML, CSS , Javascript, Ruby and Rails, focusing mainly on Ruby. At times I was getting puzzled in that ‘new world’, as it seemed a little overwhelming, but I received so much support and encouraged, and got inspired by Rails Girls and Ruby community members, that in March I decided to go for it fully. And here I am, learning, getting frustrated and excited daily, applying for the program, that being a part of will empower me and give me strong basis to pursue a career in software development.</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/cf_ute-e1411132946959.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p>I am a Computer Science student living in Berlin since 2009. Technology and programming have been my passions for a long time now. After several years of working in the pharmaceutical sector I decided to follow my heart and go back to university to study Computer Science. Although changing my career path was a very good decision, I realized that the university is not the best place to learn how to program; it provides not that many possibilities for gathering hands-on experience.
Joining the Rails Girls in 2012 has changed everything. I’ve found such a lovely, supportive community and helping hands to really get into the world of coding. Thanks to Rails Girls and the Ruby developers I met through Rails Girls I’ve found a way of learning that is fun and motivates me to go further. I was doing online courses after work and studies covering several topics. I became a Rails Girls Berlin organizer to share this passion with as many women as possible.
In January 2014 I quit my job as a personal/project manager to focus on my goal to become a developer at the end of the year.</p>
<p>And now, I am a proud Code_Padawan. <3</p>
<h2 id="our-passion-project-ataru">Our Passion Project: Ataru</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Form IV: Ataru</strong>, also known as the Way of the Hawk-Bat, or The Aggression Form, was the fourth of the seven forms of lightsaber combat. The history of Ataru stretched back through the Old Republic, to at least as early as the Mandalorian Wars, where it was commonly employed by Jedi of that day. Ataru continued to be a common form among the Jedi in the latter stages of the Republic, and was also known to be employed by the Sith.
<a href="http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Form_IV:_Ataru"><strong>Wookiepedia</strong></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ataru is a gem that can be used as a command line tool for documentation testing. You can check if the code samples in your software documentation are correct. You can also use Ataru during your CI at Travis.
You can find more infos here: <a href="https://github.com/CodePadawans/ataru"><strong>https://github.com/CodePadawans/ataru</strong></a></p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/gemversion.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p>We released the first version (0.1.0) of gem Ataru on <a href="https://rubygems.org/gems/ataru"><strong>Rubygems.org</strong></a>
You can install and run it on your documentation.</p>
<h2 id="the-life-of-a-codepadawan">The life of a Code_Padawan</h2>
<p>Being a Code_Padawan means that there are rules to guide us on our path to become a Code_Jedi one day.
First of all, we have a group of really awesome coaches who are teaching us a lot of things. Most of the week we are working at <a href="http://asquera.de/"><strong>Asquera</strong></a> , our main coaching company. One day a week we ware going to <a href="http://www.fyber.com/"><strong>Fyber</strong></a> , our second coaching company.</p>
<p>We have a lot of amaaaaaazing people as coaches <3</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/kick-off.jpg" align="center" width="600" />
Sebastian, Matthias, Kacper, Arne, Bodo, Jan</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/geek.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p>Dirk and Lucas from Cologne are our volunteer coaches</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ernesto.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p>Ernesto is our drawing master</p>
<h2 id="jedi-power-of-the-week">Jedi Power of the Week</h2>
<p>During our journey we unlock some secret Jedi Super Powers every week. They are like a „quintessence“ of what we learned in this week. By remembering this word we can bring back all those amazing memories.
But they are also some principles that are needed to be a good Code_Jedi.
Here are some examples, but you can find all Jedi Powers on our <a href="http://code-padawans.de/category/jedi_super_power"><strong>blog</strong></a></p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/05-passion.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/03-serenity.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/08-imagination.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<h2 id="from-our--padawans-diary">From our Padawans Diary</h2>
<p>We hat a lot of amazing moments in the past weeks. It would be too much for this blogpost to tell them all. So we are just list some highlights and if you want more, read our <a href="http://code-padawans.de"><strong>blog</strong></a></p>
<p>the moment when we had our first non-coach contributor on github</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/shirt.jpg" align="center" widht="600" /></p>
<p>having this awesome logo <3</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/froscon_talk.jpg" align="center" width="600" />
<br />
giving a keynote talk about our journey at RedFrogConf</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/boat.jpg" align="center" width="600" />
<br />
having a lot of fun together</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/baelle.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/haende.jpg" align="center" width="600" />
<br />Writing (and deleting) a lot of code</p>
<h2 id="and-then-the-summer-ends">And then the summer ends…</h2>
<p>There are almost 2 weeks left working on Ataru.
We had (and still have) an amazing time!
And we learned a lot. About programming, about learning itself, about ourselves. We learned that programming is more than writing code. It has also a lot to do with creativity and communication with the people you are working with. Sometimes it’s important to be patient with yourself and to be not afraid to ask questions. There are no stupid questions!!!</p>
<p>We want to encourage everyone who is thinking about applying for Rails Girls Summer of Code or an internship or some other programming course: Do it! It will change your life. Maybe not the way you were expecting it but in a positive way.
Challenge yourself and find your passions.</p>
<h2 id="but-our-journey-is-not-finished-yet">…but our journey is not finished yet</h2>
<p>The Code_Padawans will still follow the path to become Code_Jedis one day. We will continue with maintaining Ataru and learning to code.</p>
<p><img src="http://code-padawans.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/cf_hire-e1411418779174.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p>So, if you want to help the Code_Padawans on their way, hire us. :)</p>
<p>Run and Validate!
(a traditional valediction of Code_Padawans following the path of Ataru)</p>
<p>You can read our <a href="http://code-padawans.de"><strong>blog</strong></a></p>
<p>Follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/code_padawans"><strong>Twitter</strong></a></p>
<p>Visit us on <a href="https://github.com/CodePadawans"><strong>Github</strong></a></p>
For The Goodness of SwagRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/_RailsGirlsSoc_2014-09-26T00:00:00+00:002014-09-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/swag-packs-2014<p>The Rails Girls Summer of Code cohort for 2014 have almost made it to the finish line of the program.
Some who finished early, have now moved on, and some are battling through the final days to achieve their project goals.</p>
<p>Before the gray days (or the bright, sunny days depending on your hemisphere) of post SoC were upon us, we had to remind participants just how much we love them,
with a little care package.</p>
<p>To the surprise of, hopefully, all of our participants they would have received a big yellow box in the mail, filled with all sorts of delightful swag,
from our sponsors. From t-shirts, to stickers to pens, to notepads to ballons - the packages were chock full.
Unfortunately, unicorn eggs are strictly prohibited from being posted internationally, but we will work on that for next year.</p>
<p><img src="/img/goodypack2014.jpg" alt="a swag pack in the making" /></p>
<h3 id="why-we-like-to-send-goody-bags">Why We Like To Send Goody Bags</h3>
<p>In and of themselves, the monetary value of the swag we send is pretty minimal. But the monetary value is not what counts.</p>
<p>Our goody packs are an opportunity for us to remind teams that someone is thinking of them, and sending them love from afar.</p>
<p>We hand packed every package so, if you happen to be a team that did not receive your swag package, please just drop us a line…. After all mistakes can happen, and sometimes they can take a while to get delivered.</p>
<p>It’s a chance for sponsors to make themselves present in the lives of the participants. Sure, it’s only a sticker or notepad to an outsider, but it’s intrinsic value to the person who receives it is priceless.</p>
<p>Getting that bright yellow (DeutschePost) box in the mail and getting to crack it open, is like being a kid on christmas morning; likely you have an idea what’s going to be inside, but it’s still fun on a bun.</p>
<p>The stickers recipients put on their computers, and around their houses remind them of their time in the program, and who made it possible; our sponsors, and volunteers.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck"><p>Thanks for our gifts !!!! 🙌😁🙋 <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/github">@github</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/site5">@site5</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/wooga">@wooga</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/planio">@planio</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Groupon">@Groupon</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/cloudcontrolled">@cloudcontrolled</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/keen_io">@keen_io</a> 👏👏 <a href="http://t.co/DcLIhdCjIX">pic.twitter.com/DcLIhdCjIX</a></p>— ARIATeam (@GirlsARIA) <a href="https://twitter.com/GirlsARIA/status/515145367571431424">September 25, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck"><p>Thanks for the gifts!!! <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> 😊 🎁</p>— Team Migraine (@migraine_io) <a href="https://twitter.com/migraine_io/status/515205793617301504">September 25, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck"><p>I'm all good for t-shirts! Thanks <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/carpgezwitscher">@carpgezwitscher</a> <a href="http://t.co/1l72NvV6uC">pic.twitter.com/1l72NvV6uC</a></p>— Tracy Mu Sung (@TracyMuSung) <a href="https://twitter.com/TracyMuSung/status/515429230755074048">September 26, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>So, again, why? Because it’s nice, it’s fun, and most of all everyone likes getting a present.
What makes Rails Girls Summer of Code special is the spirit behind the program.
Open Source is about community and contributing to make things better, and we try to remind participants of that every step of the way.</p>
<p>Thanks so much to our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">sponsors</a> for sending all of the swag!</p>
<p>Stay tuned to the blog over the next few days as we close up the program for 2014.
We’ll be posting the last remaining Team blog posts, and thanking our sponsors for their generous contributions this year.</p>
<p>WARNING: Gratuitious selfies may be involved.</p>
Introducing Team Mutants IndiaAayish and Akshatahttp://twitter.com/_MutantsTeam_2014-09-25T00:00:00+00:002014-09-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-team-mutants<h3 id="about-us">About Us</h3>
<p>Yeah Mutants. We hit upon this name because we’re huge fans of X Men :-P We’re studying Information Science in our third year of engineering in Mysore, India.</p>
<p><strong>Aayish:</strong> I got introduced to Ruby on Rails when I got curious and attended the local Ruby User Group in January; and I started learning Rails using online resources since then. Later on, I attended the Annual RubyConf held in Goa, and heard about RailsGirls Summer Of Code, and thought of giving it a shot. The rest is history :-P</p>
<p><strong>Akshata:</strong> I attended Garden City Ruby Conf beginning of this year in January. And from then on meetups, more conferences and blog posts helped me get introduced to Open Source. I came to know of Rails Girls Summer of Code in March and thought of giving it a go. Started learning Rails
using online tutorials and applied to RGSoC! And you know the rest ;-)</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/introducting-team-mutants.jpg" alt="team picture" /></p>
<p>##What we are working on</p>
<p>We are working on RailsGirls Summer of Code Teams app. Remember the teams app you used to register yourself, lodge an application and make a team after being selected? Well, we’re working on tweaking the process to make it better! First we started off with writing specs for the code to understand the code base better.
The best part was when we made our first pull request. The thrill of creating one and making the necessary changes after taking feedback from our mentor Sebastian was an experience on a whole new awesome level.
Then in month 2, we started working on a new feature that helps students make teams during the application process so that an application can be lodged as a team. Now we’re currently trying to implement the save as drafts feature for our application form.
Refactoring and integration testing next up on our to-do list!</p>
<p>##Awesomeness appreciated :</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mavenhive.in/">MAVENHIVE</a> These folks we tell you! Amazing set of coaches we’ve got! <a href="http://about.me/pavansudarshan">Pavan</a> and <a href="http://about.me/monikamahanthappa">Monika</a> are the best kind of coaches we could ever find and we’re so grateful to them. They’re always there to guide us. Be it right software engineering practices or some bug we just cannot seem to get the hang of, they’re there. <a href="https://twitter.com/bastilian">Sebastian</a> is our mentor and he’s been really helpful too! <a href="https://twitter.com/travelingtamm">Tam</a>, our supervisor! The best! She’s an inspiration to us.
The last few months in our Summer of Code have been awesome! It feels so good to have people around you who inspire you, make you feel comfortable
and are always there for you. Great job by the organisers in pulling together this really awesome program! :-)</p>
<p>You can have a look at our <a href="http://rgsocteammutants.wordpress.com/">blog</a></p>
We are Team Speakerinnen, yeah!Team Speakerinnen2014-09-22T00:00:00+00:002014-09-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-speakerinnen-blog-post<p>As we are both graduates from technical studies, we have first hand experience of how scarce women in technical studies and jobs are. The Rails Girls Summer of Code has given us the perfect opportunity to have some great first hand experience as developers.</p>
<p>We really stand behind the Rails Girls Summer of Code. We have never heard of or experienced a better way to get started as a woman developer. Often we hear from CTOs that they want to employ more women, but none have applied. Obviously, we hope to change that!</p>
<p>We appreciate the opportunity we were given very much. Through the Rails Girls Summer of Code, we not only have had the opportunity to get to know the exciting start-up scene of Berlin a little better, we also see the actual day to day work of a great IT company and their development teams. It is a bit like Christmas. We can ask as many questions as we want and always get amazing help from professional developers.</p>
<p>The support of all the different organizations and generous people have been overwhelming. We have very involved mentors, Anja and Maren, who can tell us all about the Speakerinnen platform. And Erik and Duana from Soundcloud who volunteered to do code reviews with us. Also, we have our great coaches from 6Wunderkinder, such as Chad, Duncan, Nathan, Ryan, Hans, Bruno, Aditya, Stefan, Dennis and many more. A team of at least 20 excellent developers and other supporting co-workers who know it all ;-)</p>
<p>Our supervisor in Sweden, Björn, who is available to us for all matters around the RGSoC. And the RGSoC organizers who are the ones that have been at our side the whole time and held up good spirit and opened up networking possibilities by e.g. handing out tickets to conferences, organizing parties and a boat trip. We are so glad they picked us and thereby allowed us to have this great experience.</p>
<p>As you can see, the Rails Girls get all possible support.</p>
<p><em>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</em></p>
<p>We read about the program over the internet. And were both excited from the start. Participating would give us the opportunity to take time explicitly reserved to find out what the magic about developing is all about.</p>
<p><em>What was your happiest moment?</em></p>
<p>Writing code that actually contributed to the Speakerinnen project for the first time. Since this project is enabling our fellow women to speak at all kinds of events independent of their origin and their education. The speakerinnen platform supports women and event organizers to get together and network directly and easily.</p>
<p><em>What was most challenging moment?</em></p>
<p>Figuring out what tasks would fit best for the RGSoC - ones that were not too difficult, but which are interesting enough to challenge us. In our first few weeks we jumped right in Test Driven Development. This was exciting because it was our first experience with Behaviour Driven Development and it gave us our first steps into the codebase.</p>
<p><em>If you could code anything in the world, what would it be?</em></p>
<p>The speakerinnen_liste project is quite amazing, since it enables women to stand up and talk about their interests and competences. I guess we are very lucky to be in a project like this. And we plan to contribute to it, even after our RGSoC is over.</p>
<p>Follow us on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/TheSaHeBa">@thesaheba</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/chatulli">@chatulli</a></p>
<p><img src="https://speaki.hadar.uberspace.de/photo_blogpost.JPG" align="middle" height="300" /></p>
Time to Meet Team ParticipateTeam Participate2014-09-18T00:00:00+00:002014-09-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-participate-blog-post<h3 id="who-are-we">Who are we?</h3>
<p>Moi, we are <a href="https://github.com/RGSofC-Participate">Cathy Nangini</a> and <a href="https://github.com/RGSofC-Participate">Qian Zhou</a> from Helsinki, Finland. This is our first time with RGSoC and we are quite passionate about our RGSoC journey. We are working on <a href="https://github.com/oliverbarnes/participate-frontend">Participate frontend</a>, a democratic participation platform based on LiquidFeedback,
an open source system used for internal decision making and policy creation. The platform is built with Ember.js for the front-end and will use Grape (ruby) for the <a href="https://github.com/oliverbarnes/participate">API backend</a>. <a href="https://github.com/oliverbarnes">Oliver Barnes</a> is our project mentor, <a href="http://fi.linkedin.com/in/miikapihlaja">Miika Pihjala</a> and <a href="http://fi.linkedin.com/in/thakurmukesh">Mukesh Thakur</a> are our coaches, and <a href="https://twitter.com/FloorDrees">Floor Drees</a> is our project supervisor.</p>
<h3 id="below-is-our-team">Below is our team:</h3>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/team-participate.jpg" alt="team picture" />
<br />
<em>Supervisor Floor Drees (top left); coach Miika Pihjala, coach Mukesh Thakur, RG Qian Zhou, RG Cathy Nangini (bottom); mentor Oliver Barnes (top right)</em></p>
<p><strong>Cathy</strong>: I am a data scientist who has studied physics, geo- and bio-physics and uses scientific computing for data analysis. I started learning Rails at the first RG workshop in Helsinki in 2011. I loved the idea of being able to create and build web projects. The workshop gave me confidence and motivated me to dive into Rails further. After I completed Code School’s Rails for Zombies courses (Level 1 and 2), I developed my first simple app called the <a href="http://furious-mountain-2724.herokuapp.com/">Happy OMeter</a>. Later on, my friends and I built a <a href="https://bitbucket.org/cnangini/zingatlas">social network platform</a> that allows friends to coordinate the transport of gifts and other small personal items when they travel. It expanded my Rails knowledge and understanding of the MVC architecture, but many questions still remain. There is no doubt that RGSoC has furthered my skills. I am now quite addicted to open source and figuring out those features, and it’s great to work with Qian to hash out the never-ending mysteries of code.</p>
<p><strong>Qian</strong>: I am a computer sicence student whose sepcilization is Networking and Services. I am eager to learn new programming languages in my free time. At the beginning of 2014, I self-studied Ruby at <a href="http://www.codecademy.com/">Codeacademy</a> just for fun. This inspired me to learn Rails for Zombies (Level 1 and 2) by <a href="https://www.codeschool.com/">Code School</a>. After that my curiosity about Ruby on Rails became stronger. Around February, I joined an event called <a href="http://www.verke.org/somejam">SomeJam</a> and cooperated with other team members to create a Rails application called <a href="http://letsjamit.herokuapp.com/">Let’s Do It</a>. It was only two days but I wished it was longer so that I could practice more. One day, I accidentally saw Rails Girls news and I became super excited about it. RGSoC exactly provides an awesome opportunity for me. Naturally, the next thing was to find a pair and some coaches. Rails Girls also gives me the chance to know my pair Cathy and coach Miika.</p>
<h3 id="what-have-we-achieved-so-far">What have we achieved so far?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Emberjs. We both started from zero background in terms of emberjs. At the beginning, we were confused by its multiple models, routes, controllers and templates. Now we have a better understanding and know how to use them properly.</li>
<li>Knowledge of ember testing. We use Mocha and Chai for our testing, which we had never heard of before RGSoC. Now we use it frequently and know how to write tests and apply the idea of TDD/BDD.</li>
<li>App features. Currently we have implemented features on issues, initiatives, and suggestions, i.e., how to create them, how to list them and how to link them to the proper page, and so on. We are also on the way to creating a dashboard soon.</li>
<li>Knowledge of ember cli. We made our app with ember cli, which gives us command-line capabilities.</li>
<li>Knowledge of emblem. We use emblem as template engine, which is built on handlebars. Emblem is an added learning curve because we are not familiar with handlebars, and it is not always easy to translate template code in handlebars into emblem. Now we are getting used to using emblem.</li>
<li>Becoming Github professionals. We are now quite used to performing various GitHub gymnastics such as rebasing, squashing, resloving conflicts, etc. (but sometimes it still acts mysteriously).</li>
<li>Problem solving and troubleshooting ability. When we have problems, we first Google, Google, Google, then read related ember documents and stackoverflow. Later on, if we still cannot figure it out, we ask for help from the coaches, the campfire helpdesk from RGSoC and the emberjs IRC channel. In terms of troubleshooting, we maninly use Ember Inspector. We can also now understand the error messages better than at the beginning, and we know how to react according to the given error.</li>
<li>Good documentation habits. We use a shared Google document to record important information, tips and tricks about the project such as: GitHub commands, useful material and links, code for implementing some feature, and so on. It’s an accumulated treasure for us.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-tips-do-we-want-to-share-about-our-participate-journey">What tips do we want to share about our Participate journey?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Make keypoint notes when learning something new for things that are used frequently. For example, GitHub commands like rebasing and squashing.</li>
<li>Good to review and read the Ember guide, Mocha and Chai documents and other learning materials over and over again. You’ll always learn new things even if you read the same thing many times.</li>
<li>Be patient and it’s ok to slow down. Sometimes you may get stuck on one feature for three days or more. Don’t be panic that you aren’t making progress. Making the code work is the result, but the process of reading documents, Googling and asking for help to solve the problem is also valuable. You obtain accumulated knowledge while searching for a solution.</li>
<li>Good to explain questions clearly when asking questions. Aside from asking for help from our coaches, we also ask for help from the campfire desk and emberjs channel. It’s good to express your problem in clear way, so helpers could give related suggestions and solutions. Sometimes we use gist to post our specific problem.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="what-will-we-do-next-for-the-project">What will we do next for the project?</h3>
<p><strong>Front-end</strong>
- Voting
- Delegation of votes to other users
- Login</p>
<p><strong>Back-end</strong>
- Login
- Vote weight processing</p>
<p>And we are always looking for new contributors, so please, join us!</p>
<p>Follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/RGParticipate">twitter</a> or read our <a href="http://rghelsinki2014.tumblr.com/">blog</a> for the daily details :)</p>
Introducing Team Rubinius IndiaTeam Rubinius2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:002014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-rubinius-blog-post<h3 id="about-us">About Us</h3>
<p>We are <a href="https://twitter.com/AkankshaHA">Akanksha Agrawal</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/sanakhan_libre">Sana Khan</a>, Information Technology graduates from College of Engineering Pune. We got introduced to FOSS and Open Source from COEP’s Free Software Users Group (<a href="http://foss.coep.org.in/fosslab/cofsug.html">CoFSUG</a>).</p>
<p><strong>Sana:</strong> During my sophomore year, <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia/MiniDebConf2010">MiniDebConf</a> India happened at our college and that got me introduced to Debian Packaging. Met a lot of awesome people in the Debian India community. Learning from them, was able to make <a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=sanakhan2011@gmail.com">contributions</a> to LibreOffice hyphenation packages for Indian Languages. An year ahead, took a few sessions along with other contributors. Love the Debian India Community and would love to make more contributions :) While attending packaging sessions for <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/Diaspora/Packaging/Sessions">packaging gem dependencies for Diaspora</a>, I got introduced to Ruby on Rails. Thats how I began to learn Ruby and Rails to package a Diaspora gem dependency into Debian.</p>
<p><strong>Akanksha:</strong> Concept of FOSS was introduced to me by our college’s open source group. Attending open source seminars and workshops has always been my passion. I got introduced to Ruby on Rails in the <a href="http://blog.joshsoftware.com/2013/08/30/railsgirls-pune-the-gold-and-the-beautiful/">Rails Girls Pune event</a>. Also attended the <a href="https://twitter.com/vipulnsward/status/459971085128040448/photo/1">Rails 4.1 Release Party</a> where I met our coaches Nishant Modak, Vipul Amler and Prathamesh Sonpatki. Got fascinated with the language and Rails and applied for Rails Girls Summer of Code so as to start contributing to open source.</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/2115379/4102379/a91b12dc-3126-11e4-97c2-72be345214be.JPG" alt="me_and_sana" height="450" width="600" /></p>
<h3 id="what-are-we-working-on">What are we working on</h3>
<p>We are working on making a memory visualizer tool for Rubinius. Hence we are called ‘Team Rubinius’.</p>
<p>Heap dump is one of the most important analysis tools for troubleshooting or fixing high memory usage problems by identifying the root cause of memory leaks in Ruby applications. Rubinius provides a heap dump interface which allows for analysis of memory dump of Rubinius. Our project aims at utilizing the information available from the heap dump file and displaying this information in a graphical way through a visualization tool that helps the user explore the memory usage of their application.</p>
<h3 id="learning-so-far">Learning so far</h3>
<ul>
<li>Starting with basic concepts of Ruby, we studied the internals of Rubinius such as object structures, how array objects are represented internally, types of objects and their memory layout.</li>
<li>We then went on to read and understand the heap dump code and well as the Gauge Application code. We tried out different example codes to identify memory leaks.</li>
<li>We learned how Garbage Collectors work, what is Mark and Sweep Garbage Collection and how that is different from Generational Garbage Collection.</li>
<li>We also learned about how memory leaks occur. We now know that memory leaks are possible even when you have a garbage collector which does things to avoid leaks whenever possible.</li>
<li>Learned how memory visualizers work. Worked with VisualVM, Jhat and Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT).</li>
<li>And there is still so much to learn.. :)</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="progress-so-far">Progress so far</h3>
<p>We started with understanding the format of the Json file generated by the heap dump tool to be able to use it to generate visualization in d3.js.</p>
<p>Gave a short <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/akankshaaha/prug-rubinius-presentation">presentation</a> about our work at <a href="http://www.meetup.com/PuneRailsMeetup/events/192782212/">Pune Ruby Users Group Meetup</a>.</p>
<p>The Json file had too much information for visualization, so we played around with the heap dump code to generate our own reduced data-sets. One major issue we faced was that the number of objects and their related information was too huge that it would either clutter up the visualization or make the browser slow in rendering it.</p>
<p>Attended <a href="http://www.deccanrubyconf.org/">Deccan Ruby Conference</a> and gave a lightening talk.</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/2115379/4102383/ca4300dc-3126-11e4-9a0b-017ff06a72aa.jpg" alt="Ligtening_Talk" height="450" width="600" /></p>
<p>With inputs from our mentor we started to work on the diff of two heap dumps. We are now working on displaying the instance view in a histogram based visualization representing what percentage of objects are consuming how much memory.</p>
<p>To track our progress, follow our <a href="http://teamrubiniusrgsoc14.blogspot.in/">blog</a>.</p>
A Boat, a Forest and a Cupcake – The Day Off at Summer of Code 2014RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-09-12T00:00:00+00:002014-09-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/zoo-forest-cupcake-dayoff<p>On August 28th, 2014, after almost two months of full-time coding, we recommended to our students that they take a <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-day-off">day off</a>. It was a wonderful opportunity for everyone to get their minds off gems, classes, and variables, to take a breath and recharge. Here’s some of the stuff that happened that day.</p>
<p>In Berlin, the lovely people from <a href="http://www.applift.com/">Applift</a> wanted to do more than sponsoring RGSoC. So they came up with the crazy idea of doing a houseboat trip, since their CEO had just bought himself one. Of course, we immediately jumped on board (pun intended, ba-dum-tsssssh!) the idea to take out the Berlin teams for a spin around Tegeler See. With the weather being on its best behaviour that day, we enjoyed ourselves with food, drinks, talks and gazing across the water. Initially, we planned to have a lightning talk about depression & burn out and a big group discussion about how to handle stress at work and for everybody to share their coping mechanisms. But we immediately felt so relaxed on the boat, that we decided to really take the day off. Also for us organizers. So we hung around, talked a bit with everyone and shared a very relaxing day, which was so wonderfully planned. A big thanks goes to Sarah, <a href="https://twitter.com/peterlih">Peter</a>, Linda and Therese from the <a href="https://twitter.com/hitfoxgroup">HitFox Group</a> and Norbert, the skipper, for making this a beautiful day to remember.</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/2246045/4183220/dfbe47d2-3739-11e4-9475-4343b34aeb2e.jpg" alt="boat-tour-collage" />
(Pictures by <a href="https://twitter.com/terrifictherese">Therese</a>)</p>
<p>Over in Bogotá, <a href="https://twitter.com/PaoMarGarcia">Paola</a> from <a href="https://twitter.com/girlsARIA">Team ARIA</a> had a little chat with the geese at a farm while her pair, <a href="https://twitter.com/melipaots">Melipao</a>, hopefully had a day that was just as relaxing - in spite of the weather not looking too promising in Barraquilla, by the Caribbean Sea.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p><a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoC">@RailsGirlsSoC</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/dayoff?src=hash">#dayoff</a> with a beauty goose on a farm -Bogota -Colombia <a href="https://twitter.com/PaoMarGarcia">@PaoMarGarcia</a> <a href="http://t.co/yf1pwiUvxD">pic.twitter.com/yf1pwiUvxD</a></p>— ARIATeam (@GirlsARIA) <a href="https://twitter.com/GirlsARIA/status/506545056250343424">September 1, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>In Vienna, our organizers <a href="https://twitter.com/FloorDrees">Floor</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/alicetragedy">Laura</a> gave up on trying to find a house boat to celebrate the day off, and put their baking skills to good use for a cupcake feast instead. Proof below!</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Happy Rails Girls Summer of Code - Day Off from <a href="https://twitter.com/alicetragedy">@alicetragedy</a> and yours truly! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/rgsoc?src=hash">#rgsoc</a> <a href="http://t.co/a18uPbWJrF">pic.twitter.com/a18uPbWJrF</a></p>— Floor Drees (@FloorDrees) <a href="https://twitter.com/FloorDrees/status/505038939523407872">August 28, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>Meanwhile in Warsaw, Team Species+’s Magdalena went for a walk in the forest and Karolina spend the whole day reading (we know what you’re thinking, but no: no coding related literature was involved). Apparently, the day off has come just at the right time for them: “<a href="http://kamcoding.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/day-43-day-off/">Yes, it was really necessary day. Now we feel as if we have more room in our brains…</a>”</p>
<p>And to all the other students: We hope all of you had a wonderful day, too! <3</p>
Winners of 2nd 2014 Conference RaffleFloorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-09-10T00:00:00+00:002014-09-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/tickets-raffle2<p>We have raffled and re-raffled. Here are the winners of the tickets our befriended conferences decided to give away:</p>
<p>Speakerinnen’s <a href="https://twitter.com/TheSaHeBa">Sara</a> (who will also be attending <a href="http://rejectjs.org/">Reject.JS</a> via its Community package) won a ticket to <a href="http://2014.cssconf.eu/"><strong>CSSconf EU</strong></a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/RGParticipate">Team Participate</a>’s Cathy and Qian will attend <a href="http://rubyconf.pt/"><strong>RubyConf Portugal</strong></a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://oredev.org/"><strong>Oredev</strong></a> will get a visit from ‘<a href="https://twitter.com/code_padawans">code padawans</a>’ Magdalena and Ute.</p>
<p>And <a href="https://twitter.com/lyzellis">Lyz</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/TheUtahKate">Utah</a> from Team Omnia Extares get to go to <a href="http://keeprubyweird.com/"><strong>Keep Ruby Weird</strong></a>.</p>
<p>YAY!</p>
<div align="center"><img src="http://37.media.tumblr.com/21baac6d7fa8287c3af00b9fce89fad4/tumblr_n83ylbsZJN1sedjuto1_250.gif" /></div>
<p>A big thank you to ALL second round raffle-out conferences:</p>
<p><a href="http://2014.cssconf.eu/">CSSconf EU</a>, <a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/">The Strange Loop</a>, <a href="http://rubyconf.pt/">RubyConf Portugal</a>, <a href="http://oredev.org/">Oredev</a>, <a href="http://keeprubyweird.com/">Keep Ruby Weird</a>, <a href="http://rubyconf.ph/">RubyConf Philippines</a>, and <a href="http://rejectjs.org/">rejectjs</a></p>
Claim a ticket to the conference of your choice (and learn tons)Floorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-09-05T00:00:00+00:002014-09-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conferences<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-07-24-conferences/">As promised</a>, we have a whole new round of great-conferences-you-can-visit-for-free! This time around we have both tickets and scholarships to draw your attention to. We’ve listed what you should do to get either of those in the list below. Good luck!</p>
<h1 id="tickets">Tickets</h1>
<p><a href="http://2014.cssconf.eu/"><strong>CSSconf EU</strong></a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/cssconfeu">@cssconfeu</a> on Twitter) takes place in Berlin, September 12. We have <em>2 tickets</em> to give away.</p>
<p><a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/"><strong>The Strange Loop</strong></a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/strangeloop_stl">@strangeloop_stl</a> on Twitter) takes place September 17-19 in St. Louis. We have <em>2 tickets</em> to give away.</p>
<p><a href="http://rubyconf.pt/"><strong>RubyConf Portugal</strong></a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/rubyconfpt">@rubyconfpt</a> on Twitter) takes place October 13th - 14th in Braga. We have <em>3 tickets</em> to give away. RubyConf Portugal will also be organizing a Rails Girls Braga in the days before the conference, which you’d be very welcome to attend and coach at.</p>
<p><a href="http://oredev.org/"><strong>Oredev</strong></a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/oredev">@oredev</a> on Twitter) takes place November 4-7 in Malmö (Sweden) and we have <em>2 tickets</em> (a ticket costs around $1500) to give away!</p>
<p><a href="http://keeprubyweird.com/"><strong>Keep Ruby Weird</strong></a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/keeprubyweird">@keeprubyweird</a> on Twitter) takes place Friday, October 24th in Austin. They set aside <em>2 tickets</em> for Rails Girls Summer of Code.</p>
<p><a href="http://rubyconf.ph/"><strong>RubyConf Philippines</strong></a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/RubyConfPH">@RubyConfPH</a> on Twitter) takes place March 27-28, 2015 on Boracay Island and we have <em>2 tickets</em> to give away.</p>
<p><em>For all the above conferences we need you to tweet from your team Twitter account or from your personal Twitter account, what conference(s) you would like to attend - mentioning the conference’ Twitter handle <strong>and</strong> using the #rgsoc hashtag.</em></p>
<p><em>The deadline for claiming your conference ticket is <strong>Tuesday, September 9th</strong> (up until midnight, wherever you are).</em></p>
<p><em>Winners will be drawn by raffle at 07:00(GMT+2) on <strong>Wednesday, September 10th</strong>, and informed shortly thereafter</em></p>
<h1 id="scholarships">Scholarships</h1>
<p><a href="http://rejectjs.org/"><strong>rejectjs</strong></a> offers one ticket to their wonderful conference, plus covers travel expenses of up to 150€ via their <a href="http://rejectjs.org/#community-package">Community Package</a>. Do mention that you are a Rails Girls Summer of Code student!</p>
<p>Both <a href="http://www.railsconf.com/"><strong>RailsConf Atlanta</strong></a>, taking place April 22-25 (yes, 2015), and <a href="http://rubyconf.org/"><strong>RubyConf San Diego</strong></a>, taking place November 17-19 this year still, have an ‘Opportunity Scholarship Program’ in place. We will share application details with you shortly.</p>
<h1 id="what-to-do-at-the-conference">What to do at the conference?</h1>
<p>First of all, we want you to be amazed and inspired. A conference is one of the best places to learn heaps of stuff and talk to wonderful people.</p>
<p>Additionally, why not amaze the other attendees? We would love for you to share your Summer of Code story and spread the word to even more seasoned programmers about the great opportunities of the Rails Girls. Many conferences have slots for lightning talks. Not sure how to tackle the task? We have just <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-07-29-talk-tips/">the blog post</a> for you!</p>
<p>And now go, go, GO for those tickets.
Good luck!</p>
Introducing Team Omnia ExtaresLyz and Utahhttp://twitter.com/lyzellis2014-09-03T00:00:00+00:002014-09-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-omnia-extares<p>We are Team Omnia Extares.
<img src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lg2cE1NytJw/U5o7U6TQKvI/AAAAAAAAAAM/iXaGX4Z2Ruw/s1600/First+Day+Selfie.jpg" align="center" width="600" /></p>
<p>Giving ourselves a Latin team name makes us look pretentious. I know you were thinking it. But it’s way more awesome than you think.</p>
<p>Lyz and I both graduated from what they call The Evergreen State College, which is a smallish hippy alternative college in Washington State. That description makes Evergreen seem very…I don’t know, eye-rolly? But it’s more than just pot clouds and discussing sustainability and driftwood art, while sitting barefoot in a circle. (But, to be clear: these things ABSOLUTELY happen there.) Evergreen is also a really flexible learning environment, and it was really formative for both of us, and holds a special place in our respective and collective hearts.</p>
<p>Here’s why I just waxed poetic about our alma mater (more Latin - we really are pretentious). Omnia Extares is Evergreen’s motto, and it’s way more awesome than boring college’s mottos. Instead of meaning something like “Striving for pompous glory, or whatever”, our motto means, “Let it all hang out.”</p>
<p>So here we are, two Greeners getting letting it all hang out as we hurl ourselves bodily into our Rails Girls Summer of Code project.</p>
<p><em>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</em></p>
<p><em>Utah:</em> My first exposure to coding was using MatLab for an Ecological Modeling course in grad school. I really enjoyed it, but had to set it aside after the course was over. After finishing my Masters, I was finally able to spend more time learning to code, and I fell in love. After I took my first RailsBridge workshop, I knew that I wanted to focus on web development, and that I had found my people in the Ruby/Rails community. I have been having a blast since, and am so grateful for all of the resources available to women looking to enter tech fields!</p>
<p><em>Lyz:</em> I have always been interested in software and web development, and tinkered around with coding some while I was in college but I earned my degrees in Anthropology/Archaeology. I’ve been working as an archaeologist for some time now, but am now coming full-circle back to development. The Rails community is what drew me in - there are so many great people and amazing Rails driven sites. I had to find out what all the excitement was about, so I attended RailsBridge last year (and again this year), and have been learning ever since! I’m also really interested in getting involved in the open source community, and in helping to even out the gender ratio in scientific and engineering professions, so RGSoC is one trifecta of awesome to me!</p>
<p><em>What was your happiest moment?</em>
Merging our first pull request!</p>
<p><em>What was most challenging moment?</em>
Merging our second pull request.</p>
<p><em>If you could code anything in the world, what would it be?</em></p>
<p><em>Utah:</em> Interactive biology teaching website or lightsaber kittens (in MC Hammer pants) vs laser sharks.</p>
<p><em>Lyz:</em> Online museum documenting creative ways to destroy a completed Master’s thesis or PhD dissertation…think http://brokenships.com/ for academics….</p>
Team BrowserSpreeTeam BrowserSpreehttp://twitter.com/browserspree2014-09-01T00:00:00+00:002014-09-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/teambrowserspree<p>Hello world, we’re team BrowserSpree. We’re working on a module to integrate the e-commerce engine Spree into BrowserCMS, a Rails content management system. It’s been a challenging, but rewarding, journey so we’re excited to share what we’ve been up to so far.</p>
<p><img src="http://imgur.com/xnKYURQ.png" width="700" title="Team BrowserSpree" /></p>
<p>##Britney’s Background##</p>
<p>Hi, Britney here. I started learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails in May 2013. I attended a conference about startups but was quickly sucked into a talk about learning programming, specifically Ruby on Rails, and the active developer community in Washington, D.C. From there I’ve done tutorials, exercises, read books, attended meetups and conferences. One thing I hadn’t done prior to starting Rails Girls Summer of Code is work on an open source project. I’ve been afraid that I don’t know enough to contribute, so Rails Girls Summer of Code is giving me confidence in myself and also giving me experience that I hope will move me closer to working with Ruby and Rails professionally.</p>
<p>##Jam’s Story!##</p>
<p><img src="http://i.imgur.com/8rsQvLH.jpg" width="700" title="Jam" />
Hi – I’m Jam! I’m an IT Project Manager by day– and a Fullstack Rails Dev (in the making) by night. A year ago – learning to program never seemed like a possibility. I – of course thought you had to have a Bachelors in Computer Science and be able to solve some complex algorithm in your sleep for someone to actually pay you to do it. The big decision to go for it anyway came to me when was challenged by an employer who said I wasn’t an ”A” player because I didn’t have a technical degree - which challenged me to prove them wrong. If it hadn’t been for Rails Girls DC and the awesome DC Ruby community, I would have never believed I had what it takes to defy that belief. I attended my first Rails Girls Workshop in June of 2013, having no experience whatsoever. A year later, along with Britney - we planned the June 2014 Rails Girls DC Workshop – which was an amazing experience. Outside of the - my loves: West African Dance, Indie Music (all genres), Fashion and reality tv. My goal: to design and build e-commerce for fashion brands.
I recently enrolled in Tealeaf Academy which managing that, in addition to RGSoC and my full-time job has totally killed my summer social life – but I’m getting closer to my dream – and that’s all that matters. I’ve finally decided to follow the advice of the masses and create a blog to document my journey to learning design and code, with sprinkles of randomness in between. Follow me @justjamonit/@rbywoo and blog: rbywoo.com</p>
<p>##Ruby for Good##</p>
<p><img src="http://imgur.com/g97sQcc.png" width="600" title="Ruby for Good" /></p>
<p>The first ever Ruby for Good was a few week ago and it was so cool to see so many rubyists, both new and old get together and work projects to benefit others. Since we could break into teams and work on projects of our choosing - I thought what better chance to work on BCMS 4.0 documentation! Luckily, Craig Riecke agreed! Craig came down Ithaca, NY. He is Rails Developer for Cornell University AND published author - Mastering Dojo. When I first made the announcement that I was working on documentation for BCMS… I knew no one would be interested! After all other teams were building sexy apps in AngularJs, for example! But Craig was looking for change from his day to day - programming. So it was a win-win!</p>
<p>It was so great to work with someone of his skill set and background. He brought a very fresh perspective to the user/developer documentation that allowed us to rewrite and restructure the documentation rather than simply update what was there to include BCMS 4.0 features.
Check out what we were able to accomplish here. Craig was able to make a lot of progress with the User Documentation, while I dove into the Developer Documentation. The great news is Craig is on board to continue updating the documentation with us going forward!!
Check some our Twitter <3 from that weekend:</p>
<p><img src="http://imgur.com/CkBFfiw.png" width="600" title="BrowserCMS documentation" /></p>
<p><img src="http://i.imgur.com/wmbsWVt.png" width="600" title="Team Pathway Homes" /></p>
<p>##Steel City Ruby##</p>
<p><img src="http://alwaysbelearning.co/assets/2014/08/rails_girls_talk.jpg" width="600" title="Rails Girls Lightning Talk" /></p>
<p>Not long after Ruby for Good, we attended Steel City Ruby Conf in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a great opportunity for us to visit another community of developers since we’ve mostly just engaged with the D.C. community and those who visit. We highly recommend the conference to developers of all experience levels. The organizers did a great job of selecting talks that weren’t all highly technical. In fact many of them had more to do with self-reflection and community. We also had the opportunity to give a lightning talk about Rails Girls and Rails Girls Summer of Code. We explained what each was about and our experiences. The feedback we received was very positive and helped us start a lot of conversations with other attendees. We were able to explain in more depth how Rails Girls works and make recommendations about putting on workshops and other strategies to engage local communities. It was the first lightning talk for both of us and we’re looking forward to doing more. Our Ruby Conf schedule is far from over - we have RubyDCamp and Nickel City Ruby right around the corner, in October!</p>
<p>##Reflecting##
Since we are at the halfway point- it’s best we look back at what we have done.
We have actually followed our Project Plan pretty closely:
In July, we primarily spent our time getting familiar with BrowserCMS. We each built our own version of a bookstore. We created our content_blocks, portlets categories and made the our content_blocks and portlets available for public view.
Specifically, we added the following features:</p>
<ul>
<li>Catalog of all our books that our visitors can browse.</li>
<li>View products pages individually.</li>
<li>Categorize by type of book (Authors, Fiction/Nonfiction, Politics, Economic, Young Reader Vampire Novels, etc)</li>
<li>Authors should have their own pages that list their products.</li>
<li>Author’s other works should be visible even if we don’t have those books for sale.</li>
<li>When I view a book, I should be able to see all the author’s other books for sale.</li>
<li>When i view a product, I should see other related products for sale. I should be able to give discounts codes for an author that would last for a 4th of July weekend.</li>
<li>We also updated BrowserCMS developer documentation and user guide, thanks to Ruby for Good! Check out what we were able to accomplish here.</li>
</ul>
<p>##Key Takeaways so far##
- <strong>Google, Google, Google</strong>
This can’t be said enough. Not only when it comes to errors but also when you have a feature you are trying to add, or a how do I go about doing ‘x’ ?” question. It was surprising “how much we found out just by using others people questions. Plus, Googling is a required skill to be a developer – right under using Git or knowing the command line.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>Its okay to go over the basics</strong>
For one or two weeks, we had to cover some Rails basics - in addition to building our store so that we could ensure we are asking the right questions and learn/apply the fundamentals of Rails and not just BrowserCMS.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Pseudo code</strong>
Pseudo code is writing in English what you are trying to accomplish in code. It helps to logically map out the steps to get to your desired outcome.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Break large tasks into smaller ones</strong>
Start small. When adding a feature, it seemed daunting and often time felt like we had now idea where to start. Breaking one big action into smaller was key because it allowed us to start with what we did know – and take it step by step from there.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>##Where to From Here##
Well we spent the last two weeks diving into Spree and for the last week - we have been tried installing BrowserCMS and Spree in the same Rails app and seeing what breaks. Well - it broke a number of times - but nothing that we couldn’t work through. We figured out which version of Spree plays nicely with BCMS and we are on track to fully flesh out user authenticaton, checkout, etc. by the end of the summer!</p>
<p>###We would like to give special hugs and <3 to our coaches, Patrick Peak (@peakpg) and Tanya Bodnya (@tatianabodyna) for all offering their time to make us better devs. Specaial thanks also to Ncud (@nclud) for letting us use their space!##</p>
Rails Girls Summer of Code Day OffLaurahttp://twitter.com/alicetragedy2014-08-22T00:00:00+00:002014-08-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc-day-off<p>We love coding, we <strong>really</strong> do. But we also know that during a 3-month-long, hands-on coding program (or <em>cough cough</em> at work if you’re coding all day <em>cough cough</em>) your motivation might start to take a nosedive. This is why we are announcing a</p>
<h3 id="rails-girls-summer-of-code-day-off-on-august-28th"><em>“Rails Girls Summer of Code Day Off” on <strong>August 28th</strong>!</em></h3>
<div align="center"><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/4011384/b55fe45c-2a03-11e4-9459-a4ef28d8b130.gif" /></div>
<p>What that means: exit your terminal, close your laptop and do something awesome or relaxing with your team mate! Some of us are in Berlin, and there will be a small get together for local teams (yes, an afternoon on a houseboat - wonderfully sponsored and organized by <a href="http://www.applift.com/?gclid=CNuxwer_psACFYrpwgodBD8A0Q">Applift</a>); but since RGSoC is a worldwide movement, we won’t let distance stop you from having a great time. We just want you (yes, YOU dearest students; but also coaches, mentors, supervisors..!) to have a fun day, wherever you may be!</p>
<h3 id="our-favorite-10-ways-to-spend-your-day-off"><em>Our favorite 10 ways to spend your day off</em></h3>
<p>We have gathered a list of the best 10 ways to take a day off, feel free to try out some or all or to think up your own. And of course: you’re welcome to DOCUMENT ALL THE THINGS - e.g. sending us funny pictures of you relaxing with your favorite pet or going out for a hike. We love all your tweets.</p>
<h3 id="explore-your-hometown-in-an-alternative-way">1. Explore your hometown in an alternative way</h3>
<p>The <a href="http://www.latourex.org">Laboratory of Experimental Tourism</a> has a few fun ways to explore places - even in your own hometown. Some of our favorite examples:<br />
- Counter travel (Travel with a camera, but don’t take pictures of the famous landmarks and tourist attractions. Stand with your back to the sight and snap that view instead.)<br />
- Alternating Travel (Leave your home on foot. Take the first road on the right, then the next on the left, then the next on the right, then the next on the left, etc. Carry on until something, a no man’s land, a building or a stretch of water, blocks your path and you can go no farther.)</p>
<h3 id="organise-a-picnic">2. Organise a picnic</h3>
<p>Food, music, blankets, and sunshine. Is there anything more lovely than that (especially the food part)? Find a park nearby, take some homemade sandwiches and cookies, bring a frisbee if you want, and relax! For the ultimate awesome experience, bring a scrabble with you (sorry, but I had to include that in there, as it’s my favourite board-game)</p>
<h3 id="movie-marathon">3. Movie marathon</h3>
<p>Who said that movie marathons can only be done at night? You’re totally allowed to watch movies all day. Maybe you can each bring your all-time favourite movie - what a great way to get to know your team mate better! For the ultimate experience, we recommend making popcorn and choosing trilogies ;) Our favourite: Back to the Future, obviously!</p>
<h3 id="yoga-class">4. Yoga class</h3>
<p>Or any other physical activity, whether to let out all of that energy or to relax. Was there something you always wanted to try but never dared to? Is there a boxing or self-defence class in a studio nearby? Did you always wonder about this strange “pilates” that everyone keeps talking about? Now is the time to try it out. Do you love playing volleyball or basketball outdoors? Go for it! And you know what they say: the more, the merrier - so bring your team mate along!</p>
<h3 id="go-swimming">5. Go swimming</h3>
<p>It’s summer! At least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere ;) Need we say more? Maybe you’re lucky enough to live in a place with a lake or the ocean nearby. Run away from the city and go swimming!</p>
<h3 id="crafts">6. Crafts</h3>
<p>This could really be anything - from making your own laptop case to designing some cute birthday cards from all your friends or baking some (non-rgsoc-themed) cupcakes.</p>
<h3 id="read">7. Read</h3>
<p>Grab a book or go into a newsagents’ shop, buy ALL your favorite magazines and spend the day reading somewhere outside or snuggled up on the couch. It works wonders!</p>
<h3 id="have-a-games-day">8. Have a “games” day</h3>
<p>We’ve mentioned Scrabble already, but there is a ton of other games that you could play, and you probably have a few stacked away somewhere in a box, don’t you? Whether Uno, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Snakes & Ladders.. We’re sure you’ll be having the time of your life!</p>
<h3 id="have-a-media-free-day">9. Have a media-free day</h3>
<p>Leave your laptop and phone at home, and just head out. After the first few minutes (or hours..) you’ll get used to it. You’ll see, being phoneless for a few hours really isn’t that hard (or bad) at all!</p>
<h3 id="go-wild-at-an-amusement-park">10. Go wild at an amusement park</h3>
<p>..because roller-coasters and bumper cars are definitely not just for kids.</p>
<blockquote>Studies show that just "hanging around" and doing nothing and just lying on the couch all day won't let you feel very relaxed. Your brain wants to do things and experience stuff.</blockquote>
<p>So make the best out of it, and <strong>enjoy your RGSOC-DAY-OFF</strong>!</p>
<p><em>P.S. If we find any commits or signs of you working on this particular Thursday, we won’t send you cat gifs in the following weeks! So. There. We are serious about this.</em></p>
Self-promotion by RapidRailsGirls!RapidRailsGirlshttp://twitter.com/RapidRailsGirls2014-08-22T00:00:00+00:002014-08-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/blog-post-self-promotion-by-RapidRailsGirls<h3 id="about-us">About us:</h3>
<p>We are <a href="https://www.xing.com/profile/Katharina_Zwick2">Kathi Zwick</a> and <a href="https://www.xing.com/profile/Brigitte_Markmann">Brigitte Markmann</a>, two aspiring software developers based in Berlin. We met in December 2013 at our first Rails Girls Workshop. We figured out that we would make a great team for the Rails Girls Summer of Code - and as you can see - we got accepted as a volunteer team! Yeah! :)</p>
<p><strong>Kathi:</strong>
“Remembering back, I always wanted to be a detective (like Sherlock Holmes). But very recently I realized that my skills also happen to fit perfectly to those of a programmer: I’m quick at combining new information, I have an urge to get things done and obviously I LOVE solving riddles (isn’t that what programming is all about?)! Because childhood wishes rarely come true, in reality I’ve been a recruiter for the past two years. Hanging out a lot with IT guys made me realize: being a programmer is the coolest job on earth, I’ll go for it! And here I am :) “</p>
<p><strong>Brigitte:</strong>
“There must be parallel universes in which I am a volcanologist or a pilot of a very small aircraft in a remote area. In this one I am a media manager who now decided to go an a slightly different adventure - becoming a developer. Why? Because languages are amazing: you can admire the sheer aesthetics and marvel at or be confused about the underlying concepts and values. Using a different one you become another persona!<br />
Besides that I like to be around people what kind of rules out the careers mentioned above.
What else? I love to invent silly taglines and titles, can wiggle my ears (up and down) and can explain movies to my friends, when they again have missed all the subtle hints….
Perfect material for a decent developer, don’t you think? ;) “</p>
<h3 id="why-rapid">Why Rapid?!</h3>
<p>Because we learn at a high pace ;) but also because the project we chose to start with is called RapidFTR. It’s a Ruby on Rails/Android application that lets aid workers collect and share information about unaccompanied children in emergency situations, so they can be reunited with their families. We will help upgrading the current app to version 2.0.</p>
<h3 id="things-we-learned-so-far">Things we learned so far:</h3>
<ul>
<li>how to use a Mac (yap, involving terminal commands and funny symbols )</li>
<li>how to use Twitter (just have to overcome our general fear of actually using it).</li>
<li>learned the English words for all the punctuation marks.</li>
<li>the importance of going to conferences - you get free tshirts there!</li>
<li>real coding stuff like git, GitHub, Ajax, jQuery, RSpec, Slim, DOM, rubocop, Ruby keywords, TDD, code coverage, etymology of foo, bar, etc. ! :)</li>
<li>how to be a good programmer in terms of style, community involvement etc…</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="things-we-are-amazed-by">Things we are amazed by:</h3>
<ul>
<li>all the hearty support we experienced so far! So many people in the Ruby community as well as SoundClouders have been very kind and super encouraging. From making us feel welcome to offering classes on whatever topic people are experts on!</li>
<li>our coaches/mentors/supervisors obviously! Erik Michaels-Ober (SoundCloud), Klaus Fleerköetter (ThoughtWorks), Steffi Tinder (ThoughtWorks) and Tam Eastley: thank you so much for your dedication and patience! And for motivating and inspiring us!</li>
<li>how much you can learn in 7 weeks!</li>
<li>how many different things you actually <em>have</em> to learn in order to make a Rails Application work</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="things-we-would-change-about-the-summer-of-code">Things we would change about the Summer of Code:</h3>
<ul>
<li>turn the program into “Winter of Code”. We realized that the current “Summer of Code” makes one too excited about coding and thus you spend most of the time in front of a computer, neglecting the beautiful sunshine outside.</li>
<li>we would not choose SoundCloud as an office again. It’s just too fabulous, too cozy, too many goodies for the employees, too good food …. the result being that we’re now totally spoiled.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="anyways">Anyways…</h3>
<p>… if you’d like to stay tuned about our Summer Code, check out <a href="http://rapidrailsgirls.weebly.com/">our blog</a>!</p>
<p>… and if you’d like to hire us, don’t be shy - message us <a href="https://twitter.com/RapidRailsGirls">on Twitter</a> or XING!</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/rapidrailsgirls.jpg" title="That’s Erik, Brigitte, Kathi, Steffi and Klaus" /></p>
Why not offer an internship after the summer is over?Tamhttp://twitter.com/travelingtamm2014-08-14T00:00:00+00:002014-08-14T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/post-rgsoc-internships<p>The summer is reaching its halfway mark, so we’re hard at work thinking about how to keep supporting our students when it ends. For a handful of selected women, RGSoC has marked a turn in their lives: they have spent hours coding, learning, and discovering a new world of programming possibilities.</p>
<p>But sooner than they (and we!) realize, their summer will be over, and it will be time to move on.</p>
<p>That’s where you come in. We are looking for awesome companies <em>all around the world</em> who are willing to offer internships or junior developer positions to Rails Girls Summer of Code alumni.</p>
<p>If your company was unable to sponsor the summer of code this year, this is a great opportunity for you to still show your support. If you already sponsored this year, keep it coming!</p>
<p>Hiring a RGSoC graduate is a great idea. You’ll gain an employee with real hands on experience in the programming world, and who has already pushed working code to well a known and visible codebase. Your new employee will be an expert at communicating ideas within a team, and will not be afraid to submit code for review. Need more proof? RGSoC students are very excited about learning, and have oftentimes given up a previous career in order to pursue their goal, making them all the more motivated. This past work experience merged together with hard-earned tech savvy just might fit in perfectly with your company, making them an asset to your team.</p>
<p>As this is a worldwide program with students all across the globe, we are looking for exceptional companies in or around the following locations:</p>
<h5 id="australia">Australia</h5>
<ul>
<li>Sydney</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="colombia">Colombia</h5>
<ul>
<li>Barranquilla</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="finland">Finland</h5>
<ul>
<li>Helsinki</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="germany">Germany</h5>
<ul>
<li>Berlin</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="india">India</h5>
<ul>
<li>Pune</li>
<li>Mysore</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="macedonia">Macedonia</h5>
<ul>
<li>Skopje</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="peru">Peru</h5>
<ul>
<li>Lima</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="poland">Poland</h5>
<ul>
<li>Warsaw</li>
</ul>
<h5 id="usa">USA</h5>
<ul>
<li>Atlanta, GA</li>
<li>Washington, D.C.</li>
<li>Seattle, WA</li>
<li>Chicago, IL</li>
<li>Los Angeles, CA</li>
</ul>
<p>If you’re looking for talented women who are eager to continue learning, or just want more info about how you can help out after RGSoC, please <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">get in touch</a>!</p>
Spree Girls Winter of Code!Spree Girls2014-08-07T00:00:00+00:002014-08-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/spree-girls-blog-post<p>#Spree Girls Australia</p>
<p>The Spree Girls are Tracy Mu Sung and Catherine Jones, we are working on Spree eCommerce and live in Sydney Australia. There are 2 teams working on Spree this year, and we think this is fine since it is such a massive project. What makes us unique are that we are the first, and so far only, RGSoC team from Australia!</p>
<p>We both work full time, so are undertaking the RGSoC part time outside of our jobs. We meet up one night during the week, all day Sunday, and work remotely from each other the rest of the time. We make good use of Skype and email during the week, and have Google Hangouts with our mentor Trung Le in Melbourne (although we hate Google Hangouts).</p>
<p>We are a volunteer team, and you can find out more about what that means <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-volunteer-teams/">here</a>.</p>
<p>###How We Got Here</p>
<p><img src="http://www.tracecode.com.au/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/catherine.jpg" alt="Catherine" /></p>
<p>Catherine is a former fashion designer from the UK, who went back to college to study multimedia design. Once exposed to code she became so enamoured that she went on to study web design. She was taught using C# and PHP, but quickly found out how much better Ruby was.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.tracecode.com.au/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/group.jpg" alt="Tracy, Catherine, Croc" /></p>
<p>Tracy became exposed to coding while working in Digital Marketing. She met Catherine at one of the many Sydney Ruby events, and both have become actively involved in the community, attending Ruby Conf, Rails Camps, Hack Nights and ending up being mentors at a Rails Girls event.</p>
<p>###Our Hopes From The Project</p>
<p>We chose to work on Spree because one of the core contributors to Spree lives in Australia, the amazing Trung Le, and was keen to take on a Rails Girls team and teach them all about Spree. As Australia is not in a convenient time zone with other countries, it was important for us to have a mentor who was local (even though he is in Melbourne, not Sydney, it’s the same timezone).</p>
<p>As a part time team, our goal is to understand Rails better and learn, rather than make a new feature or add functionality for Spree.</p>
<p>###Our Experience So Far
Our original intention was to learn by answering issues from the log or questions on the mailing list, but after a few weeks of trying this we discovered that other people could answer things quicker than we could even understand the questions!</p>
<p>It was very dispiriting to spend a few days trying to work out the problem and come up with a suggestion/solution, only to discover the issue was since closed.</p>
<p>Spree is a massive project that has been around since 2004. It is a flexible ecommerce system that can be used to create online retail stores for products, games, downloads, subscriptions…almost anything because it is so flexible. It has a lot of users and contributers, a very active community and a constantly updated issues log and mailing list.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.tracecode.com.au/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/radar.jpg" alt="Core Contributor, Radar" /></p>
<p>Although only one repository, it is four separate engines: Front end, Back end, core and API. The complex nature of the Spree gem means it is taking us longer than expected to get our head around even the business logic (even though we started one month earlier to read all the docs and try to understand the project!)</p>
<p>After 3 weeks working on 3 issues and submitting only 1 pull request, we are now changing direction to focus on the business logic using drawings and understanding the concepts of service objects.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.tracecode.com.au/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/dan.jpg" alt="Mentor Dan" /></p>
<p>What we have learnt so far, and what our mentor keeps emphasising, is that understanding the business logic and being able to explain the business problem, is much more important than understanding the code. If you can understand and explain the problem first in laymans terms, then the coding part will be a lot easier.</p>
Team Species+ says hello!TeamSpecies+http://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-08-05T00:00:00+00:002014-08-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-species+-says-hello<p>Hi everyone :-) It’s time for our short introduction. Team Species+ are: <strong>Karolina Kaminska</strong> and <strong>Magdalena Niedzwiecka</strong>.
Karolina was studying Hungarian language at the University of Warsaw. She knows 5 other foreign languages apart of Hungarian. She’s also interested in computer graphics and a wide variety of different things. But when she attended the second edition of Rails Girls Warsaw last year, she finally fell in love with web development. In order to participate in RGSoC she quit her job.
Magdalena graduated in journalism at the University of Warsaw. Until quite recently she was working as a PR officer in one of Warsaw PR agencies. She was specializing in running PR projects for IT companies. Her first experiences with coding took place this year at the end of February - it was Rails Girls Warsaw workshop. Since then she does her best to learn.</p>
<p>Last but not least - we both are mothers :-)</p>
<p><img src="http://i.imgur.com/vDcbsMr.jpg" width="600" title="Here you can see us with our coaches, Tomasz & Piotr" /></p>
<p>OK, and now a few words about our project.</p>
<p><a href="http://speciesplus.net">Species+</a> is a web service for accessing key information on species of global concern. It’s based on the CITES database (<a href="http://www.cites.org/">here</a> you can find out what CITES is), but uses <a href="http://www.un.org/earthwatch/about/docs/Pdcms.htm">CMS</a> data as well - everything in order to protect endangered species of animals.
Species+ has over 20 thousand visits per month. Our task in the project is to analyse users’ behaviour. How do they search for species? Do they browse online or download data? Which bits of species information are most often accessed? After we extract this data, we’re going to create a tool for making the information more readable.</p>
<p>To find out more about users’ behaviour, we use ahoy_matey gem. At the moment we have to add ahoy tracking to Species+ API requests.</p>
<p>Let’s be honest - our project is not easy. During the relatively short time we have to learn some PostgreSQL & SQL and a lot of Ruby & JavaScript. From time to time we are facing problems with various gems & their compatibility with different versions of Ruby. Sometimes we feel a little bit overwhelmed, but we know that it’s just leaving our comfort zone. And when you leave your comfort zone, magic happens.</p>
<h2 id="take-a-look-at-our-bloghttpkamcodingwordpresscom-and-wish-us-luck">Take a look at <a href="http://kamcoding.wordpress.com/">our blog</a> and wish us luck!</h2>
Introducing ARIA TeamARIA Teamhttp://twitter.com/GirlsARIA2014-07-31T00:00:00+00:002014-07-31T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introduction-about-aria-team<p>Hi everybody, we are the <strong>ARIA Team</strong> and we want to say hi! My name is <strong>Melissa Torregrosa</strong>, I am 24 years old, and I’m a graduate in Computer Science. After my graduation I was working in the field of quality assurance and information system audit. I consider myself as an outgoing person, friendly and responsible. <strong>Paola Garcia</strong> is my teammate, she is 25 years old, she’s from Barranquilla-Colombia and she’s a graduate in Computer Sciences as well. She was working as a Process Analyst before RGSoC. Her goal this year is to become a Ruby on Rails developer. Currently she spend her time studying and researching technology, and enjoying time with her family.</p>
<p>We met at the University 5 years ago and there began our friendship. <strong>Guillermo Iguaran</strong> is our Mentor, <strong>Roberto Miranda</strong> and <strong>Laura Garcia</strong> are our coaches. We met Roberto and Guillermo during University and became good friends. Paola and Laura are sisters, and Laura participated in last year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code, and through her heard of RGSoC.</p>
<p><img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ARIATeam/web-portfolio/master/img/melipaocollage.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<p>##About our project!</p>
<p>The project name is <strong>“Improving Accessibility in Rails through ARIA”</strong>, and we chose this idea because right now people with disabilities who are working in development software applications have limitations with the tools they use. Traditional software developer tools weren’t designed with features who are required to be interpreted by assistive technology.</p>
<p>###Our goals are:
1. To add ARIA attributes to error pages thrown by rails, so that developers with visual disabilities can identify the details of errors.</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>To add support for accessibility attributes to the form helpers (label tag, form tag), so that developers can create web applications more easily.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>To add ARIA attributes to Ruby on Rails official website, in order to become an accessibility website.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>As you can see, since we are working with ARIA attributes that’s the reason for our name <strong>“ARIA Team”</strong>. We feel really excited with this opportunity and hope that our project will have a positive impact in the software development progress.</p>
<h2 id="ariateam-"><em>ARIATeam</em> .</h2>
<p>You can follow the team’s process here: <a href="http://ariateam.tumblr.com/">http://ariateam.tumblr.com/</a> and on <a href="https://twitter.com/girlsaria">Twitter</a>.</p>
And the conference tickets go to...Floorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-07-29T00:00:00+00:002014-07-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/tickets-raffle<p>All the students turned to Twitter, gave us their <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-06-09-conference-tickets/">conference</a> wishlists and the results are in! <em>And the conference tickets go to…</em></p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/3734491/b7877118-1717-11e4-9b4f-74c5b301eeb5.png" alt="raffle" /></p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/6">Team Participate</a> - FrozenRails</p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/5">ARIA Team</a> - Strangeloop</p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/2">code_padawans</a> - arrrrcamp</p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/12">Team Species+</a> - GoToConf</p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/8">Team Instructure (LTI)</a> - MadisonRuby</p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/14">RapidRailsGirls (RapidFTR)</a> - polyconf AND BaRuCo</p>
<p><a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/18">Team Speakerinnen</a> - eurucamp</p>
<p>###CONGRATULATIONS!</p>
<p>IF you ended up empty-handed, don’t worry, you will get another shot as <strong>we’ll be adding new conferences for a second round of ticket raffling.</strong></p>
<p><strong>And now what?</strong>
Well, now you can all start planning your trips and accommodation. Let us know if we can connect you to the local Rails Girls community to make your stay even more fun.</p>
<p>Then: enjoy the conference! Additionally, why not amaze the other attendees? We would love for you to share your Summer of Code story and that’s why we wrote up some <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-07-29-talk-tips/">handy nuggets to help you past your initial stage fright</a>.</p>
<p>###Thank you to all our round 1 conferences</p>
<p><a href="http://2014.eurucamp.org/">eurucamp</a>, <a href="http://2014.eurucamp.org/">Burlington Ruby Conference</a>, <a href="http://steelcityruby.org/">Steel City Ruby</a>, <a href="http://madisonruby.org/">Madison Ruby Conference</a>, <a href="http://2014.frozenrails.eu/">Frozen Rails</a>, <a href="http://www.baruco.org/">Barcelona Ruby Conf</a>, <a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/">The Strange Loop</a>, <a href="http://rubydcamp.org/">Ruby DCamp</a>, <a href="http://railsisrael2014.events.co.il/speakers-list">Rails Israel</a>, <a href="http://2014.arrrrcamp.be/">Arrrrcamp</a>, <a href="http://polyconf.com/">Polyconf</a>, <a href="http://gotocon.com/berlin-2014">GoTo Conference</a></p>
<p>Have fun!</p>
How to ace your lightning talkFloorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-07-29T00:00:00+00:002014-07-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/talk-tips<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/2246045/3922214/49d465dc-23c8-11e4-8adc-e5bbcb9d01ec.jpg" alt="Rails Girls Speakers" /></p>
<p>Many of you get to <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-07-24-conferences/">attend a conference</a> as part of your Summer of Code. Else you might also go to local meetups or user goups. For all of these, we highly encourage you to share your story in a lightning talk and spread the Rails Girls word. A lightning talk (usually about 5 minutes long) is a perfect way to show people you’re there, share your knowledge, inspire others with your story and get in touch with many wonderful and interesting people.</p>
<p>Talking to a large group of people, especially those more experienced than you, might feel like a large hurdle to cross. This is completely normal, even the most seasoned speakers still carry that feeling with them when they go on stage. Remember that everyone has to start somewhere, and lightning talks are the best ‘somewhere’. There is even a conference dedicated to <a href="http://lightning.io/">lightning talks</a>!</p>
<p><strong>“But what am I supposed to talk about? I only just started!”</strong></p>
<p>Well, the talk could be about your project and your contribution, how you found out about the project, why you decided to take on this task, the overall Rails Girls movement (there are still so many women out there who wanna learn coding and seldom have the chance to do so), the motivations to learn coding and sometimes change your complete life path along with it, … The options are endless!</p>
<p>It doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re talking tech or social. Lightning talks are designed to be a kind of “have a sneak peak at this little thingy” chat.</p>
<p><strong>Alright, let’s talk!</strong></p>
<p>There’s a massive amount of tips & tricks out there how you can prepare for a talk. We gathered those in <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conference-tips/">“How to go to a conference”</a>. There you can also find helpful nuggets on how to prepare your talk. They’re especially useful when that flutter says ‘hi’ again.</p>
<p>In addition to those:</p>
<ul>
<li>Try out your slides at home or within your team. Get familiar with different projector types, speaker notes (they can come in handy) and timers so you know how much time you have left to convince the crowd of your amazing project!</li>
<li>Try and put as little text as possible on your slides and have them support your chat in a visual way. We are all visual people and like nice pictures of you (two) coding, or a screenshot of your commit bar on GitHub ;)</li>
<li>We will prepare a slide deck with some factoids and numbers about Rails Girls Summer of Code. Shoot us a mail if you'd like to have that as a template!</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Sweet, now I only need a time and a place</strong></p>
<p>To get you talk on the agenda, contact the conference organizers about the possibilities. We could also get you in contact with them - just ask us!</p>
<p>Alternatively: many conferences have a CfP (Call for Papers) where you can submit your talk proposal. It should have a choosing where you say how long your talk’s supposed to be. If it hasn’t got a separate checkbox for this, you can also add questions to your description or write an email to the organizers.</p>
<p>A lightning talk is a great way to get some stage experience. And it’s over before you know it - promised ;)</p>
<p>If you know more great tips, please add them in the comments!</p>
<div style="font-size: 0.7em">
<em>Photo Credits (from left to right and upper to lower row)</em>
<ul>
<li>Susanne Derwein from <a hre="http://highwaytorails.tumblr.com">Team Highway to Rails</a> at Rails Israel 2013 (<a href="http://susannelearnstocodewithouttam.tumblr.com/post/64209357903/middle-eastern-conference-spree-pt-1">Susanne on her blog</a>)</li>
<li>Rails Girls Berlin workshop @ eurucamp 2013 (<a hre="https://www.flickr.com/photos/railsgirlsberlin/9662779173">by Rails Girls Berlin on flickr</a>)</li>
<li>Rails Girs Vienna (<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/raydoo/8398072138">by Raimund Appel on flickr</a>)</li>
<li>Linda Liukas at a Rails Girls workshop somewhere on this lovely planet (<a href="http://blog.railsgirls.com/post/67365212654/diary-of-a-doubly-new-rails-girl">from railsgirls.com</a>)</li>
<li>Akanksha Agrawal and Sana Khan of <a href="http://teamrubiniusrgsoc14.blogspot.de/">Team Rubinius</a> at Deccan Ruby Conf Pune (<a href="http://teamrubiniusrgsoc14.blogspot.de/2014/07/at-deccan-ruby-conf-pune.html">their blog post about the conference</a>)</li>
<li>Agata Radzińska and Aleksandra Puchta at a Rails Girls Warsaw workshop (<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/railsgirlswarsaw/8066979628">by Rails Girls Warsaw on flickr</a>)</li>
<li>Lena Hermann at a Rails Girls Berlin workshop (<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nerdbabe/13243439784">by nerdbabe on flickr</a>)</li>
<li>Jen Diamond and Joyce Hsu from <a href="http://rgsocbundler.github.io">Team Bundler</a> at Distill 2013 (<a href="http://rgsocbundler.github.io/2013/08/08/week4-day18.html">their blog post about the conference</a>)</li>
</ul>
</div>
Get your ticket to one (or more!) of these great conferencesFloorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-07-24T00:00:00+00:002014-07-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conferences<p>Get your twitter clients ready and join the rafflemania!</p>
<p>Like last year, a number of exciting conferences have offered free (team) tickets for you - the Rails Girls Summer of Code students. We heard wonderful stories from our students last year about how they made new friends, valuable connections, learned heaps and had tons of fun.</p>
<p>So we couldn’t help but do it again! By now, we have 26 tickets to 13 amazing conferences and we’re still adding more.</p>
<p>Since some of them already take place mid-program, we decided to do an early raffle-out now, followed by a second one later this summer. So, IF you end up empty-handed, don’t worry, you will get another shot! ;)</p>
<p><strong>How to get your hands on those awesome tickets</strong></p>
<p>We need you to tweet which conferences (find out their twitter handles on their websites) you’d like to attend - ordered by 1st choice, 2nd choice etc. - <strong>be sure to mention <a href="http://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc">@Railsgirlssoc</a></strong>, so that we can see your tweet and take it into the raffle.</p>
<p>These are two examples, how this could look like:</p>
<p>###Hey @Railsgirlssoc We would love to attend @arrrrcamp, @eurucamp and @rulu.
(and alternatively add #wishfulthinking #LOL).</p>
<p>###My Conf Wishlist for this summer: @SteelCityRuby and @frozenrails via @Railsgirlssoc.</p>
<p>By sending the tweet you automatically take part in the competition. Make sure you send your tweet by <strong>Monday July 28 12:00 (AM) CEST</strong>. We’ll announce the winners shortly after.</p>
<p>You can choose from any of the below mentioned conferences. Please keep in mind, that these tickets don’t include travel costs or accomodation, so better chose a conference near you or one where you could afford a travel to.</p>
<p><strong>What to do at the conference?</strong>
First of all, we want you to be amazed and inspired. A conference is one of the best places to learn heaps of stuff and talk to wonderful people.</p>
<p>Secondly, amaze the other attendees! We strongly recommend you to give a lightning talk and share the love of programming and your Summer of Code story. This is an important step to help us spread the word to even more seasoned programmers about the great opportunities of Rails Girls. Many conferences have slots for lightning talks, we can help you get in touch with the organizers. In a next post we’ll give you some tips & tricks on how to ace a 5 minute talk like that.</p>
<p><strong>Here are the conferences of the first raffle:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://2014.eurucamp.org/"><strong>eurucamp</strong></a>
August 1-3
Berlin, Germany
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://burlingtonrubyconference.com/"><strong>Burlington Ruby Conference</strong></a>
August 1-3
Burlington, VT
4 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://steelcityruby.org/"><strong>Steel City Ruby</strong></a>
August 15-16
Pittsburgh, PA
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://madisonruby.org/"><strong>Madison Ruby Conference</strong></a>
August 22-23
Madison, WI
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://2014.frozenrails.eu/"><strong>Frozen Rails</strong></a>
September 11-12
Helsinki, Finland
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://www.baruco.org/"><strong>Barcelona Ruby Conf</strong></a>
September 12-14
Barcelona, Spain
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/"><strong>The Strange Loop</strong></a>
September 17-19
St. Louis
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://rubydcamp.org/"><strong>Ruby DCamp</strong></a>
October 10-12
Prince William Forest Park, VA
2 stipends</p>
<p><a href="http://railsisrael2014.events.co.il/speakers-list"><strong>Rails Israel</strong></a>
November 4-5
Tel Aviv, Israel
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://2014.arrrrcamp.be/"><strong>Arrrrcamp</strong></a>
October 2-3
Ghent, Belgium
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://polyconf.com/"><strong>Polyconf</strong></a>
October 30-31
Poznan, Poland
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://gotocon.com/berlin-2014"><strong>GoTo Conference</strong></a>
November 6-7
Berlin, Germany
2 tickets</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
Hashrocket to support our remote helpdeskFloorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-06-25T00:00:00+00:002014-06-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/hashrocket-helpdesk<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-06-19-tealeaf-helpdesk/">We recently announced</a> how a bunch of awesome Tealeaf students and alumni will help this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code participants get the answers-they-need. Today we are excited to share that <a href="http://hashrocket.com/">Hashrocket</a> will also be joining our helpdesk team on <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.campfirenow.com/33c5b">Campfire</a>. Committing to 10 hours per week for the entire span of the program, at least one Hashrocketeer will hang out in our support room between 14:00 and 22:00 UTC - every day!</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/joshuadavey">Joshua - Josh - Davey</a> from Hashrocket on their involvement:
<em>“Rails Girls Summer of Code is something we’ve been following, and we are really happy to be a part of the program this year. We’re excited to help the students learn more about Rails and see the cool projects that come out of the program.”</em></p>
<p>And that’s not all. Hashrocket supports Rails Girls Summer of Code as a Silver sponsor AND offered to be a <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">Coaching Company</a>. Hashrocket builds solutions for the Web, iPhone and iPad, and specializes in Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android development. Again, It’s great to have them help us out!</p>
<h3 id="please-join-us">Please join us!</h3>
<p>We are always looking for more people to join the helpdesk.</p>
<p>In case you are interested, please register via our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams application</a> and specify your role as “Helping as a remote coach (helpdesk)”. Then sign in to our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.campfirenow.com/33c5b">Campfire chat room</a>, and you’re good to go!</p>
Tealeaf helps make our remote helpdesk even more awesomeFloorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-06-20T00:00:00+00:002014-06-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/tealeaf-helpdesk<p>The Remote Helpdesk was part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code concept right from the beginning. Coaches who are not assigned to a team (or just want to help even more) check in on the Helpdesk chat room to assist students with … any question they might have, should their local coaches not be immediately available.</p>
<p>Because both the students and remote coaches were located all around the globe, at least someone would be online at any time. And it did work reasonably well last year. But we think that’s not good enough. Our Remote Helpdesk wasn’t structured very well, and sometimes coaches weren’t actually available. On top of that we used IRC which isn’t accessible enough to newcomers.</p>
<h3 id="building-a-better-remote-helpdesk-with-tealeaf-academy">Building a better Remote Helpdesk with Tealeaf Academy</h3>
<p>So we decided to up the remote helpdesk to another level. We’ll be using Campfire this year, which is not only more accessible and nicer to look at, we can also paste screenshots more easily.</p>
<p>Apart from the tooling we are also very excited to announce that <a href="http://www.gotealeaf.com/">Tealeaf</a> will be managing the Remote Helpdesk this year, and a number of Tealeaf students will be joining and give support on Campfire. The Tealeaf Academy offers Ruby on Rails Online Bootcamps and excels in teaching programming remotely.</p>
<p>We are thrilled to have some of the Tealeaf junior join our helpdesk because we ourselves learned the most when explaining things to someone who is only slightly less advanced. And they are dying to help create useful contributions to Open Source, so we think this idea fits the Rails Girls Summer of Code concepts very well.</p>
<p>You can find the list of our Remote Coaches here on our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams application</a>.</p>
<h3 id="please-join-us">Please join us!</h3>
<p>We are always looking for more people to join the helpdesk.</p>
<p>In case you are interested, please register via our <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Teams application</a> and specify your role as “Helping as a remote coach (helpdesk)”. Then sign in to our <a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.campfirenow.com/33c5b">Campfire chat room</a>, and you’re good to go!</p>
These wonderful conferences support Rails Girls Summer of CodeFloorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-06-09T00:00:00+00:002014-06-09T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conferences-14<p>Last year a number of conferences offered (team) tickets to Rails Girls Summer of Code students. A few of them even supported the students with their travel costs and accommodation. We heard great stories from our students how they made new friends, valuable connections, learned heaps and had tons of fun.</p>
<p>This year around again 15 Ruby conference organizers offer tickets to their events. As RedDotRuby and Rulu take place before the official program we decided to raffle out these tickets to our alumni of last year (we will send you an email about this shortly, #youknowwhoyouare).</p>
<p><a href="http://rulu.eu/">Rulu</a>
June 19-20, Lyon, France
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://reddotrubyconf.com/">RedDotRubyConf</a>
June 26-27, Singapore
2 tickets</p>
<p><strong>And now for the conferences that take place during and after the program (drum roll):</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://brightonruby.com/">Brighton Ruby Conference </a>
21st July, Brighton, UK
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://2014.eurucamp.org">eurucamp</a>
August 1-3, Berlin, Germany
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://burlingtonrubyconference.com/">Burlington Ruby Conference</a>
August 1-3, Burlington, VT
4 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://steelcityruby.org/">Steel City Ruby</a>
August 15-16, Pittsburgh, PA
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://madisonruby.org/">Madison Ruby Conference </a>
August 22-23, Madison, WI
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://2014.frozenrails.eu/">Frozen Rails</a>
September 11-12, Helsinki, Finland
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://www.baruco.org/">Barcelona Ruby Conf</a>
September 12-14, Barcelona, Spain
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/">The Strange Loop</a>
September 17-19, St. Louis
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://rubydcamp.org/">Ruby DCamp </a>
October 10-12, Prince William Forest Park, VA
2 stipends</p>
<p><a href="https://railsisrael2014.events.co.il/store/orders/new">Rails Israel</a>
November 4-5, Tel Aviv, Israel
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://2014.arrrrcamp.be/">Arrrrcamp </a>
October 2-3, Ghent, Belgium
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://polyconf.com/">Polyconf </a>
October 30-31, POZnan, Poland
2 tickets</p>
<p><a href="http://gotocon.com/berlin-2014">GoTo Conference</a>
November 6-7 Berlin, Germany
2 tickets</p>
<p>… and we’re still adding conferences!</p>
<p>Attending a conference is the best way to meet the Ruby community - and for offering free tickets the above conferences desrve a big THANK YOU!</p>
<p><em>Are you an organizer of a Rails/Ruby related conference and would you like to give our students a similar (unforgettable) experience? Let me know: floor@railsgirls.com.</em></p>
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Volunteer TeamsRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-06-02T00:00:00+00:002014-06-02T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-volunteer-teams<h3 id="everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-volunteer-teams">Everything you ever wanted to know about volunteer teams</h3>
<p>This year, RGSoC has accepted <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/final-team-list-2014/">six volunteer teams</a> in addition to ten sponsored teams. It’s an exciting development, and you may be wondering, what is a volunteer team, and how do I become one?</p>
<p>Volunteer teams, like sponsored teams were hand picked by the selection committee from the pool of applicants. The chosen teams showed enthusiasm and demonstrated that they have a good level of support. We really wanted these teams in the program, but sadly, we couldn’t sponsor them. Instead of leaving them out completely, we took a leap of faith, and asked if they wanted to do it anyway. Lucky for us, six of them said yes!</p>
<h3 id="so-what-is-a-volunteer-team">So what is a volunteer team?</h3>
<p>A volunteer team is the same as a sponsored team, with two main differences. First, as the name implies, they do not receive monetary support from RGSoC, so they need to be financially stable enough to support themselves over the summer. Second, because of the financial constraints, volunteer teams are only asked to work part time on their open source project.</p>
<p>Aside from those two points, volunteer teams will participate in the summer of code and have the same experience as sponsored teams. They will:</p>
<ul>
<li>get access to the same support structure and benefits such as conference tickets</li>
<li>document their daily work on their <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/team-log">team log</a> and send in pictures/tweets</li>
<li>give a lightning talk at a conference</li>
<li>be assigned a supervisor</li>
<li>connect to other students via the RGSoC chat</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="how-do-i-become-a-volunteer-team">How do I become a volunteer team?</h3>
<p>This year’s applications are closed and teams have been selected, ready to kick off on 1st of July. If you want to be considered as a volunteer team next year, send in an application when applications open and show us what you’re made of!</p>
<h3 id="the-team-behind-the-teams">The team behind the teams</h3>
<p>Volunteer teams also have a great support structure behind them. <a href="https://twitter.com/BibiBienenstich">Susanne Dewein</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/travelingtamm">Tam Eastley</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/carpgezwitscher">Carsten Zimmermann</a> will all be volunteer team supervisors. You may recognize those names from last year: Susanne and Tam were students with the volunteer team <a href="http://highwaytorails.tumblr.com/">Highway to Rails</a>, and Carsten was their coach. They bring with them this summer a wealth of first hand information about what it’s like to successfully complete a voluntary summer of coding ruby on rails.</p>
The Final List of our Teams for Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-05-26T00:00:00+00:002014-05-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/almost-final-teams-list<p>It’s time to celebrate! After a great spurt in the campaign and with the
incredible support of our students we’re happy to announce: We are able to fund
10 sponsored teams, and there will be 6 volunteering teams, 32 students in
total \o/.</p>
<p>You have met the
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014-05-07-meet-the-first-seven-teams-rgsoc-2014">first seven teams</a>
a while back. Please say hi to the remaining 3 sponsored teams, and the 6
volunteering teams of this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code. We’re stoked to
see that much enthusiasm!</p>
<h3 id="sponsored-teams">Sponsored Teams</h3>
<p>Akanksha Agrawal and Sana Khan from Pune, India will work on a memory
visualization tool for Rubinius, which will help to get insights to memroy
usage and find memory leaks. They will be supported by their coaches
<a href="http://github.com/prathamesh-sonpatki">Prathamesh Sonpatki</a>,
<a href="http://github.com/vipulnsward">Vipul A M</a>, and
<a href="http://github.com/nishantmodak">Nishant Modak</a> from Pune,
as well as their mentor <a href="http://github.com/dbussink">Dirkjan Bussink</a>
based in Netherlands, and long time core contributor to Rubinius.</p>
<p>Kai Baraka and Valerie Sparks from Atlanta, USA will work on various
improvements to Bundler at the AT&T Foundry and Hypepotamus offices, supported
by their team of coaches Dion Salvage, Shawn Johnson. Roger Mahler and <a href="">Andre
Arko</a> will be their mentors. See here for the detailed
<a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/projects/issues/11">project proposal</a></p>
<p>Britney Wright and Jamela Black from Washington D.C., USA will work on
<a href="https://github.com/browsermedia/browsercms">BrowserCMS</a> and a BrowserCMS integration with
<a href="https://github.com/spree/spree">Spree</a>. They will be supported by their coaches
<a href="https://github.com/peakpg">Patrick Peak</a> and
<a href="https://twitter.com/tatianabodnya">Tatiana Bodnya</a> at the BrowserMedia offices,
also connecting them to the Spree team which both are located in Washington, D.C.</p>
<h3 id="volunteering-teams">Volunteering Teams</h3>
<p>Rocio Paez and Evette Kotze, from Lima, Peru will work on a personal migraine
research and diary tool which will help to collect statistics and insights
about the process of migraines. They will be supported by their coaches
<a href="https://github.com/goddamnhippie">Gustavo Beathyate</a> from Lima, and
<a href="https://github.com/frodsan">Francesco Rodriguez</a> from Buenos Aires, Argentina.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/catherine-jones">Catherine Jones</a> and
<a href="https://github.com/TracyMu">Tracy Mu Sung</a>
from Sydney, Australia (our first team from Australia, yay!) will work on
Spree, improving documentation, refactoring tests, and improving existing
features. They will be supported by a great team of coaches:
<a href="https://github.com/elle">Elle Meridith</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/geoffroh">Geoff Hodgson</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/lengarvey">Leonard Garvey</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/mootpointer">Andrew Harvey</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/tobyhede">Toby Hede</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/coderdan">Dan Draper</a>, and
<a href="https://github.com/suranyami">David Parry</a>.
<a href="https://github.com/joneslee85">Trung Le</a> from Spree Commerce is going to be
their mentor.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/jendiamond">Jen Diamond</a> and
<a href="https://github.com/stephaniebetancourt">Stephanie Betancourt</a>, “The Standard Librarians”, from Los Angeles
will work on a Try Ruby Standard Library in-browser REPL.
<a href="https://github.com/dipolesource">Michael McCormick</a> will be their main coach
and they will be hosted at and supported by their Coaching Company
<a href="http://pivotallabs.com">Pivotal Labs</a>.
<a href="https://github.com/krainboltgreene">Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene</a> and
<a href="https://github.com/rkh">Konstantin Haase</a> will help as their mentors.</p>
<p>Abril Vela and Colleen Masterson from Chicago will work on an LTI (Learning
tool) that integrates with online learning management systems based on
standards. The goal is to build a tool to help children practice reading
skills, with a focus on helping children with dyslexia become more proficient
at reading.
<a href="https://github.com/feministy">Liz Abinante</a> from
<a href="http://www.girldevelopit.com/chapters/chicago">Girl Develop It Chicago</a>
will be their main coach, and
<a href="https://github.com/phinze">Paul Hinze</a> will provide additional support.</p>
<p>Katharina Zwick and Brigitte Markmann from Berlin, Germany, will be working on a
<a href="http://rapidftr.com/">RapitFTR</a>
Rails backend for an upcoming rollout to Democratic
Republic of the Congo and Syria in November.
<a href="https://github.com/kaeff">Klaus Fleerkötter</a>
from ThoughtWorks and
<a href="https://github.com/sferik">Erik Michaels-Ober</a>
from Soundcloud will be their main coaches.
They will be hosted at the SoundCloud office with access to a pool of
additional support coaches such as
<a href="https://github.com/starkcoffee">Duana Stanley</a> (who coached a
<a href="http://2013.teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/3">successful team last year</a>)
and others.
<a href="https://github.com/sriprasanna">Sri Prasanna</a>
will act as their mentor, supported by Stuart Campo coordinating the project on
UNICEF’s side.</p>
<p>Akshata Mohan and Aayish Shetty from Bangalore, India will be working on
our Rails Girls Summer of Code
<a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org">Teams application</a>,
putting it into an even better shape for students to connect, form teams
and apply for next year’s Summer of Code.
<a href="http://about.me/monikamahanthappa">Monika Mahanthappa</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/itspanzi">Pavan Sudarshan</a> as well as
<a href="https://github.com/tomelam">Thomas Andrew Elam</a> will be their coaches,
and our very own
<a href="https://github.com/bastilian">Sebastian Gräßl</a>
will act as their mentor.</p>
Meet the first seven teams for Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014!RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2014-05-07T00:00:00+00:002014-05-07T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/meet-the-first-seven-teams-rgsoc-2014<p>We’d like to thank everyone who send in an application, the quality of
submissions was exceptionally high this year. The selection team had a tough 3
days deciding which teams will spend their summer coding on a number of
outstanding Open Source projects. Without further ado, we’d like you to meet
the teams:</p>
<p><strong>Utah Kate Newman and Lyz Ellis</strong> from Seattle, USA, will code on
<a href="https://diasporafoundation.org/">Diaspora*</a>, at their Coaching Company
<a href="http://nird.us/">NIRD</a>.
<a href="https://github.com/reneedv">Renee Hendricksen</a> (RailsBridge)
will be their primary coach, and Rails Girls veteran
<a href="https://github.com/kerrizor">Kerri Miller</a>
will help out. Fun fact:
<a href="https://github.com/lislis">Lisa Passing</a> and
<a href="https://github.com/carolinagc">Carolina</a>,
took part as a volunteering team in Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013, and will
now be their mentors. Find the project proposal
<a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/projects/issues/10">here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Paola Garcia and Melissa Torregrosa</strong> from Barranquilla, Colombia will be
improving accessibility in <a href="http://rubyonrails.org">Rails</a> by adding
<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria">ARIA</a> support.
<a href="https://github.com/lauragarcia">Laura Garcia Casadiego</a>,
Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013 alumni and a Computer Science student, and
<a href="https://github.com/robertomiranda">Roberto Miranda Altamar</a>,
lead Ruby on Rails developer and coach of the “New Rosies”
team last year, just like
<a href="https://github.com/guilleiguaran">Guillermo Iguaran</a>
from the Rails Core team, will assist them.</p>
<p><strong>Ute Mayer and Magdalena Frankiewicz</strong> will work at the offices of their
Coaching Companies <a href="http://asquera.de/">Asquera</a> and <a href="http://www.sponsorpay.com/">SponsorPay</a> in Berlin, Germany, coding on
<a href="http://padrinorb.com/">Padrino</a>. They will be supported by a great team of coaches:
<a href="https://github.com/schultyy">Jan Schulte</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/skade">Florian Gilcher</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/emig">Ernesto Miguez</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/justahero">Sebastian Ziebell</a>, and
<a href="https://github.com/kazjote">Kacper Bielecki</a>.
<a href="https://github.com/bitboxer">Bodo Tasche</a> will be their mentor.</p>
<p><strong>Cathy Nangini and Qian Zhou</strong> from Helsinki, Finland will work on a port of
<a href="http://liquidfeedback.org/">Liquid Feedback</a> to Grape/Ember. Check out the proposal
<a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/projects/issues/13">here</a>.
They will be supported by their coaches
<a href="https://github.com/zonpantli">Miika Pihjala</a> and
Mukesh Thakur
at their Coaching Company, <a href="https://www.flowdock.com/">FlowDock</a>.
<a href="https://github.com/oliverbarnes">Oliver Barnes</a>
from São Paulo will act as their mentor.</p>
<p><strong>Sarah Haselbauer and Edna Kropp</strong> will work on making
<a href="http://speakerinnen.org/">speakerinnen</a> even more awesome.
See <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/projects/issues/2">here</a>
for their project proposal.
<a href="https://github.com/zaziemo">Maren Heltsche</a> and
<a href="https://github.com/tyranja">Anja</a>,
Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013 alumni, are their mentors.
Both are active at <a href="https://github.com/rubymonsters">Ruby Monsters</a>
who built <a href="http://speakerinnen.org/">speakerinnen</a> as a learning project.
<a href="http://chadfowler.com">Chad Fowler</a>,
<a href="http://duncandavidson.com">Duncan Davidson</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/rylev">Ryan Levick</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/benjaminmateev">Benjamin Mateev</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/netroy">Aditya Yadav</a>,
<a href="http://www.dennis-schneider.com/">Dennis Schneider</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/schlubbi">Stefan Schmidt</a>, and
<a href="http://hans.io/">Hans Hasselberg</a>
will all be there to support them as coaches, over at their Coaching Company
<a href="http://www.6wunderkinder.com/en/#/welcome">6wunderkinder</a> in Berlin.
<a href="https://github.com/starkcoffee">Duana Stanley</a>,
Rails Girls and OpenTechSchool veteran, and coach at
last year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code, as well as
<a href="https://github.com/sferik">Erik Michaels-Ober</a>, both from
<a href="http://soundcloud.com">SoundCloud</a>,
will help by doing an additional code review.</p>
<p><strong>Marija Radevska and Magdalena Gulicoska</strong> from Skopje, Macedonia will be
working on
<a href="http://seemespeak.org/">SeeMeSpeak</a>,
an application that helps you learn sign language, supported by the entire
<a href="https://twitter.com/mk_rug">Macedonian Ruby User Group</a> (no kidding!).
<a href="https://github.com/dalibor">Dalibor Nasevic</a> will act as both their
lead coach and mentor. Check out the project propsal
<a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/projects/issues/23">here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Karolina Kamińska and Magdalena Niedźwiecka</strong> from Warsaw, Poland, will work on the
<a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/projects/issues/14">Species+</a>
project at their Coaching Company
<a href="http://www.rebased.pl/">Rebased</a>.
<a href="https://twitter.com/chastell">Piotr Szotkowski</a> and
<a href="https://twitter.com/_tomash">Tomasz Stachewicz</a>, both frequent Rails Girls
coaches, will support them as their coaches.
<a href="https://github.com/simaob">Simao Belchior de Castro</a> (UK) from
<a href="http://www.unep-wcmc.org/">UNEP WCMC</a>
will be their mentor.</p>
<p>We’re looking forward to what will be another fantastic summer no doubt!</p>
<h3 id="please-support-us">Please support us!</h3>
<p>We aim to support 3 more teams, and we have a huge number of additional,
amazing applications to pick from.</p>
<p>Please help us reach this goal and come on board as a
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/packages">sponsor</a>,
open a <a href="https://www.givie.io">giv.ie campaign</a>,
and ask everyone you know to
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">donate</a>
to Rails Girls Summer of Code!</p>
<p>Also please check out our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors">sponsors</a>
who help make this happen.</p>
Team Selection for 2014RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2014-05-06T00:00:00+00:002014-05-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-selection<p>After 60 hours of rating over 100 applications for Rails Girls Summer of Code,
we now are proud to say: we’ve made the first step. We have selected the first
7 teams and will notify them throughout the day via email.</p>
<p>Because this is the second edition of RGSoC and our future students had so much more time to prepare, this year’s average of applications was even richer, more complex and an even higher
standard than last year. So many amazing applications but also, so hard to pick only very few of them.</p>
<p>We still have 3 spots for teams left, which could be accepted, provided that we
are still able to fund the budget.</p>
<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/"><img src="/img/blog/2014/team-selection-3seatsleft.png" width="650" /></a></p>
<p>We are currently at USD 74 K, that means we need only USD 16 K to fund
those last seats. Please help us take on 3 more wonderful teams, and make
their dream of a Summer of Code come true.</p>
<p>Let’s <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">help fund them</a> and start
another summer with 10 awesome teams!</p>
Givie is here! Use it to help us fund the last 3 teams!RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2014-05-05T00:00:00+00:002014-05-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/givie-is-here<p>We have raised an amazing amount so far but we have so many great applications and every donation counts! We wanted a way to help raise money to get the last 3 teams (or more!) sponsored, so we created <a href="http://givie.io.">http://givie.io.</a></p>
<p>It’s a pretty simple concept: you create a campaign, decide on a fun pledge you would be willing to do
if you get enough backers, and BAM! Start spreading the word amongst your friends, family colleagues, anyone really and let them know why this is important. Givie redirects your supporters to the RailsGirls Summer of Code site, and after they have donated, the number of backers on your campaign gets updated.</p>
<p>The idea for Givie came from Duana’s personal campaign last year when she promised to go one month without
coffee if she could get 20 people to donate to RailsGirls Summer of Code. For someone whose twitter name
is <a href="http://twitter.com/@starkcoffee">@starkcoffee</a>, this was something people were curious to see.
We created <a href="http://givie.io">Givie</a> so that we we can scale this idea!</p>
<p>Duana sent this tweet out a few weeks ago, and fellow Australians-in-Berlin Marc and Sara answered the call:</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/starkcoffee/statuses/454584198993829889"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/Yi3fVc5.png" width="400" /></a></p>
<p>Please check it out, create campaigns, and help us fund more women for Summer of Code 2014!</p>
<p><a href="http://givie.io.">http://givie.io</a></p>
<p>Oh and we’d love to get your feedback! Email us at <a href="mailto:hello@givie.io">hello@givie.io</a> or tweet <a href="https://twitter.com/givieapp">@givieapp</a>.</p>
<p>Yours truly, The Givie Team: Duana (<a href="http://twitter.com/@starkcoffee">@starkcoffee</a>), Marc (<a href="http://twitter.com/@marcgreenstock">@marcgreenstock</a>) and Sara (<a href="http://twitter.com/@sareg0">@sareg0</a>)</p>
<p><a href="https://www.givie.io/about"><img src="https://dbi8z4cyyjpon.cloudfront.net/assets/givie-team-f82c2376c18f73ff5f15d498140f1512.jpg" width="600px" /></a></p>
Final Spurt is ON! Help us fund the last 4 teams!RGSoChttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2014-04-29T00:00:00+00:002014-04-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/final-spurt-is-on<p>Hi there! As the end of the application process is just around the corner (May 2nd), we thought we might update you on the status of the crowdfunding campaign. But let us give you the tl;dr version first:</p>
<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/"><img src="/img/blog/2014/final-spurt-rgsoc_beggars_small.jpg" width="600" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">Donate now</a>!</p>
<p>So let’s see what happened in the last 27 days. We’ve updated our progress bar, with the help of our designer <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rebecca/">Rebecca</a> and we love it:
<br /><br />
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/"><img src="/img/blog/2014/final-spurt-progress_bar.png" width="600" /></a>
<br /><br /></p>
<p>… and as you can see we are halfway on the road to support 20 students (10 teams) to work on a Open Source project of their choosing this summer. <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">Help us fund those last teams!</a></p>
<p>We are detemined to help our students have an amazing experience like for example <a href="http://railsgrrls.tumblr.com/">Laura</a> had. She was a student last year:
<em>“Last summer changed my life. I never expected this and now i’m moving to Hamburg to work as a graduate developer at ThoughtWorks. I couldn’t have done it without the Rails Girls Summer of Code and my mentors.”</em></p>
<p>Last week we received so much support and kind words from our community - we’re still blushing! The wonderful <a href="http://rubyrogues.com/152-rr-the-new-york-times-and-ruby-with-jacqui-maher/">Ruby Rogues</a> mentioned us in their podcast, and so did <a href="http://ideveloper.co/podcast110/">Scotty and John from ideveloper.co.</a> Jen Myers (also one of our Trust Comittee members) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvbx7CLV6nI&feature=youtu.be">talked about Rails Girls Summer of Code</a> to Mike from UGTASTIC at RailsConf. We were also mentioned as the <a href="http://fm4.orf.at/stories/1737477">‘web tip’</a> of the week on fm4 (awesome radio station you should check out nevertheless) and… guess who was featured (twice!) in <a href="http://rubyweekly.com/issues/190">The Ruby Weekly</a>?! Spoiler alert: it’s us! Plus, we love every single support tweet from you, especially when there’s a lot of hearts in them:</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/final-spurt-aaronpattersontweet.png" width="600" /></p>
<p>So we guess the only thing left to say is this:</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">Join our supporters today</a> and help us reach our goal this week!!!1!!1</strong></p>
<p>Reach out via Twitter, ask your company to sponsor us and/or empty out your pockets to help us fund our future students. ♥</p>
A lot has happened! What? Let me summarize that for you...Floorhttp://twitter.com/floordrees2014-04-12T00:00:00+00:002014-04-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/a-lot-happened<p>Hi there! We have made some changes to the website and we thought we would let you know!</p>
<p>First off: There is now a Support Chat for the community where you can hop on to give us all your questions - wether it’s about applying, getting involved, sponsoring etc. See you in here:
<strong><a href="https://railsgirlssummerofcode.campfirenow.com/da52f">Rails Girls Summer of Code Campfire Chat</a></strong>.</p>
<p>We also added a <strong><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/code-of-conduct/">Code of Conduct</a></strong> for the project - which was admittedly much overdue. A primary goal of Rails Girls Summer of Code is to be inclusive to the all of our part-takers - participants, coaches, mentors, supervisors and everyone in the organizing team, with the most varied and diverse backgrounds possible. As such, we are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ability, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and religion (or lack thereof). Our Code of Conduct outlines our expectations for all those who participate in our community and introduces <strong>our super-amazing Trust Committee</strong> composed of both core organizers and externals.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2014/a-lot-happened-trustcommittee.jpg" width="600px" /></p>
<p><em>Anne Wizorek, Jen Myers, Uta Sommer, Anika Lindtner & Sven Fuchs</em></p>
<p>We added <strong><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/sponsorship-guidelines/">Sponsorship Guidelines</a></strong> to outline what we are looking for sponsors. Spoiler alert: we are looking for companies that can identify with the values of Rails Girls Summer of Code and stand behind our mission to support women in technology and furthermore getting more women into Open Source. Do <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/sponsorship-guidelines/">check ‘em out</a> if you’re curious!</p>
<p>We also had <strong>loads of mentions during local Rails Girls events and Ruby user group meetups</strong>. <a href="http://twitter.com/laurawadden">Laura Wadden</a> gave a lightning talk during a <a href="http://railsgirlsberlin.de">Rails Girls Berlin </a> workshop in last week, and <a href="http://twitter.com/alicetragedy">Laura Gaetano</a> did the same at <a href="http://railsgirls.com/ostrava">Rails Girls Ostrava</a> in the Czech Republic. Miss Gaetano also mentioned our ambitious project during a recent <a href="http://vienna-rb.at/">vienna.rb</a> meetup (the Ruby user group in Vienna, Austria), as I did at the Berlin chapter. Judging from our Twitter response there are a lot of Rails Girls and user group chapters that will also host a Rails Girls Summer of Code related (lightning) talk. And the beauty is: everyone can do it! Do reach out if you feel you need any extra information, feel free to shoot us an email and we will bring you up to speed: <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a>.</p>
8 Scholarships in 7 days - One week of crowd fundingRGSoC teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-04-10T00:00:00+00:002014-04-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/one-week-crowd-funding<p>Wow, it’s been only one week since we <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">kicked off our crowd funding campaign</a> and we already have so much to tell!</p>
<p>The historical moment was April 3rd, 12:01 CET, when we tweeted about it for the first time:</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/2660446/2f17d992-c020-11e3-9d6e-180e61c0de11.png" width="500" /></p>
<p>First, thank you all for being amazing supporters of our mission and making our dream of more women in Open Source come true more day by day! This is really moving. Haven’t donated yet? Do eet now and join all the other wonderful people: <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/</a>! And while others can’t stop high fiving about this, running around with a big smile in their faces or buying chocolate for everyone, some couldn’t stand still anymore.</p>
<h3 id="we-just-cant-hide-it">WE JUST CAN’T HIDE IT</h3>
<p>The whole team has been so happy about this campaign! We <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS6eUIpwwds">just can’t hide it</a>. Two of our organizers, Floor and Anika, even jumped around out of joy:</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/2660426/f192f4ee-c01f-11e3-9192-6a004432093f.png" width="700" /></p>
<p>And these 7 days truly have been something to jump around about for all of us.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>We funded 8 students in 7 days,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>got 110 retweets of our announcement tweets,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>had 2.233 website visits within 4 hours,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>have 64 individual donors, (we found two Tobias’, two Patrick’s, two Jeremy’s in there),</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>got 17 ♥s in the comments</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>and have already 11 company sponsors hopping on board!</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>We are so happy about <a href="http://travis-ci.com">Travis CI</a> joining as a lead organizing supporter through <a href="http://foundation.travis-ci.org">Travis Foundation</a>and <a href="http://github.com">Github</a> as a returning Platinum sponsor, supporting us from the very beginning. We also are super happy to announce <a href="http://soundcloud.com">SoundCloud</a> again as one of our biggest sponsors, as well as <a href="https://developers.google.com/open-source/">Google Open Source</a>. So great to see the magic happen again.</p>
<h3 id="favorite-moments">FAVORITE MOMENTS</h3>
<p>Magic also always happens in the small moments and one of our favorite was definitely this donation comment from @eljojo:</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/2660664/884395f8-c023-11e3-87fd-25e02d5f8981.png" width="500" /></p>
<p>We also love every single tweet from you and that you help us spread the word.</p>
<p><img src="https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1711357/2661106/0974d736-c029-11e3-9c5d-656a1263b315.png" width="700" /></p>
<p>Another week lays before us, we look forward to having even more amazing people and companies join our great supporters and help us bring our mission forward: Getting more women into Open Source! You all started making that happen and are helping us reach our goal of supporting 20 students: <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/</a> ♥</p>
<h3 id="lets-fundhttprailsgirlssummerofcodeorgcampaign-those-next-scholarships">LET’S <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/campaign/">FUND</a> THOSE NEXT SCHOLARSHIPS!</h3>
The wonderful 6Wunderkinder, Envato and Springest are Coaching CompaniesFloorhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-04-01T00:00:00+00:002014-04-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/coaching-companies<p><a href="http://www.6wunderkinder.com/">6wunderkinder</a>, <a href="http://www.envato.com/">Envato</a> and <a href="http://www.springest.co.uk/">Springest</a> support our Summer of Code by being <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company/">Coaching Companies</a>, a role we defined for this year’s edition as we noticed that some of last year’s most successful student teams have been supported greatly by local coaching companies. Companies like SoundCloud, who provided a place to work and a pool of coaches to help out two student teams at their Berlin office, inspired us to formalize this role.</p>
<p>Having the exposure to a productive work environment and ready access to coaches, greatly helps our students get the most out of their summer! And the other way around, a Coaching Company brings in talented people, excited to learn as much as they possibly can. Their fresh take on projects, and possibly unorthodox questions, are a valuable asset. Plus: you get to actively support the Open Source community.</p>
<p>We are excited to have 6wunderkinder (Berlin, Germany), Envato (Melbourne, Australia) and Springest (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) on board. And all three of them just sent an email to the Summer of Code team about how they wanted to support Rails Girls Summer of Code in a more ‘offline’ way.</p>
<p>Last year, our dear friends at SoundCloud offered coaching and space to our students and besides that it was a big success for everyone involved, they clearly had some fun (and cookies!).</p>
<p><img src="http://25.media.tumblr.com/3ceb453d2a688392e2da5baabad6d24f/tumblr_mp25l8KK6t1swqx92o1_500.gif" width="500" /></p>
<p><strong>Did you know that</strong> being a Coaching Company means that coaches employed by the company will have to prepare one (or many) team’s application together with the students. If you are thinking about applying to Rails Girls Summer of Code, it might just be a good idea to <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">register at our teams app</a>, to find a coach at either of these companies.</p>
<p><strong>Chad Fowler</strong>, CTO at 6Wunderkinder:
<em>“We are excited to do anything we possibly can for Rails Girls Summer of Code. Looking forward to this summer!”</em></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/chadfowler">Chad</a> coincidentally is also a member of the organizing team behind Rails Girls Summer of Code.</p>
<p><strong>Wouter de Vos</strong>, CTO at Springest NL:
<em>“As a learning company, we love this opportunity to share our knowledge and help people find their dream. We think it is opportunities like these that build towards a more equal environment in the developer community, and we are proud to be a part of it.”</em></p>
<p><strong>Collis Ta’eed</strong> from Envato is also super excited to offer some help to future Rails Girls students in Down Under: <em>“We have <a href="http://inside.envato.com/envato-office-tour/">a lovely creative office in the heart of Melbourne</a> with plenty of desks, and we can offer some coaching support ready to go”</em></p>
<p>Envato is also one of our Early Bird sponsors. And they have some <a href="http://hub.tutsplus.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search%5Bkeywords%5D=Ruby&button=">great video tutorials about Ruby</a>. Just saying.</p>
<p>Do you have free space for at least a one to two-person team to work? Do have developers passionate about helping newcomers, and working on Open Source? You might just have what it takes to be a Coaching Company. Do register your company by emailing us: contact@rgsoc.org.</p>
3 Ways Your Company Can Support Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014Sarahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-03-18T00:00:00+00:002014-03-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/companies<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013 was a resounding success!</p>
<p>We had over 30 students working on Open Source projects over the summer, most
on a full-time basis, sponsored by the community and our company sponsors. A
significant amount of those students went on to present at conferences, and
meetups, as well as moved onto their own coding projects!</p>
<p>Preparations for this year’s instalment of RGSoC have begun, and we’re looking
for companies to support this incredible program in 2014.</p>
<p>This year we have three options for companies to join and support the program
as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Sponsors,</li>
<li>Coaching companies and/or</li>
<li>financially supporting organizers</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="sponsors">1. Sponsors</h2>
<p>While we are going to open our fundraising campaign as soon as possible,
sponsors who sign up early will get a significant amount of exposure, and
publicity, since their logo will already be on the website when the hype goes
off on Twitter.</p>
<p>Sponsors are listed on the site not only according to the size of their
donation, but also their sign up date. Our sponsorship packages will remain the
same as they were in 2013, giving you the opportunity to choose your desired
package early! Take a look at the packages we are planning to offer
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/sponsors/">here</a>.</p>
<p>Sponsor logos will be listed and linked via the Rails Girls Summer of Code
homepage and on the dedicated “Sponsors” page, with a blurb text that you are
free to choose.</p>
<p>Other perks of sponsorship include: getting your swag in goody bags which are
sent out to our student teams, your logo on students’ slides at conference
talks, mentions in our press kit and newsletters, blog posts dedicated to
sponsors, lots of tweets and of course love from the community.</p>
<p>Want to be one of our early-bird sponsors? Get in touch with us:
<a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a></p>
<h2 id="coaching-companies">2. Coaching companies</h2>
<p>Some of last year’s most successful student teams have been supported greatly
by local <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/guide/coaching-company">coaching companies</a>,
who have given them a place to work in their offices and a pool of coaches to
help them. We are looking to formalize this support into an option for
interested companies this year.</p>
<p>A great example from 2013 is
<a href="http://blog.soundcloud.com/2013/07/19/rails-girls-summer-of-code-welcoming-nicole-and-laura">SoundCloud</a>,
who sponsored RGSoC and provided coaching resources for two student teams at
their Berlin developer office.</p>
<p>Their developers were put into a coaching pool and alloted a certain amount of
time to coach the students. Students presented their work during company
meetings, and met with other staff members during lunch breaks. There were a
number of other companies who provided similar setups with great success, too.</p>
<p>Some companies have a policy in place that allows developers to work on Open Source,
or other beneficial projects, during business hours. If you do, ask your team
if they’d be interested in coaching a team of two students onsite.</p>
<p>Please keep in mind that student applications cannot be selected upfront and
being backed by a Coaching Company is not a guarantee for them to be accepted:</p>
<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application">Student applications</a>
will be rated based on the set criteria, and the best ranked applications will
be selected. However, you can greatly improve your team’s chances of getting a
sponsored seat by helping them prepare an outstanding application.</p>
<p>If you have the ability to be a “Coaching Company” we’d love to hear from you:
<a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a></p>
<h2 id="supporting-organizers">3. Supporting organizers</h2>
<p>A mammoth amount of work goes into organizing Rails Girls Summer of Code, and
a vast majority of it is done by volunteers. We would like to provide another
paid position for an RGSoC Orga Team Member to dedicate themselves to Summer of
Code organizational activities part- or fulltime.</p>
<p>A great example of financially supporting organizers is <a href="http://travis-ci.com">Travis CI</a>,
who support Rails Girls Summer of Code by paying Anika Lindtner to work on the
program, through the <a href="http://foundation.travis-ci.com">Travis Foundation</a>.</p>
<p>Another wonderful company is <a href="http://www.anynines.com/">anynines</a> who are <a href="http://blog.anynines.com/we-are-proud-to-support-rails-girls-summer-of-code/">supporting Floor Drees to help organize</a> this year’s edition.</p>
<p>The sponsored organizer will have displayed a track record of reliability and
honesty, and will be vetted to ensure they will make terrific use of a paid
position.</p>
<p>If you are interested in this new initiative, then please get in touch:
<a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a></p>
Applications for Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014 are open!RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-03-14T00:00:00+00:002014-03-14T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/applications-open<p>It’s Friday and we are in love: With this we are officially opening the
applications for Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014!</p>
<h4 id="the-applications-will-be-open-until-may-2nd-2359-utc">The applications will be open until May 2nd, 23:59 UTC.</h4>
<p>This is the timeline we are aiming for:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>14. March</strong>: Open applications!</li>
<li><strong>March</strong>: Crowdfunding start</li>
<li><strong>02. May</strong>: Close applications!</li>
<li><strong>03.-04. May</strong>: Rank applications</li>
<li><strong>05.-06. May</strong>: Acceptance letters</li>
<li><strong>June</strong>: Preparations</li>
<li><strong>1. July</strong>: Start RGSoC 2014!</li>
</ul>
<p>All you have to do now is head over to our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application">Application
Guide</a> and read on
about what you need to apply for a summer full of Open Source code.</p>
<p>We wish you all the luck in the world and if there is anything the Application
Guide can’t solve for you: Don’t hesitate to <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/about/">contact
us</a>!</p>
<p>Happy applying everyone! Let’s get this summer started.</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>Application Guide: <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/application-guide/">railsgirlssummerofcode.org/application-guide/</a></p>
<p>Projects examples: <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/where-to-start/">railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/where-to-start/</a></p>
<p>Apply here: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/application">teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/application</a></p>
Where to Start With Rails Girls Summer of CodeTamhttp://twitter.com/travelingtamm2014-03-12T00:00:00+00:002014-03-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/where-to-start-2014<p>The second annual Rails Girls Summer of Code is just around the corner! As a potential applicant, you’re probably wondering what makes a good project, workspace, coach/mentor, as well as how to find all these seemingly elusive necessities. We’ve just published this new, shiny <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students/application">Application guide here</a> but we also had Tam Eastley (former Team Highway to Rails member, and 2014 Organizer) put together this post for you with some successful examples from 2013.</p>
<h2 id="projects">Projects</h2>
<p>RGSoC 2013 had teams from all around the world working on a number of exciting open source projects, with each team tackling their challenges in different ways. Here a few examples to whet your appetites:</p>
<p><strong>Team Species+</strong> made a beautiful interactive <a href="http://species-app.herokuapp.com/">app for displaying CITES protected animals in Poland using the Species+ API</a>. Their recap video was featured in our last blog post, <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/2014/">here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Team Spree</strong> contributed to <a href="http://spreecommerce.com/">Spree</a>, an e-commerce application. They spent a large portion of their time learning Ruby on Rails, which enabled them to implement their small Spree feature towards the end of the summer.</p>
<p><strong>Team Punchgirls</strong> created on an <a href="http://jobs.punchgirls.com/">open source job-board</a> from scratch complete with twitter and github integration.</p>
<p><strong>Team Inchworms</strong> worked on <a href="http://www.sinatrarb.com/">Sinatra</a>, a library for serving HTTP from your Ruby program. It is simple, flexible, and mature. They worked alongside Sinatra maintainer Konstantin Haase, who also acted as their mentor.</p>
<p><strong>Team Bundler</strong> worked on <a href="http://bundler.io/">Bundler</a>, one of the community’s most widely used gems. They made the documentation easier to access and to read. As the summer progressed, they also worked on small features and fixes as they popped up.</p>
<p><strong>Team Dysania</strong> worked on <a href="http://www.discourse.org/">Discourse</a>, a Rails forum software. They focused on extracting oneboxing, a feature of Discourse, into a gem.</p>
<p><strong>The New Rosies</strong> contributed to <a href="https://github.com/NewRosies/conductor">Conductor</a>, a Web-UI for assisting in the development of Rails apps. They decided upon the project after seeing it on the 2013 Rails Girls Summer of Code project ideas page.</p>
<h2 id="working-space">Working Space</h2>
<p>The ideal working space has the right number of desks, is close to your coach and/or mentor, has a strong internet connection, and is (in a perfect world) free to use. You’ll be happy to hear that this is not as hard to find as one might think, and many companies are excited about having learners within their midst.</p>
<p>When it came to somewhere to work, <strong>Team Species+</strong> simply asked <a href="http://hackerspace-krk.pl/">Hackerspace Kraków</a> if they could use their space, and they said “ok”. It’s just that easy!</p>
<p><strong>Team Highway to Rails</strong> worked in the offices of <a href="http://www.absolventa.de/">Absolventa</a>, where our two coaches and mentor were based. We were supplied with computers and sat within the development team of seven people who were always on hand to help.</p>
<p><strong>The New Rosies</strong> worked at their University and met with their coaches and mentor on weekends.</p>
<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/">SoundCloud</a> hosted two sponsored teams and one volunteer team in their offices last summer. The teams had desk space, daily access to coaches, and were surrounded by numerous excited programmers who were eager to hold workshops, host book-clubs, and chat over a free lunch. Yeah, we know… Pretty sweet ;)</p>
<p><strong>Team Punchgirls</strong> worked from home, and met up with their coaches a few days a week in cafes around Buenos Aires.</p>
<p>As you can see each team found a different solution, dependant upon their needs and location. The main thing they all have in common, is that all were proactive about finding the best solution they could.</p>
<h2 id="coaches">Coaches</h2>
<p>For a newbie to the world of programming, approaching someone you look up to and asking them to guide you through three months of intense learning during the summer, can feel like a daunting task. But fear not! There are lots of programmers out there who love teaching and who will jump at the chance to change someone’s life. Go ahead! Ask! We dare you.</p>
<p><strong>Team Species+</strong> found their coach through <a href="http://webmus.es/en">WebMuses</a>, a women empowered IT community in Poland, of which the team is a part.</p>
<p><strong>Team Inchworms</strong> approached the coaches of their local Rails Girls project group.</p>
<p><strong>The New Rosies</strong> found their coaches and mentor via their local Ruby community.</p>
<p><strong>Team Spree</strong> put out a call on the Spree google group and were met with support, ideas, and enthusiasm from the community.</p>
<p><strong>Team Punchgirls</strong> found their coaches from the Rubysur community. They started with a mentor, who suggested a coach, who then brought another on board.</p>
<p>My team-member from <strong>Team Highway to Rails</strong> approached her co-workers. She found coaches who were excited about teaching, and passionate about helping women succeed in the field of web development.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/792560/1d1326d8-eba6-11e2-8fb3-2de8298fb07b.png" width="500" /></p>
<p>We hope these examples take away some of the intimidation of getting started on your SoC application process, and highlight how there is no one way to go about sourcing your team, coaches and working space. Now get out there, approach some developers, and find a project you’re excited out! We’re all excited to hear what you come up with.</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>To see a full list of teams and projects from 2013, check out <a href="http://2013.teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams">last years Team App</a>.</p>
Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014 - Here we come!Anikahttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2014-02-24T00:00:00+00:002014-02-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rgsoc2014<p>Good news on a Monday and we want you to know it first:</p>
<p><strong>There will be a Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014!</strong> Yay!</p>
<p>Do you want to join our team as an organizer? Wonderful! We are happy about every hand that helps with copy writing or fundraising, getting the word out, improving our apps, improve communication, the campaign or help our applicants find Open Source projects.</p>
<p>Shoot an email to <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a> and let’s get the magic started!</p>
<p>We are currently working on the application process and will publish a guide amd more infos soon, so stay tuned!</p>
<p>P.S. Remember last year? Here is one of our favorite videos from Team Species+ who made a short film about their Summer of Code. Enjoy!</p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/78348473"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/2243866/12ce0ba2-9d35-11e3-918f-ffa916e28fba.png" width="500" /></a></p>
<p>This really calls for another summer like it, doesn’t it?</p>
Great news for the Open Source scene and Rails GirlsRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/RailsGirlsSoc2013-11-25T00:00:00+00:002013-11-25T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/travis-foundation<p>So much love!</p>
<p>Travis launched their <a href="foundation.travis-ci.org">Foundation</a> officially last friday and the happy happy news made quite some noise in everybody’s tiwtter feed/ mail boxes. Great news for Open Source, since they launched Open Source Grants and will basically support amazing things happening. ♥</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1613442/45d34646-55d9-11e3-8fcd-3f0f31c0af23.gif" alt="get_cat" /></p>
<div align="left"><font size="2px"><font color="#CAD4D4">We hope, this will be one of the next OS projects, they help fund!</font></font></div>
<p>On the Rails Girls Blog, <a href="twitter.com/lindaliukas">Linda</a> wrote about <a href="http://blog.railsgirls.com/post/56429177963/rails-girls">how the Rails Girls Movement sometimes needs heroic people and why we all will love Travis Foundation forever</a>.</p>
The secret missionAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-11-11T00:00:00+00:002013-11-11T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/packages<p>“Hey wouldn’t that be cool if our sponsors could send us stuff that we can send to the teams?”
This was the beginning of our secret mission <em>keep on coding package</em>. Since June we’ve written to all our sponsors, have tracked down lost packages, unpacked stickers, buttons, sunflower seeds, gummy bears, laptop bags, bike seat covers, note books, pens, magic tricks, t-shirts, bags and fought with german customs over packages, with the post office over declarations and with our printer. Packing, packing, packing.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501237/7f23bba0-4888-11e3-8ddc-1b2610b3dbb5.jpg" width="200" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501149/c73894c6-4886-11e3-8ad4-999655a79661.jpg" width="200" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501146/c726fd56-4886-11e3-80a7-13e4a87aaeb1.jpg" width="200" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501147/c737c9c4-4886-11e3-95ce-afd805a1bfbe.jpg" width="200" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501143/c7117ec2-4886-11e3-8765-66a498fcda2f.jpg" width="200" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501148/c7389214-4886-11e3-85b3-75f66d25061c.jpg" width="200" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1502248/e426eb62-4897-11e3-8d96-d2ae9da4819d.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<p>Three months we collected all these precious things, took up half the Travis CI office with brown packages from bottom to ceiling and trained our arms when bringing the packages all to the post office.</p>
<p>Now nearly all packages have arrived and this is thanks so much again to our accomplices who happily engaged in our surprise mission! We want to especially say thanks to our silver and bronze sponsors like <a href="wooga.com">Wooga</a>, <a href="dawanda.de">DaWanda</a>, <a href="groupon.de">Groupon</a>, <a href="http://www.aupair-world.net/">Aupairworld</a>, <a href="Bendyworks.com">Bendyworks</a>, <a href="Innoq.com">InnoQ</a>, <a href="Jumpstartlab.com">Jumpstartlab</a>, <a href="Honeybadger.io">Honeybadger</a>, <a href="Gnip.com">Gnip</a>… who took the time and effort to send us presents! It was a pleasure being in cahoots with you. We spread a lot of happiness together!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501925/4f6910f8-4893-11e3-85a4-93f79a40a5af.png " width="600" /></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1492921/d2ffcc90-47c6-11e3-906c-7ee58abdb26d.jpg" width="600" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1511863/0cd77cb4-4abb-11e3-91d0-f10e6f31fab2.jpg" width="600" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1511865/0cfe4eac-4abb-11e3-971a-669258e7f24f.jpg" width="600" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1511866/0cffea00-4abb-11e3-9044-cc5d429cb90b.jpg" width="600" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501825/e29366b4-4891-11e3-9a72-e228bcb1337c.png" width="600" /></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501826/e2941cd0-4891-11e3-82ff-e2bf5031b457.png" width="600" /></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1501879/ad7f7b06-4892-11e3-8659-2223179217ef.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1492731/59fda80a-47c4-11e3-9899-f3152ea2efca.JPG" width="600" /></p>
<p>WHEEEEEE!</p>
Looking back to look forwardAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-10-30T00:00:00+00:002013-10-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/feedback<p>Oh my! I still can’t believe that this crazy wonderful summer is over! Can you? For everybody who wants to help us out and give us something: Your opinion!</p>
<p>To understand what happened this year, to make the next one even better, we want to know how your summer was. Honestly! <em>(You are encouraged to not spare our feelings ;) )</em>
Say what you always wanted to say and fill out these feedback forms. You will make us very happy and help a lot to evaluate our program. Every single feedback is super valuable to us ♥</p>
<p>Stundents: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z14O-7qHenDN0YQSnTYN2eS_Jvk_Gv7cJNi-uVB83jU/viewform"><em>-> start</em></a><br />
Coaches: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Jv5q62DwRXga4x0Y317IGLCOcHUlMZGZ3sC5pIKM9NE/viewform"><em>-> start</em></a><br />
Mentors: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1wusOm5p7wK_Hs5yAbSvkc68EIXnxqrdyv9rFTqsUVzE/viewform"><em>-> start</em></a><br />
Organizers: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1r02Ju0vyODOWo8a2c0elRoqa_n8_c21IQhyUjFxqwlU/viewform"><em>-> start</em></a><br />
Supvervisors: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BxTiTyNrmbwE_q8IUc3ttLr0NVP-ECgnvaSSP6teWI8/viewform"><em>-> start</em></a><br /></p>
<p>Thanks a ton.
Lots of hearts to you, you are awesome!</p>
Even more Silver Sponsors!Tamhttp://twitter.com/travelingtamm2013-10-23T00:00:00+00:002013-10-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/silver-sponsors-pt-2<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/silver-sponsors-pt-1/">Last week,</a> we presented the first five of our remarkable silver sponsors. Now you can learn more about the other half. These generous guys make RGSoC possible; we think they’re pretty awesome!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.envato.com/"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1408492/b4a7df24-3d82-11e3-9ad7-91436b528217.png" width="200" /></a>
<strong>“Envato is the Australian company behind an ecosystem of sites that helps millions of people earn and learn. We love summer, Rails, and supporting women in the tech community, which makes Rails Girls Summer of Code & Envato a match made in Internet heaven.”</strong> We agree, thanks Envato, you’ve helped us a lot starting step by step to make the Open Source community even better!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.innoq.com/de"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1408508/01e7d0e6-3d83-11e3-9e06-e2d9b73912a6.png" width="200" /></a>
<strong>“innoQ is a consulting/software development firm with a focus on technology and architecture, and we maintain a very engineering-oriented company culture among our around 60 people. (…) with our involvement we want to achieve two things: Send a clear message about our attitude towards women in tech (we’re welcoming them), and do a small part in increasing the number of women who consider a career in tech in the first place.”</strong> innoQ has also been involved with numerous Rails Girls events by hosting and providing coaches. We are lucky to now also have them as sponsors!</p>
<p><a href="http://gnip.com/"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1408518/190451be-3d83-11e3-8b99-573eb9fd26b6.png" width="200" /></a>
Gnip makes the <strong>“ever/expanding universe of social media data available via a consistent and reliable architecture so the world can realize the full potential of this amazing stream of information.”</strong> Located in Boulder, Colorado, the company won the Best Place to Work award in 2012, and this summer also won over our hearts with their donation. You rock, Gnip!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.groupon.com/"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1408521/3793a1ca-3d83-11e3-9642-bd5352cb891f.png" width="200" /></a>
At this point everyone knows Groupon, they are <strong>“a global leader in local commerce, making it easy for people around the world to search and discover great businesses at unbeatable prices.” But did you know that Groupon also have Women in Engineering and Employee Resource Groups like Women@Groupon and Pride@Groupon in order to **“foster diversity at work”</strong>, especially in the tech scene? They donated to RGSoC because it aligned with their core values, those of supporting women and increasing diversity. Groupon is <strong>“happy to support dreams coming true”</strong> and after such a successful summer, we can say that you have!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.shopify.com/"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1408529/4a71ded8-3d83-11e3-9289-e267cddc3536.png" width="200" /></a>
<strong>“At Shopify, we help emerging small businesses get off the ground and grow into successful companies. We do this by creating great technology and by making it accessible to people that previously wouldn’t be able to afford it.”</strong> With their silver donation, Shopify also supports women in tech and helps them grow into successful programmers!</p>
<p><a href="http://supadupa.me/)"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1408535/5da7416e-3d83-11e3-8366-fae29e14c5d8.png" width="200" /></a>
SupaDupa is a <strong>“premium affordable boutique e-commerce platform aimed at people with an uncompromising eye for design who have one or many products to sell.”</strong> As their story goes, <strong>“almost two years ago SupaDupa was a flimsy idea with barely a leg to stand on!”</strong> Hmmm sounds like the early days of the RGSoC, and without amazing sponsors like you, we wouldn’t be here! You guys are supa!(…dupa)</p>
<p>Thanks sponsors, and keep supporting women in tech!</p>
Meet our Silver Sponsors!Tamhttp://twitter.com/travelingtamm2013-10-18T00:00:00+00:002013-10-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/silver-sponsors-pt-1<p>In the lead up to the Rails Girls Summer of Code, female coders around the globe were frantically refreshing the RGSoC donate page. Everyone was talking about what an amazing opportunity this summer was, how it would change so many lives, and how it had the potential to jump start the careers of women who had discovered their love of programming a little later on in life.</p>
<p>With each passing day, the amounts donated grew bit by bit, and uncontrollable excitement followed. Tweets from potential students, all in caps locks, circulated, as companies thrilled by the idea of having more women in the vastly male dominated tech scene gave what they could.</p>
<p>Without these constant and impressive donations, RGSoC wouldn’t be what is today, and for this, we have ten silver sponsors to thank. Here is the first half.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.anynines.com/"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1333477/950bf636-3595-11e3-8803-d0fd71c5d826.png" width="200" /></a>
<strong>“Anynines is an upcoming PaaS written in Ruby. A hosting that grows with your apps!”</strong> But Anynines isn’t just about business. the company also <strong>“supports selected non-profit open source and charity projects with free hosting.”</strong> Non-profit open source and charity projects? The summer of code couldn’t have found a better match.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.aupair-world.net/"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1333502/1182cce4-3596-11e3-9902-ebc342387544.png" width="200" /></a>
<strong>“Aupair World is the world’s leading au pair agency on the Internet. It lets au pairs and host families make contact with each other and arrange au pair placements directly and independently.”</strong> With 24 full-time employees, Aupair World not only helps families find their perfect au pair, but is now also a supporter of RGSoC and female programmers around the world. Thank you!</p>
<p><a href="http://de.dawanda.com/"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1333509/472d8ff0-3596-11e3-811d-91946941722a.png" width="200" /></a>
Rails Girls in Berlin are already well aware of DaWanda. The company has supported numerous Rails Girls workshops, and many happy new programmers have walked away with DaWanda swag following a full day of coding, as well as a newfound love for the company. For those who don’t know, <strong>“DaWanda is a marketplace where you can buy unique, customized and handmade products made by talented people, and sell your own creations.”</strong> Thanks for the continued support DaWanda!</p>
<p><a href="https://www.engineyard.com/"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1333520/73551c1a-3596-11e3-8714-58255bb4d3ba.png" width="200" /></a>
<strong>“Engine Yard is the leading Platform as a Service (PaaS) empowering developers to plan, build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud. Engine Yard was started in early 2006 to meet a genuine need: customers were developing business-critical Rails applications, but they didn’t want to worry about application deployment, management and scaling.”</strong> Engine Yard is also committed to community, participating in meetups, user groups, conferences, and parties. As a community for women and and their supporters, we’re thrilled to have Engine Yard on board and a sponsor!</p>
<p>Next week, you’ll read about the remaining silver sponsors and their motivation to support RGSoC. Rock on!</p>
Behind the scenes with: RebeccaAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-10-16T00:00:00+00:002013-10-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rebecca<p>They are everywhere. Just glance to the right, at the bottom or click on any other page: The wonderful, cute drawings that made my day for the last four months.</p>
<p>Today I want to show you, who’s behind that. Who made RGSoC look so amazing and could draw anything that we wished for. We are so happy she’s here, please meet: Rebecca Conrad!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1329686/21b027a8-351c-11e3-9954-0906c550d4cf.jpg" width="310" style="padding-right: 2px;" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1329736/2cd0fd96-351d-11e3-8efb-03b809ebee37.jpg" height="575" style="padding-left: 2px;" /></p>
<div class="image-credits">photo: Anika Lindtner</div>
<p>Some weeks ago we met at the Travis CI office and - some days now it’s hard to believe - it was really warm outside. We chatted and I asked her some questions to get to know the woman with the most amazing tattoos and the one who can draw like I always dreamed of. After doing a lot of funny friday-hug-pics, we settled down on the couch and started talking.</p>
<h3 id="how-did-you-do-these-scribbles-for-rgsoc-at-the-computer">How did you do these scribbles for RGSoC? At the computer?</h3>
<p>I actually start by plain drawing old fashion in my sketch books. Then I scan it and work on it at the computer a bit.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1329557/7378fa9a-3519-11e3-9875-0dc782e2148e.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<h3 id="so-when-did-you-actually-start-drawing">So, when did you actually start drawing?</h3>
<p>When I was a kid and I went with my class to the “Deutsches Technikmuseum”, we had to draw the machines we saw there. I was the only one who had fun doing that - that’s when I first realized, that I had a passion for drawing.</p>
<p>But actually half of my family is creative, my grandpa was an author and stage actor at the “Berliner Ensemble”, grandma would do poster designs and my uncle is a painter, so no surprises there ;)</p>
<p>Later I studied graphic design at the BTK where I also learned everything from comic to aquarell. When I started to understand the different techniques and possibilities I knew that drawing and illustrating will probably be something I want to do for the rest of my life.</p>
<h3 id="did-you-always-draw-for-yourself-or-did-you-share-it">Did you always draw for yourself or did you share it?</h3>
<p>Well, I always drew for myself in my free time. A lot of the stuff dusted away in my drawers because it used to cost me (and still sometimes does) a bit of effort to share my work with others. But after 5-6 years of drawing regularly, getting feedback from other students, teachers and friends, I grew more confident and eventually created a website.</p>
<h3 id="which-kind-of-has-a-weird-name-right">Which kind of has a weird name, right?</h3>
<p>Yeah (laughs) - <a href="http://www.ejaculesc.com/">ejaculesc.com</a>. I wanted to combine creative ejaculations (or “Künsterliche Ergüsse”) with escaping since drawing, painting, crafting is always a bit like a getaway for me. You spend hours concentrating on pen and paper, just letting the ideas pour out and forget about time and the world around (and the pizza in the oven). It´s a bit like mediation, or programming? So I just merged those 2 things together and this is how it came to the name for my website. Perhaps it´s weird, I guess, but I like weird. The downside is that I get lots of corny spam mails.</p>
<h3 id="what-do-you-like-to-draw-best">What do you like to draw best?</h3>
<p>Usually something that doesn´t require a masterplan. Spontanious scribbles. I like those abstract telephone call sketches a lot. I really have troubles keeping any sheet of paper blank.</p>
<p>But my favorite are <a href="http://www.ejaculesc.com/portfolio-item/gazelle/">these animals</a>, I draw lately.</p>
<p>I also like crafting things, things you do with your hands: Pyrography, pottery and old fashion techniques like lino cut. I like to experiment a lot and always have phases I go through, so my favorites always change.</p>
<h3 id="sounds-really-fun-you-also-experiment-with-programming-right">Sounds really fun! You also experiment with programming, right?</h3>
<p>In one of my former jobs, I sat in a room with two programmers, and I got more and more curious what mysterious number thing they were talking about so I went to find out. I attended a JS course from Open Tech School and was intreagued. I wanted to start solving this mysterious world of code. Then I read about Rails Girls Berlin and from there on everything took it’s way.</p>
<p>Now I’m meeting up with the <a href="https://github.com/rubymonsters">ruby monsters</a> (the first study group that formed out of Rails Girls Berlin) at the Travis CI to program every week, but you can’t leave it at that. You have to do that at home too and learn regularly, repeat and repeat to feed the progress bar. It´s not always easy to stay focused and motivated. Have to admit I get lazy sometimes and level down. But I am super grateful for this study group and the experiences. Also watchig the whole railsgirl´s movement develope is exciting. I am happy to play a little part in it. :)</p>
<h3 id="did-you-have-any-goals-when-learning-programming">Did you have any goals when learning programming?</h3>
<p>At first I did it because it was fun, to do something that had nothing to do with drawing. But I found also similarities. programming is also creative, meditative and abstract, so it’s actually not THAT far away. ;)</p>
<p>I have this idea of a little app and it would be great to build it on my own eventually.</p>
<h3 id="what-kind-of-app">What kind of app?</h3>
<p>Just a tiny thing, some sort of trend indicator for your feelings. You would be able to push three emoticons buttons to document your every day mood.
Then have some kind of data visualization for it so you can easily see your ups and downs over the year.
Or maybe a fart app and you could record your own sounds. ;)</p>
<h3 id="are-you-going-to-continue-coding">Are you going to continue coding?</h3>
<p>Yes. I want to keep on learning Rails but I am also becoming very interested in really learning frontend. I used to work at a place where we had a clear seperation between designer, frontend/backend developer. But things have changed and you need to know about coding in a lot of jobs already. I think it´s about time to become seriously familiar with javascript, HTML and CSS. So lot´s to learn!</p>
<p>–
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1329556/7375c3c0-3519-11e3-82dc-cc747d567e4a.jpg" /></p>
<h3 id="rebecca-conradhttpwwwejaculesccom"><a href="http://www.ejaculesc.com/">Rebecca Conrad</a></h3>
<p><em>Born and raised in Berlin. Grew up at Tempelhofer Ufer 32, in the apartment german singer Rio Reiser was living a few years before with his band “Ton Steine Scherben” (OMG!). Worked 4 years as a graphic designer for <a href="toonpool.com">toonpool.com</a>, a website for cartoons and illustrations. Then switched to <a href="http://eu.fab.com/">fab.com Europe</a> to work as a production designer. Currently looking for new opportunities. \o/</em></p>
TUESDAY QUIZ: What is Tilde?Charlotte2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:002013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/tilde<p><strong>1)</strong> An abbreviation used in Medieval Latin Documents <br />
<strong>2)</strong> A developer-centric, developer-run company who MAKE PRODUCTS WORK<br />
<strong>3)</strong> The nickname I gave my cat<br /></p>
<p>Okay it was a trick question. Tilde is actually all of the above, but today let’s focus on Option
2- our wonderful sponsors of Summer of Code!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1333295/c1b8771c-3591-11e3-89c3-8b03850564c7.png" width="600" /></p>
<p>Founded in August 2011 by Leah, Tom, Carl and Yahuba, Tilde is an open-source focused
startup in San Francisco and Portland. Led by current leaders and alumni of projects like Ruby on Rails, jQuery, and Ember, Tilde is quickly building a profile as ‘the hostess with the mostess’. Just like that one friend who
seems to be able to do everything right when they throw a party – food, music, ambience
– Tilde are a multi-talented team of developers, with an impressive and varied portfolio.</p>
<p>They’ll build your product, deliver you a marketing strategy and train you up on the
software you need to DIY in the future.</p>
<p>Oh and Tilde Co-founder Leah Silber ran the first (and only) Ruby Summer of Code in 2010,
where fellow Co-Founder Yehuda Katz served as a Mentor. So they’ve got a history with
this particular initiative, and we’re big fans of the resources they’re putting back into open
source communities.</p>
<p>If you want a piece of their magic for yourself, learn more here and check out their first
developer product, Skylight, launched recently. You can also chat to them at the SF Ember Meetup (which they run)as well as at annual events that they work on like the Golden Gate Ruby Conference and RailsConf. By night (and when else should it be, cause they are already involved in so much amazing stuff) they worked on getting <a href="http://devswag.com/pages/about-us">devswag</a> running - an Open Source merchandise project you should definitely check out.</p>
<p>In short, Tilde ♥ open source ecosystems and we ♥ them for helping our Summer of Code
Students turn their dreams into a reality-
Thank you for your support Tilde!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1333262/e32a25b8-3590-11e3-9bb8-c4d1de8107aa.png" width="600" /></p>
OpportunitiesAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-10-09T00:00:00+00:002013-10-09T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/opportunities<p>Some of our teams are still rocking their projects, some have already finished, but this doesn’t mean the coding needs to be over. There are some opportunities! We got offers for internships from companies:
<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/de/opsworks/">Amazon OpsWorks</a> and <a href="http://www.and-is.de/">and-is</a> a.k.a. Aupair World offered each 2 spots. Which is pret-ty cool!</p>
<p>###Students</p>
<p>If you are interested in these two, drop us a line!
Also - and this is the important part - please rock on and start looking for opportunities. Be active!
Look around and ask your local communities to help you. Get involved with your local user groups, start or join a study group, help to coach newcomers. You already know your coaches and mentors, who can surely recommend something to you. There are so many wonderful companies out there who would be glad to have enthusiastic coders like you at their side. We will try to help you in any way to turn your summer into something more!</p>
<p>###Sponsors, Companies, friends</p>
<p>If you want to give our talented students the opportunity to work with you and your team or have a recommendation: drop us a line at <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a></p>
Meet Team BundlerJen and Joycehttp://twitter.com/RGSoCBundler2013-09-27T00:00:00+00:002013-09-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/team-bundler<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1235067/bbcc9eb4-2998-11e3-9f57-326bbeb8bd14.png" width="600" /></p>
<p>Way back in April our coach, Jessica, had organized Rails Girls LA. Jen was coaching and Joyce was in attendance. Joyce really connected with her pair and coach while Jen was inspired by the new crew of women.</p>
<p>Post Rails Girls workshop, we were both part of the same weekly Ruby/Rails study group which really kept us rolling. It’s nice to have people tell you to calm your horses when you have freak out moments. A few of us started working on an app. together when the word went out about RGSoC.</p>
<p>As part of the Bundler core team, Jessica already had Bundler in mind as a project so we jumped at her offer. This allowed us to take what we already knew and apply it to a real open-source project, one small edit at a time. We were happy to get the opportunity to delve more into coding with the help of a coach and mentor!</p>
<p>We ended up working on the most used gem in Ruby/Rails: Bundler! It is not glamorous, but very important. It is probably something you don’t even think about much past <code class="highlighter-rouge">bundle install</code> or <code class="highlighter-rouge">bundle update</code> because it is just part of the fabric of Rails. In the dark ages of Rails, developers would have to stand in the snow, manually installing the dependent gems for each project and then hope their project didn’t fail as gems were updated to newer versions. Now bundler “magically” makes sure everything is working in your favor. We have been working to help keep that seamless effect still seem magical.</p>
<p>We have worked on the bundler website, <a href="http://bundler.io">http://bundler.io</a>, to make the documentation easier to access and to read. Lately we have been working on adding features and fixing problems that users have encountered. One of the happiest moments was seeing our fixes merged into Bundler! It is incredibly satisfying especially our first merges! Our mentor Andre Arko has also been incredibly helpful in our pursuits. Plus, he gave us awesome Bundler t-shirts when we met him at the Distill conference in San Francisco. Thanks so much to everyone who has made this possible. XO Rails Girls LA - Team Bundler</p>
Say HI to 37 Signals - RGSoC Gold SponsorCristinahttp://twitter.com/cristinasantamarina2013-09-23T00:00:00+00:002013-09-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/37signals-gold-sponsor<p><a href="http://37signals.com">37signals</a> creates and maintains web-based applications for collaboration, project management, and information sharing. In their own words, they build ‘frustration-free web-based apps for collaboration, sharing information, and making decisions.’ They proudly work backed by their customers and buyers and without any external funding.</p>
<p><a href="http://37signals.com">
<img src="https://raw.github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/summer-of-code/gh-pages/img/sponsors/37signals.png" alt="37 Signals logo" title="37 Signals" width="290px" align="left" />
</a></p>
<p>But beyond developing applications to help us get things done, they maintain a popular <a href="http://37signals.com/svn">company blog</a> and job board, write insightful books, and their developers contribute regularly to various <a href="http://37signals.com/opensource">open source projects</a>.</p>
<h2 id="productivity-on-rails">Productivity on Rails</h2>
<p>In 2004, 37 Signals launched <a href="http://basecamp.com">Basecamp</a>, a web based project management app. Since then they have focused on building productivity applications, like <a href="http://highrisehq.com/">Highrise</a>, a CRM app; or <a href="http://campfirenow.com/">Campfire</a>, a business oriented online chat service. These apps are used by millions of freelancers and smaller and bigger businesses around the world (including myself!). Their apps are the white T-Shirt of web apps: uncomplicated, neat and clean and always a fit.</p>
<p>In 2004, they made public <a href="http://rubyonrails.org/">Ruby on Rails</a>, an open-source framework that was created by David Heinemeier Hansson for the Basecamp project that they had been using internally for a while. Without this Random Act of Kindness we wouldn’t be here today. The maintenance of Rails is now in the hands of the Rails Core Team with the assistance of the rest of the Rails Community.</p>
<h2 id="sharing-is-caring">Sharing is caring</h2>
<p>37 Signals sponsor Ruby on Rails and other projects, like our <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/">Rails Girls Summer of Code</a>, and play their part in fixing the job crisis by helping programmers and other smart people to <a href="http://jobs.37signals.com/">find a job.</a></p>
<p>In their free time (I’ve never been good at maths but something doesn’t seem right) Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson also wrote two books: <a href="http://37signals.com/rework">REWORK</a>, a must read if you’re thinking of getting into business or already working on a project; and <a href="http://gettingreal.37signals.com/">Getting Real</a>, a great (and free) handbook for building web apps that shows the full picture and is written in plain English.</p>
<p>If you plan to spend a while in the world of technology, these are some good guys to learn from and look up to. Join us in sending them a lot of mental thumbs up!</p>
Summer of ConferencesFloorhttp://twitter.com/floordrees2013-09-21T00:00:00+00:002013-09-21T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/summer_of_conferences<p>We have been offered no less than 49 free tickets at some of the best Ruby conferences on 3 different continents. Behold, the conferences that so kindly sponsored tickets to their events (and in some cases even flight tickets!) for our Summer of Code participants:</p>
<p>##Upcoming:</p>
<p>###SoCoded
<strong>September 19-20, Hamburg</strong>
Learn & hack for 2 days at <a href="http://socoded.com/">SoCoded</a>, with top notch international speakers and 150 fellow web developers. SoCoded brings together the best of Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP in Hamburg.
<strong>Plus:</strong> <a href="https://twitter.com/teamhacketyhack">Team Hackety Hack</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/15">Team D*</a> will be at SoCoded!</p>
<p>###BubbleConf
<strong>September 27, Amsterdam</strong>
<a href="http://www.bubbleconf.com/">BubbleConf</a> aims to inspire you to reach for the stars. It’s about Design, Technology, and above all Entrepreneurship. And: <a href="https://twitter.com/PHenriettaK">Henrietta</a> - part of the global Rails Girls team - and yours truly share a speaking slot! Also <a href="http://twitter.com/langziehoht">Anika</a> will pour all her Rails Girls Summer of Code story telling qualities into a lightning talk.</p>
<p>###Ruby Shift
<strong>September 27—28, Kiev</strong>
This year will be the 4th time <a href="http://rubyshift.org/">RubyShift</a> takes place, an independent non-profit conference on Ruby and satellite technologies with accent on making new friends, being inspired, and having fun.
<strong>Meet</strong> <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/5">Team Spree Girls</a>, <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/15">Team D*</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/inchworms_">Team inchworms</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/highwaytorails">Team Highway to Rails</a> at Ruby Shift!</p>
<p>###Arrrrcamp
<strong>October 3-4, Ghent</strong>
A 2-day, dual track Ruby, Rails and web related conference with plenty of good speakers, loads of free rum and a free pirate twist. That sure sounds like <a href="http://www.arrrrcamp.be/">Arrrrcamp</a>!
<strong>Meet</strong> <a href="ttps://twitter.com/oanasipos">Team Oana</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/RG_TeamUnicorn">Team Unicorn</a> there!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1186095/b2a3b986-22df-11e3-8498-9c1efec50b4b.jpg" width="500px" />
<br />
Quite probably the awesomest conference logo EVER!</p>
<p>###Rails Israel
<strong>October 9, Tel Aviv</strong>
<a href="http://railsisrael2013.events.co.il/tracks">Rails Israel</a> is best described watching this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paCPoa5lLCA">YouTube video</a>. Tel Aviv bringing you Rails awesomeness, garanteed!
<strong>Meet:</strong> Team <a href="https://twitter.com/highwaytorails">Highway to Rails</a>in Israel!</p>
<p>###DevConTL
<strong>October 10, Tel Aviv</strong>
<a href="http://devcon-oct13.events.co.il/tracks">DevConTL</a> is best described with ‘server side development & rock and roll’. And this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRiNHEaC5_4">YouTube video</a>.
<strong>Meet</strong> <a href="https://twitter.com/highwaytorails">Team Highway to Rails</a> at DevCon!</p>
<p>###RuPy
<strong>October 11-13, Budapest</strong>
<a href="http://13.rupy.eu/">RuPy</a> is a unique conference that brings together communities from different state-of-the-art programming languages Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Clojure and related technologies.
<strong>Meet</strong> <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/5">Team Spree Girls</a> in Budapest!</p>
<p>###Wicked Good Ruby
<strong>October 12-13, Boston</strong>
<a href="http://wickedgoodruby.com/">Wicked Good Ruby</a> is a two day, double track Ruby conference at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston. AND: it’s Boston’s first annual Ruby conf!
<strong>Meet</strong> <a href="https://twitter.com/RG_TeamUnicorn">Team Unicorn</a> at Wicked Good Ruby!</p>
<p>###dotRBeu
<strong>October 18, Paris</strong>
<a href="http://www.dotrb.eu/">dotRBeu</a> is the largest Ruby conference in France and truly a conference made by developers for developers, with exceptional speakers on stage, like the maintainers of the most popular Ruby projects, the implementors of Ruby runtimes, … Just great hackers all-around. There will also be a Workshop Day on October 19!
<strong>Meet</strong> <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/7">Team Species+</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/inchworms_">Team inchworms</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/highwaytorails">Highway to Rails</a>in Paris!</p>
<p>###FutureStack
<strong>October 24-25, San Francisco</strong>
<a href="http://futurestack.io/">FutureStack</a> is: “tomorrow and the day after—and right now—all at the same time”. Join your fellow Sys Admins, Leads, Devs, and Data Analysts and learn how FutureStack will help revolutionize the world you’re helping to create!</p>
<p>###StarTechConf
<strong>October 25-26, Santiago</strong>
Don’t miss out on what is advertised to be the greatest tech event in Chile: <a href="http://www.startechconf.com/en/">StarTechConf</a>. The conference brings together world renowned stars in software development and local tech experts to talk about HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Ruby, Java, Python, Mobile and much more.
<strong>Meet</strong> <a href="https://twitter.com/punchgirls">Team Punchgirls</a> in Santiago!</p>
<p>##Awww, such good times we had at…</p>
<p>###Distill
<strong>August 8-9, San Francisco</strong>
<a href="https://distill.engineyard.com/">Distill</a> developer conference featured over 25 speakers (like Summer of Code coach Konstantin Haase) showcasing best practices from application architecture and user experience to testing and security.
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/rgsocbundler">Team Bundler</a> attended the SF conference.</p>
<p>###JRubyConf
<strong>August 14-15, Berlin</strong>
<a href="http://2013.jrubyconf.eu/#">JRubyConf</a> is a two-day, single track conference, completely devoted to JRuby. This year JRubyConf celebrated its second birthday.
<a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/5">Team Spree Girls</a> and <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/15">Team D*</a> were at JRubyConf.</p>
<p>###Eurucamp
<strong>August 16-18, Berlin</strong>
<a href="http://2013.eurucamp.org/">eurucamp 2013</a> was far more than a conference: a week of Ruby goodness in Berlin. Geek camp ftw! The days before the conferences were an official part of the program, with activities planned for locals and first-time Berlin visitors alike.
<a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/5">Team Spree Girls</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/RailsGrrls">Team RailsGrrls</a> attended eurucamp!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1186096/c1ae4536-22df-11e3-949e-b93f2adda939.jpg" width="500px" />
<br />
Rails Girls Berlin</p>
<p>###Madison Ruby Conference
<strong>August 23-24, Madison</strong>
<a href="http://madisonruby.org/">Madison Ruby Conference</a> did a pretty awesome job bringing together two great communities showcasing the assets of the local Ruby community and allowing Madison visitors a chance to experience one of the best, brainiest, and least-expensive places in the United States to live and work. Plus: Madison Ruby Conference hosted a RailsBridge Womens Outreach Workshop!
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/teamhacketyhack">Team Hackety Hack</a> and <a href="http://www.twitter.com/RG_TeamUnicorn">Team Unicorn</a> were at the Madison conference.</p>
<p>###CSSconf.eu
<strong>September 13, Berlin</strong>
<a href="http://2013.cssconf.eu/index.html">CSSconf.eu</a> is a conference dedicated to the designers, developers and engineers who build the world’s most engaging user interfaces. From the community, for the community. Our design heroes <a href="http://twitter.com/lisapassing">Lisa</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/bioshrimp">Rebecca</a> attended CSSconf.eu.</p>
<p>###The Strange loop
<strong>September 18-20, St.Louis</strong>
<a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/">Strange Loop</a> is a multi-disciplinary conference that aimed to bring together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow’s technology. And boy, did they succeed!
<a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/6">Team New Rosies</a> was at The Strange Loop.</p>
<p>We’ll see YOU soon, at a conference near you! ;)</p>
And the BubbleConf tickets go to...Floorhttp://twitter.com/floordrees2013-09-20T00:00:00+00:002013-09-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/bubbleconf-winners<p>Our friends at <a href="http://www.phusion.nl/">Phusion</a> and <a href="http://www.nedap.com/nl/">Nedap</a> announced on Wednesday that they’re giving away tickets to <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Bubbleconf_tickets/">Bubbleconf</a> to Rails Girls (Summer of Code) alumni & supporters! We had a jury go through the crazy pictures you guys tweeted. And the winners are:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.twitter.com/AneliyaE">Aneliya Evtimova</a><br />
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/MoInRotterdam">Moniek Kuipers</a><br />
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/charisrooda">Charis Rooda</a><br />
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/dannylelieveld">Danny Lelieveld</a><br />
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/PascalOnRails">Pascal van Hecke</a><br />
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/Atenna2">Ivana Drábiková</a><br />
<a href="http://www.twitter.com/nixone">Martin Olešnaník</a></p>
<p>HAVE FUN at BubbleConf!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1180760/4f9c965c-21fc-11e3-8ee1-05cb4e56f854.jpg" width="500" />
<br /></p>
<font size="2px">Charis Roda</font>
<p><em>If you want to make sure to get a ticket for BubbleConf, you can also buy one via http://bubbleconf.com. Students only pay EU 60 (incl. VAT) per ticket, and Standard Tickets are EU 300 (incl. VAT) a piece. For Rails Girls members however, we’re able to provide a nearly 50% discount on the Standard Ticket pricing, making them EU 160 (incl. VAT) per ticket. You can order these tickets via https://bubbleconf2013.paydro.net/event/bubbleconf-2013/railsgirls!</em></p>
Meet Our Gold Sponsor SoundcloudKatrinhttp://twitter.com/_die_katrin2013-09-19T00:00:00+00:002013-09-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/soundcloud-gold-sponsor<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2246045/1172169/a2173858-2119-11e3-96e3-35aa2f5dc514.png" width="300" />
SoundCloud is a long and dear friend of Rails Girls, especially here in Berlin.</p>
<p>Right from the first workshop, the guys and gals supported us. With their help it was, amongst others, possible to arrange a thank you dinner for our coaches or get a band for the legendary winter party of Rails Girls Berlin. And there’s even more: <a href="https://twitter.com/starkcoffee">Duana</a>, working as a software engineer at SoundCloud, is a coach since the very beginning up until now, where she’s coaching <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/3">Team RailsGrrls</a> at the Soundcloud office. She also encouraged other SoundCloud developers to help raise the next generation of programmers.</p>
<p>SoundCloud is a social sound platform where you can create or upload your own music or anything sound-related for that matter and then share it with the rest of the world. It all started off with music, the heart of Soundcloud. By now, the simple way of distributing sound files made it a great place-to-be for <a href="https://soundcloud.com/explore/storytelling">storytellers</a>, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/explore/learning">teachers</a> and <a href="https://soundcloud.com/explore/arts%2Bentertainment">artists</a>, too.</p>
<p>We want to say THANK YOU!!! ♥</p>
<p>###A Summer of Code Mixtape</p>
<p>But that’s only the beginning. As the saying goes: A song is worth a thousand words. And a mixtape is a wonderful novel.</p>
<p>We are putting together a SoundCloud <strong>“Rails Girls Summer of Code Mixtape”</strong>.</p>
<p>Everybody who participated in Rails Girls Summer of Code can send her or his favorite “Summer Coding Song” to us via tweet. Like this one, for example:</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1171784/f91a96dc-210e-11e3-8e6e-350a71c329f8.png" width="500" /></p>
<p>Here’s that snippet again:
“Hi @RailsGirlsSoC here is my song from @SoundCloud for the #rgsocMixtape: “</p>
<p>We are going to collect all of the wonderful pieces <a href="https://soundcloud.com/railsgirlssummerofcode">here</a> and together we will create the sound of this fantastic summer. Great? Great! Let’s go!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2246045/1172208/c6e5cd2e-211a-11e3-888c-66c5c37426f7.png" width="600" /></p>
Bubbleconf tickets for Rails Girls alumni & supportersFloorhttp://twitter.com/floordrees2013-09-18T00:00:00+00:002013-09-18T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/bubbleconf<p>Our friends at <a href="http://phusion.nl/">Phusion</a> and <a href="http://www.nedap.com/nl/">Nedap</a> are giving away <strong>10 tickets to Bubbleconf</strong> to Rails Girls (Summer of Code) alumni & supporters! And YOU want one. Why? <a href="http://www.bubbleconf.com/">BubbleConf</a> is THE conference on design, development and entrepreneurship. It differs from all the
other conferences out there in that it focusses on a myriad of topics instead of just a single one. This
is only made possible due to its stellar speaker line-up which consists exclusively of field experts and
founders of the hottest startups currently out there. Let us hear your best ‘WOW’!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1164536/df5f33de-2059-11e3-8717-14ed30bb3469.png" /></p>
<p>Last year’s edition had over 300 attendees come down to Amsterdam from all over the world. On September 27th 2013, developers, designers and founders from companies such as Dribbble, GitHub, Facebook,
SoundCloud, 6Wunderkinder, Apple Design Award Winners and many more will be sharing their stories in the gorgeous the Beurs van Berlage (in itself a reason to visit Amsterdam). Fun fact: it’s where the Dutch Royal Wedding of King Willem Alexander and his Queen Maxima took place.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1164534/dab8bd32-2059-11e3-99d9-70a6ea9f0c07.png" /></p>
<p>Phusion and Nedap have followed the Rails Girls initiative with great interest for quite some time
and would like to help remove barriers whenever it can to welcome diversity in the fields they are active in.
To that end, BubbleConf has invited <a href="http://www.twitter.com/PHenriettaK">Pia Henrietta Kekelaïnen</a> and yours truly - respectively member of the global Rails Girls team and Rails Girls veteran - to take the main stage to share their story. And additionally they want to provide 10 tickets to Rails Girls (Summer of Code) students, mentors, coaches and organizers.</p>
<p>###How do I win this thing, you say?
Tweet “Hope to see you at #Bubbleconf” with a picture of you waving / a cute kitten / something fun and bubbely attached from the account that you’d want to score a ticket. You can also participate as a Rails Girls Summer of Code team, securing a ticket for you AND your team mate. A special, super unbiased Summer of Code jury will look over the submissions and pick 10 lucky winners (to avoid bribery the judges remain anonymous). So: tweet, tweet, tweet!!</p>
<p>Seeing as BubbleConf will take place in about 2 weeks from now, the winners will be announced on Friday at 12:00 Berlin time.</p>
<p>With already over 300 registered attendees, this year’s edition will only be more awesome with your presence. Hope to see you this September 27th at BubbleConf 2013!</p>
<p><em>If you want to make sure to get a ticket for BubbleConf, you can also buy one via http://bubbleconf.com. Students only pay EU 60 (incl. VAT) per ticket, and Standard Tickets are EU 300 (incl. VAT) a piece. For Rails Girls members however, we’re able to provide a nearly 50% discount on the Standard Ticket pricing, making them EU 160 (incl. VAT) per ticket. You can order these tickets via https://bubbleconf2013.paydro.net/event/bubbleconf-2013/railsgirls!</em></p>
Rails Girls The HagueAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-09-17T00:00:00+00:002013-09-17T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/railsgirlsdh<p>The story of Rails Girls Summer of code is just crazy, amazing, inspiring and actually hard to believe (the idea stated only in May this year and now we are actually doing this!). So to tell other people about this, other Rails Girls students who are just at the beginning of falling in love with Rails, I visited <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RailsGirlsTheHague">Rails Girls The Hague</a>.</p>
<p>Our organizer and lovely dutchie <a href="http://twitter.com/floordrees">Floor</a> organized the whole thing and it was super nice!
The talks were also pretty inspiring and went from <a href="http://prezi.com/vlkcx9gdmnf0/how-to-get-in/">resources to keep on coding</a>, a <a href="https://github.com/FloorD/RG_TH_talks/tree/master/abangratz/github2">Github introduction</a> and our supervisor & mentor <a href="http://twitter.com/pxlpnk">Andy</a> talked about <a href="https://github.com/FloorD/RG_TH_talks/tree/master/open_source">this Open Source thing</a> and how to contribute.</p>
<p>I gave a talk about our program, Travis’ role, our teams and the wonderful things that are going on in our Summer of Code. Here you can check out <a href="https://github.com/FloorD/RG_TH_talks/tree/master/Rails%20Girls%20Summer%20of%20Code">my slides</a>. <em>(Spoiler altert: it includes more than one cute gif!)</em></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1151148/300f2376-1ef6-11e3-87a1-fc1e095c6cc2.jpg" width="600" /></p>
<p>My favorite moment was when I met Nila. She was helping with the event and told me that the Rails Girls Workshop she attended 6 months ago actually changed her life.</p>
<p>She jumped and had a whole carrier turn and now she works in an IT firm coding more and more. It always feels so wonderful to meet somebody who benefited from something you helped with. To see these Rails Girls stories popping up all over the world always makes me kinda sentimental. ♥</p>
<p>All in all a wonderful weekend.
Big eyed students, the beach, viking hats, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=221011044689440&set=a.221011031356108.1073741829.213104192146792&type=3&theater">not much sleep</a>, hagelslag and lots of beginning coding stories.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/floordrees/sets/72157635561868894/">PICTURE TIME!</a>
<br /></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1151266/2c067516-1ef8-11e3-83d8-720cee299651.png" width="300" />
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1151257/009d6ba0-1ef8-11e3-9088-12e4c7353d0e.png" width="300" /></p>
<p>So if you have a Rails Girls event near you - visit them, give a talk and spread the word. It’s magical.</p>
Google Open Source loves Rails Girls Summer of CodeFloorhttp://twitter.com/floordrees2013-09-16T00:00:00+00:002013-09-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Google_Open_Source<p>##Google Open Source</p>
<p>Recognizing the vital role that open source software plays at Google, the Open Source Programs Office heavily supports the open source software development community. <a href="https://developers.google.com/open-source/">Google Open Source</a> do this by releasing code created at Google, providing infrastructure, supporting open source organizations, handling internal open source compliance, and by running student outreach programs such as Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1149633/3a571be4-1ede-11e3-91a5-fb899de49438.jpg" width="400px" />
Google Open Source send us these goodies, for the Rails Girls Summer of Code participants (soon, in a mailbox near to you!).</p>
<p><a href="https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/">Google Summer of Code</a> is a global program that offers student developers to write code for various open source software projects. Since its first edition in 2005, the Google Summer of Code program has brought together over 6,000 successful student participants and over 3,000 mentors from over 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, participants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, gaining experience with real-world software development scenarios, just like we aim to do with Rails Girls Summer of Code.</p>
<p>Thanks for supporting us, Google Open Source, we love you back!</p>
Introducing Team NewRosiesLaura and Adriana2013-09-12T00:00:00+00:002013-09-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-team-newrosies<p>Hello, we are Laura and Adriana, two college students from Colombia and we are the <a href="http://newrosies.tumblr.com/">New Rosies</a>. We met each other one year ago in a computer networks class at college.</p>
<p><strong>¿Why New Rosies?</strong> We call us New Rosies in honor of the group of women programmers in World War II whose story is told in detail in the documentary “Top Secret Rosies” and like them we want to contribute in the field of computer sciences and programming.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1772544/1136108/52df3234-1c2f-11e3-8a76-71b6d42ace70.jpg" alt="Laura and Adriana" width="600" /></p>
<p>We heard about RGSoC from Guillermo and Roberto, our current mentor and coach whom we thanks for giving us all the tools needed and the knowledge acquired in this summer and specially for working with us during this months while we were developing the project, <strong>Conductor</strong>.</p>
<p>Conductor is a original project from <strong>DHH</strong> (creator of Rails), the idea behind the project is create an assistant for the Rails applications development. Conductor allows to do through its web interface many of the actions that we normally do in the command line and that are often very hard to remember for beginners.</p>
<p>This project has been a chance to improve our Ruby skills, to learn more about Ruby on Rails and how some of this internal parts work, also we learnt about other common tools used in Ruby community like Bundler, Rack and Sinatra. We learnt to take advantage of all the benefits of version control systems, about Git and the advantages that Github offers as a repository hosting. Finally and maybe more important than the other lessons, we learnt to have more interaction with the developer community and be part of an open source project.</p>
<p>One of the happiest moments until now, after receiving the news of being chosen within many students to participate in this summer program, was to know that we will go to StrangeLoop conference and we will have the opportunity not only to hear experts in different topics but also to talk about Rails Girls and Rails Girls Summer of Code.</p>
<p><strong>If you could code anything in the world, what would you work on?</strong>
<strong>Adriana</strong> would create a program that would prove theorems. <em>-</em></p>
<p><strong>Summer is almost over but we don’t want it to leave.</strong></p>
Thank you Travis!Floorhttp://twitter.com/floordrees2013-09-10T00:00:00+00:002013-09-10T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/thank-you-travis<p><img src="https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1788260785/travis.png" height="250" style="padding-right: 10px;" />
<img src="https://dyrci3isikb50.cloudfront.net/files/172392/original/A45831E2-43A7-4D8D-B14C-86D787A131BC.gif" height="250" /></p>
<p><a href="http://travis-ci.org">Travis CI</a> is an open source company, based in beautiful Berlin. They build a hosted continuous integration service which is integrated with GitHub and supports a multitude of programming languages, like Python, Go, PHP, Java, C++… and of course Ruby! And I think it’s fair to say that without Travis, there would not have been a Rails Girls Summer of Code, as they took on lead support and organization.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/langziehohr">Anika</a> - from now on referred to as ‘Chief Spread the Word’ of Rails Girls Summer of Code - wrote a cool post on the Travis blog the other day, on how our ‘founders’ went from <a href="http://about.travis-ci.org/blog/2013-09-05-travis-and-rails-girls-summer-of-code/">‘dream to 19 scholarships in under 3 months’</a>. Which is indeed a huge accomplishment and worthy of a BIG thank you!</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/inchworms_">Team Inchworms</a> found a suitable way to thank the Travis CI team for their efforts <em>(spoiler alert: they <a href="http://inchworms.net/travis">baked a Travis CI cake</a> and there are awesome gifs involved!!</em>)<br /></p>
<p><a href="http://inchworms.net/travis"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1114474/06b42110-1a1a-11e3-8082-06e98269b200.png" width="600" /></a></p>
<p>It’s truly amazing what happened after <a href="https://twitter.com/svenfuchs">Sven</a> gave a lightning talk at a <a href="http://railsgirlsberlin.de/2013/04/01/review-follow-up-workshop-march-2013/">Rails Girls Berlin workshop</a> at <a href="http://www.wooga.com/">Wooga</a> in late March. The idea to organize a Summer of Code to get more women in open source spread like wildfire. Sven has been working on getting RGSoC off the ground and the whole Travis team contributed - <a href="https://twitter.com/konstantinhaase">Konstantin</a> is even a mentor of Team Inchworms, who work on Sinatra.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1114209/064745a0-1a14-11e3-8088-6f9186ad122d.png" width="600" /></p>
<p>We love Travis.</p>
How it all began...RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2013-09-06T00:00:00+00:002013-09-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/travis<p><img src="http://sauceio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/travisguy.jpeg" width="100" align="left" style="padding-right: 10px;" /></p>
<p>The story about Travis CI and Rails Girls Summer of Code. How this all started and how magic happens.
This is one of the reasons why we just love them. <a href="http://about.travis-ci.org/blog/">Read on</a>, dearest friends!</p>
Introducing Team MagdaMagdahttp://twitter.com/lippenka2013-09-06T00:00:00+00:002013-09-06T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-rgsoc-participant-magda<p>Hi, I’m Magda. This is my coding story.
<a href="https://github.com/lipenco"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2530057/1087318/a430166a-1614-11e3-8e46-cefa27c40820.png" width="600" /></a></p>
<p>For me coding is freedom. Freedom from the corporate world, from being tied to one city, from an office, from a 9 to 5 lifestyle, and most importantly - freedom TO be creative. This is why I started coding - to be able to live the life I’ve dreamed about without resigning from my professional aspirations while expressing my creativity.</p>
<p>Rails Girls Summer of Code was the best thing that could happen on my way to ultimate nerdiness. I have chosen <a href="https://github.com/bartaz/impress.js/">impress.js</a> , one of the most starred open source projects on GitHub. Impress.js was created by my awesome, dedicated mentor, Bartek. It is a JavasScript framework for building presentations using an HTML5 canvas. That means a lot of JavaScript. As an aspiring front end developer it has been a perfect project for me.</p>
<p>For the last two months I had the opportunity to write some juicy JS code. I was developing new features for impress.js - plugins for automatically generated layouts, substeps and more. And then came the idea to create an application for end users to create presentations. I created a <a href="http://impress-builder.herokuapp.com/">Rails application that generates the code</a> for a presentation based on the user’s choices. The prototype is already working, but my imagination for additional features is endless. Luckily, I still have some time to make it more awesome. You can read about the progress on <a href="http://lipen.co/til/">my blog</a>.</p>
<p>If I could code anything in the world I would bootstrap my lucrative startup. This is not a dream, it’s a plan :).</p>
<p>A big thanks to the people who rescued me from beginner frustration and helped me understand what is going on: Bartek, John, Chris, Mateusz - you saved my passion for coding. Thank you!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2530057/1087531/3e114f74-161a-11e3-8b3a-755126b72dc2.jpg" alt="magda" /></p>
Cherry on Survival KitAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-09-05T00:00:00+00:002013-09-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/slides<p>A few days ago, we put together a conferece survival kit for you, dearest students.
Now you know almost everything there is to know and we are sure, you’ll return from your adventures safe and sound and unharmed.</p>
<p>But we also have a cherry on top for you <em>(what’s a survival kit without, right? ;)</em> <br />
Here it comes.. say ahhh!</p>
<p>###Rails Girls Summer of Code Slides for you!</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/RGSoC_slides"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1088599/f5b8bbf6-1635-11e3-855f-066ab0e93fb4.png" width="600" /></a></p>
<p>A big thank you to <a href="http://twitter.com/floordrees">Floor</a>, who put them together and a lot of love into them.
They look amazing and include everything you need to have for your talk. Wonderful, right?</p>
<p>Important here is that these slides include slides with our sponsors at the end. If you use your own slide <em>(which you still can, of course!)</em> please mention the platinum sponsors <a href="http://github.com/">Github</a>, <a href="http://travis-ci.org/">Travis</a> and our gold sponsors <a href="http://tilde.io/">Tilde</a>, <a href="http://37signals.com/">37signals</a>, <a href="http://soundcloud.com/">SoundCloud</a> and <a href="https://developers.google.com/open-source">Google Open Source</a> at the end of your talk on an extra slide, since they are the reason we can have this georgeous Summer of Code! ♥</p>
<p>###Speaker Coaches coach you to speak</p>
<p>Of course, that’s not all! We want to thank these awesome people who have offered to be your <strong>speaker coaches</strong>.</p>
<p>They will help you review your slides, practise your talk, give feedback and any other magic trick they have up their sleeves for giving a great talk. Some of you already met them, some we still have to connect for the upcoming confs:</p>
<div align="center">★ Tiffany Conroy
★ Juliane Peterson
★ Caroline Drucker
★ Chad Fowler ★<br />
★ Josh Kalderimis
★ Patrik Huesler
★ Tim Lossen
★ Arne Brasseur ★<br />
★ Dirkjan Bussink
★ Paul Klipp ★</div>
<div align="center"><img src="http://r17.imgfast.net/users/1711/43/68/65/smiles/161870.gif" /> </div>
<p>Put your hands up for them, because they are just awesome for doing this! And we are very very sure, you’ll now not only survive your conferences, but make them to the best of your summer!</p>
Namaskara World: Team Diasbits<3Sakshi and Pallavihttp://twitter.com/s_jain11072013-09-01T00:00:00+00:002013-09-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/Namaskara-world-Team-Diasbits<p>We are Pallavi and Sakshi <a href="http://defendingdiaspora.wordpress.com/">Team Diasbits</a> from India. The name Diasbits, as we are contributing a bit to <a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora">diaspora*</a>, the privacy-aware, decentralized social network. Also, Diasbits, came to our mind as assembling bits of diaspora* to enhance its developement.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/4617609/1040803/1b694b66-0fc1-11e3-941f-cca6b365c978.jpg" alt="Pallavi and Sakshi together in Bangalore" width="500" height="400" /></p>
<p><strong>Sakshi:</strong> I had started coding in Ruby a few months before I got to know about RGSoC. The Rails Girls Summer of Code was introduced to me by our coach Arihant. I applied for RGSoC to get in touch with the open source and do wonders.</p>
<p><strong>Pallavi:</strong> I heard it from <a href="http://www.fsmk.org/">FSMK(Free Software Movement, Karnataka)</a> mailing list. I was always interested in working on web applications and wanted to start with Ruby on Rails.</p>
<p>The Rails Girls Summer of Code encouraged us to get hold of Ruby, Rails, Git workflow, Jekyll.
Already 2 months of the summer of code have come to an end, and we are now in a situation to stand confident and present our work of this entire duration.
So far, we have been able to finish our project on <a href="https://gist.github.com/svenfuchs/c80ddfe0f117b7de3328">Rails Girls Rails App Generator</a>. We created a <a href="http://railsgirls-generator-app.github.io/railsgirls-app/">Jekyll Bootstrap based website</a> that contains the links to some cool Rails tutorials.</p>
<p>The mid-July to mid-August, was a period of workshops, seminars, meetings, interactions and what not. :) We attended the Rails Girls workshop, Mysore, Rails Girls event, Bangalore, Jaipur Ruby users group meetup, FSMK (Blender sessions, 9 days workshop).</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/4617609/1040819/7a923774-0fc1-11e3-8f32-464cabe8cc23.jpg" alt="Mysore Rails Workshop" width="400" height="300" /></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/4617609/1040824/a3fb0604-0fc1-11e3-8ea7-d0d226946b94.png" alt="Rails Girls Event, Bangalore" width="500" height="300" /></p>
<p>Currently, we are working on a few diaspora* issues and features like
<a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/4417#issuecomment-23010511">adding an ignore user icon on the profile page of a user</a>,
<a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/4340">adopt a pull request</a>.</p>
<p>We chose to work for Rails Girls App Generator as it seemed to be easy for the beginners and diaspora* because it gives us immense exposure to open source and to the concept of decentralization of data.</p>
<p>Our happiest moment was when we got selected for RGSoC and we are the only team from India who made through :)</p>
<p><strong>If we could code anything in the world</strong>
<strong><em>Pallavi:</em></strong> I would love to code a phone book app for my Dad because he writes in his diary and keeps searching for it.
<strong><em>Sakshi:</em></strong> I’d code to make a machine that would insert the whole book into my memory in one sec, so that I don’t have to cram anything during exams :P</p>
<p>-
On Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/s_jain1107">Sakshi</a> and <a href="http://pallavi_shastry">Pallavi</a></p>
Meet our Platinum Sponsor GitHub!Alexandrahttp://twitter.com/troubalex2013-08-30T00:00:00+00:002013-08-30T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/github-platinum-sponsor<p>Hands up, who hasn’t heard of GitHub? We probably won’t see that many raising theirs. For those who are new to all these development details, here is what GitHub <a href="https://github.com/about">writes about themselves:</a></p>
<p><a href="http://github.com">
<img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1057737/8276498e-117a-11e3-9737-d548ef46f0f6.png" alt="Octocat GitHub logo" title="Octocat" width="300px" align="left" />
</a></p>
<p><em>“GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.”</em></p>
<p>What this really means is that more than _three million people_ store their code in one place. This is neat because cooperation on projects suddenly becomes so much easier. You can search for projects, learn from other users’ code, fix their bugs or finish their features. And you can do all of this without having to ask for write access to the repository first or sending patches via email.</p>
<p>At the same time, GitHub is also a bit of a marketplace. It’s great to be able to take a look at the source of a gem or library when you think about what you want to use. You can find collections of useful snippets, and share your own. And it’s a fab place to show the world what you’re tinkering with.</p>
<p>For some, GitHub now almost equals open source development. That’s also because GitHub has made git much less intimidating, and turned it into something accessible to mere mortals. Just check out their <a href="https://help.github.com/">help section</a>!</p>
<p>Of course, all Rails Girls Summer of Code teams have public repositories on GitHub to securely store – and version control! – their hard work.</p>
<p>Most importantly for us, GitHub generously supports Rails Girls Summer of Code with a platinum sponsorship which helps a bunch of dedicated women to get deeper into coding and open source projects - how wonderful is that!
Alicja & Wictoria from <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/7">Team Species+</a> have something special to say:</p>
<object width="420" height="315"><param name="movie" value="//www.youtube.com/v/fX2TmwB5PD8?version=3&hl=en_US" /></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /></param><embed src="//www.youtube.com/v/fX2TmwB5PD8?version=3&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="420" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" /></embed></object>
<p>Thanks and hugs to -the Octocat- all GitHubbers, you’re awesome! ♥</p>
Introducing Team UnicornVictoria and Hesterhttp://twitter.com/RG_TeamUnicorn2013-08-29T00:00:00+00:002013-08-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-TeamUnicorn<p>Hi everyone!</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/3309295/1042495/f67988da-0fec-11e3-89bb-b91059b19309.jpg" width="500" /></p>
<p>We’re Hester and Victoria. We live in the Netherlands but Hester lives in Groningen (north) and Victoria lives in Eindhoven (south). We met by chance in June just few days before the application for Rails Girl Summer of Code was closing and also by chance we ended up doing this amazing Summer of Code together.</p>
<p>Victoria was still living at that time in Helsinki, at the same time moving to the Netherlands and it was great surprise to meet people even before arriving to the new country.</p>
<p>We didn’t get selected for the sponsored teams but still we wanted to make a team and we wanted to do something with Ruby on Rails during summer. We started on July 1st with a super intense session of more than 6h. Our brains were dead… and we continue from time to time.</p>
<p>Find time to do this voluntarily after work is very hard. Victoria works at Startupbootcamp with Dutch Expansion Capital and Ernst & Young in Eindhoven. Hester is running her own business, Noordwijs, in Groningen.</p>
<p>Why Team Unicorn? It is there something cuter than unicorns? That is why!</p>
<p>We first heard about RGSoC through <a href="http://twitter.com/railsgirls">@railsgirls</a> and Facebook. That is also how we found each other to start the project. Hester already had been in contact with <a href="https://twitter.com/pberkenbosch">Peter</a>, our super coach, who is helping us a lot!</p>
<p>Our project is <a href="http://spreecommerce.com/">Spree</a> an open source e-commerce platform. Our coach was already working with them for a while and he introduced us to them. We decided to go for it and also Spree team were supporting us since the beginning.</p>
<p>Our goal for the summer is basically to improve our Ruby on Rails skills, give something to the Spree project, make Peter proud of us, and of course, have a lot of fun!</p>
<p>So far, we have been working in tutorials and recently started to do our baby steps in Spree. So far, very happy!</p>
<p>A few of our happiest moments so far are when things work after a few tries, when big problems become easy(or at least easier) and also seeing RGSoC brought us more than just programing skills.</p>
<p>If we could code anything in the world… Victoria will code an application to order breakfast delivered home on weekends, and Hester will code more one to make more time!</p>
<p>Feel free to follow us on Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/RG_TeamUnicorn">@RG_TeamUnicorn</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/VicAMarBar">@VicAMarBar</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/HestervanWijk">@HestervanWijk</a> or our <a href="http://rgsoc.github.io/">blog</a></p>
Eurucamp DaysFloorhttp://twitter.com/floordrees2013-08-28T00:00:00+00:002013-08-28T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/eurucamp<p>Last weekend was <a href="http://2013.eurucamp.org/">eurucamp</a> weekend and I sort of promised to write a recap for you summery coders. So here we go, my personal highlights and other (fun) stuff:</p>
<p>Friday was dubbed ‘workshop day’ and a Rails Girls course was hosted, next to sessions for the more advanced conference attendees. I attended the beginners course as a coach. <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/57">Txus</a> was my co-coach and he drew the most comprehensible MVC - webserver - browser graphic I have ever seen, for our incredibly eager team. We even figured out a way for one of the girls to attend the eurucamp conference for free, so she could continue to learn, how cool is that?!</p>
<p><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5467/9557464936_563b7a2e27.jpg" width="500" />
hello, MARS! (borrowed from RubyMonsters’ super fun intro to the terminal)</p>
<p>Joseph Wilk’s Creative Machines keynote was up after the workshops. He’d take the talk descriptions of eurucamp’s speakers and have a machine create haiku’s. We then needed to guess which one was his, and which one was from the machine. You guess*:
Philosophers talk
Humans boil ruby for fun
Clickety click love</p>
<p>I loved how Joseph, senior developer at <a href="https://soundcloud.com/">SoundCloud</a>, stressed the social aspect to recognizing and defining what creativity is. After the keynote all of us rushed to the SoundCloud party, for an evening of BBQ, drinks and good tunes.</p>
<p>###Day 2
My favorite talks on day one were by <a href="https://twitter.com/plexus">Arne Brasseur</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/ashedryden">Ashe Dryden</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/fidothe">Matt Patterson</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/chastell">Piotr Szotkowski</a> (and his crazy keyboards), <a href="https://twitter.com/joannecheng">Joanne Cheng</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/roy">Roy Tomeij</a>, with his marketing-intelligence talk.</p>
<p><strong>Arne</strong> is a Rails Girls Berlin regular (coach). His talk was basically a call to “stop using strings to handle structured data”. Why? Well, Arne referred to the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY">The science of insecurity talk of the 2011 CCC conference</a>, saying how much of a security vulnerability it really is. Thank glob, Arne is working on his pet project HEXP, a Ruby API for creating and manipulating HTML syntax trees. You can <a href="https://github.com/plexus/hexp">check it out on GitHub</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Ashe</strong>’s talk was titled ‘Programming Diversity’. Ashe is known to be vocal about the lack of diversity in tech. And with diversity, she means more than just gender (like age, ability, sexuality, language, race).
She got the attendees to realise how priviliged we all are, and how harmful stereotype threats (‘wow you’re bad at math’ vs ‘girls are bad at math’) and marginalizing are. On the bright side, Ashe mentioned that in Bulgaria 73% of the women graduating, do so in (computer) science. Pretty cool, huh? She also had som nifty tips for people who want to increase diversity in their teams. Like: take a look at <a href="http://100percentmen.tumblr.com/">100percentmen.tumblr.com</a> and review your about pages, make sure the interview is as close to the actual day-to-day workflow as possible and offer mentoring.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Patterson</strong> showed us how he parsed real-world ‘fuzzy’ dates with Ruby, transfering it from unstyled Word documents and turning it in a website. Say WUT?! Well, Matt struggled to order 31 march 1933 versus 1930s vs c1973, early 1946, from, by, after… But he solved it (and he promised to publish his slides shortly).
Matt co-coaches the Ruby Monsters, a study group born out of Rails Girls Berlin, with Sven Fuchs.</p>
<p><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7301/9557462578_67a294af05.jpg" />
lauratryingoutkeyboards.tumblr.com (just kiddin’)</p>
<p><strong>Joanne Cheng</strong> is a developer for thoughtbot in Denver, CO. In her spare time, she runs Colorado Code for Communities, an organization of developers and designers dedicated to making important local government data easily accesible through better interfaces. And: she plays arouns with Ruby-Processing, a simple wrapper for the Processing framework that combines the visual-driven environment of Processing with the fun of writing Ruby. Joanne pulled of some live coding, showing us a basic example of Ruby-processing. It certainly got me hooked! And though you’ll definitely not be asked to do this at your day job, Joanne claims she notices more she gained more confidence and code fluency, and she adapts the trying-out-first-and-refactoring-later at the work place.</p>
<p>###Day 3</p>
<p>My favorite talks on Sunday were by <a href="https://twitter.com/ellen_koenig">Ellen König</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/harrybrundage">Harry Brundage</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/manhattanmetric">Joshua Ballanco</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/halfbyte">Jan Krutisch</a>. And it was lightning talks day!</p>
<p><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5510/9557462982_c9ecb796ff.jpg" />
Drawatars, it’s a thing (this one is from RGSoC mentor/supervisor/hero <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/115">Andy</a>)</p>
<p><strong>Ellen König</strong> tought us to take all the cool stuff we learned during the conference and take it to our hobby projects and day job. Ellen is a professional software developer and part-time psychology student. She loves learning and teaching about technology-related topics, having learned more programming languages and technologies than she cares to remember. She has taught them to others at various opportunities such as university, work and most recently as a Rails Girls student and coach. She put <a href="http://de.slideshare.net/ellenkoenig/eurucamp-deliberate-practiceellenkoenig">her slides</a> online ♥</p>
<p><strong>Harry Brundage</strong> leads the Performance Team at Shopify! They have an “enormous Rails application who’s traffic at least doubles every year and processes a whole whackload of money for real people running real businesses”. Harry talked about what happens when a user is mashing the f5 key and how they (barely) handle cyber Monday, the online equivalent of retail craziness Black Friday.</p>
<p><strong>Joshua Ballanco</strong> shared how one can get their Ruby EGOT (Emmy Grammy Oscar Tony). How? By submitting patches (that then get accepted) to MacRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius, JRuby, or some other Ruby implementation. Slightly unrelated: Joshua recommends to read a surplus of code than what you’re writing on a daily basis. Because it will help you become a better programmer, as you learn from others (mistakes).</p>
<p><strong>Jan Krutisch</strong>, a freelance web developer from Hamburg, summed up (at least) <a href="http://slides.krutisch.de/10_things_you_didnt_know_your_browser_could_do/">10 things you didn’t know your browser could do</a>. Did you know for example that your browser can make music (and I don’t mean by playing back sound files)? I’m definitely going to play around with the CSS Filters and <a href="http://flippinawesome.org/2013/08/19/responsive-content-using-css-regions">CSS Regions</a> he mentioned!</p>
<p>###Lightning talks</p>
<p>There were some super fun lightning talks. Like about this difficult machine called baby (really!). Or about ‘Fuby’. It’s a thing. Or at least according to Txus - who had hand-drawn ALL his slides! <a href="http://twitter.com/pragtob">Tobias</a> would encourage everyone to start using Shoes (4), as it’s as fun as “putting sunglasses on your dog”.
And <a href="http://twitter.com/laurawadden">Laura Wadden</a> talked about Rails Girls Summer of Code, <a href="http://twitter.com/railsgrrls">Rails Grrls</a>, their work on Rubinius and their plan to write a new programming language! Which is the coolest thing ever.</p>
<p>So. I guess that wraps it up. I got little sleep. And I did not once come close to the lake. I was too busy blogging, I guess. Anyhow… on to the next conference! ;)</p>
<p>*This one was by the machine! Crazy huh?!</p>
How to go to a conferenceRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2013-08-23T00:00:00+00:002013-08-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conference-tips<p>The first time is always special. And the time after that. And the time after that.
Going to a conference - and maybe even giving a talk - can be loads of fun, scary, exhilarating and exhausting together.</p>
<p>So here we have a small conference prep package for you! We stuffed it with the best tips & tricks especially on how to give great talks and in general how to make these couple of (conference)days to the best of your life.</p>
<p>##Rock that Conference</p>
<div class="smaller"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1010419/97b3d93c-0b4a-11e3-9a9f-865fdaf7ed7e.png" width="150" /></div>
<p>Lucas Pinto: <em>“My biggest tip would be not to be shy and go talk to people, make connections. A lot of people go to conferences not for the talks but mostly to meet fellow devs. It is always very inspiring and you always meet nice people. So if you come in gang, try not to stick with them 100% of the time plus it is easy to find an opener at a conf “hey, where do you come from, are you here alone/with your company, who do you work for, do you know the city well, etc. etc.”</em></p>
<p>Anika Lindtner: <em>“Most important for me was to keep in mind, that the people around are eager to get to know you, too. Conferences are great for meeting people and mingle. Always check out the hashtag for the conference, so you’ll stay in the loop with what’s happening. Have your phone always with you and do a lot of funny friday-hug-pics. It’s a great way to spread the joy, have some fun with others - and it’s a super cool souvenir. Oh and don’t forget this last thing: Enjoy yourself!”</em></p>
<p>★ <a href="http://skillcrush.com/2012/10/10/8-ways-to-rock-a-tech-conference-how-to-network-your-butt-off-or-how-to-make-new-friends-while-at-a-conference/">8 ways to rock a tech conference</a> by Scillcrush</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://zachholman.com/posts/how-to-survive-tech-conferences/">How to survive tech conferences</a>
by Zach Holman</p>
<p>##Rock that talk</p>
<div class="smaller"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1010421/9ac77458-0b4a-11e3-9eee-0871e47a8af3.png" width="150" /></div>
<p>Floor Drees: <em>“Definitely check out presentations by other programmer-speakers like Konstantin Haase, Patrick Huesler… Make it a fun and interesting experience for you and for the audience and pick a topic you have special affection with, so you can speak from experience.
Make sure your audience can identify with your problem right at the beginning, so you got them hooked for the solution (read: the rest of your talk) ;)
Test running your talk by your friends or (if you have the chance) a local ruby developer meetup thingie, is also a smart idea!
AND: don’t do a live demo unless you’re absolutely certain it (/ wifi) will work / you pre-recorded it (cook show style).”</em></p>
<p>★ <strong>How to give great talks</strong> by Caroline Drucker</p>
<object width="560" height="315"><param name="movie" value="//www.youtube.com/v/2H36kbMMrZo?version=3&hl=en_US" /></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /></param><embed src="//www.youtube.com/v/2H36kbMMrZo?version=3&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" /></embed></object>
<p>★ <a href="http://weareallaweso.me/2012/06/12/practical-tips-for-becoming-a-great-speaker.html">Practical tips for becoming a great speaker</a> by Tiffany Conroy</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://vimeo.com/44267609">5 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People</a> by Weinschenk Institute</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc">Your body language shapes who you are</a> by Amy Cuddy</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://zachholman.com/posts/what-they-dont-tell-you-about-public-speaking/">What people don’t tell you about public speaking</a> by Zach Holman</p>
<p>★ <a href="https://gist.github.com/rkh/ef2d02b1d95f7a04f10f">Do’s and Don’ts</a> by Kontantin Haase</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://vimeo.com/57965823">How to give a lightning talks</a> by Steve Klabnik</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://writing.jan.io/2013/05/10/how-to-give-the-killer-tech-talk---a-pamphlet.html">How to give the killer tech talk</a> by Jan Lenhardt</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9JXH7JPjR4">How to talk to Developers</a> by Ben Orenstein</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://weareallaweso.me/2012/06/22/practical-tips-for-creating-great-slides.html">Practical tips for creating great slides</a> by Tiffany Conroy</p>
<p>★ <a href="http://nubyonrails.com/articles/improve-your-technical-slides">Improve your technical slides</a> by Geoffrey Grosenbach</p>
<p>Sven Fuchs: <em>“One of the best tips I’ve ever gotten was from Steve Bristol: <a href="http://lesseverything.com/blog/archives/2013/02/18/just-have-fun-with-it/">Just have fun with it!</a>”</em></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/1010425/a824ef90-0b4a-11e3-8ae6-c803a5c82c2f.png" width="600" /></p>
<p>……….
<br />
Have more recommendations? Leave a comment and help us collect the best tips ♥</p>
Get your nerd on!RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2013-08-16T00:00:00+00:002013-08-16T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/nerdie<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/977240/9f62ddae-069f-11e3-83a9-a0bb84cc0bda.png" width="600" /></p>
<p>Did you hear? <a href="http://bit.ly/1793rWX">The nerdies are here!</a></p>
<p>The truly amazing girls of Unerdwear released a <strong>limited edition of a Rails Girls Nerdies</strong>. AND they donate all the profits to RGSoC to make your summer even better! True Story. The Nerdies will probably sell out in a minute, so be quick as a cat!</p>
<p>We hear rumors that, while wearing them, your code will get magically better ;) <br />
So <a href="http://bit.ly/1793rWX">get your hands on them now</a>!</p>
<div align="center">
<a href="http://bit.ly/1793rWX"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/977358/ee7f0226-06a1-11e3-8b73-4128176f497f.gif" width="400" /></a>
</div>
Week Review: Talk time, lunch time, publishing timeKatrinhttp://twitter.com/_die_katrin2013-08-12T00:00:00+00:002013-08-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/talktime-lunchtime<p>For some of us last week started like this:</p>
<p><img src="http://www.kaputtmutterfischwerk.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tumblr_mqjzp8idTr1rn7bzro1_400.gif" width="500" /></p>
<p>But there’s nothing that couldn’t be sweetened with a delicious lunch. And thus started another week full of monster coding and learning many and more new things.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/946049/16a70bf6-0326-11e3-8861-0f4a6add5fdb.jpg" width="500" />
<br /></p>
<font color="grey" size="2px"><i>Some wonderful people from the Rails Girls universe (Berlin, Brno, Rotterdam and RGSoC)</i>
</font>
<p>###Happy Conferencing</p>
<p>After the raffle of the conference tickets last week, two of our students dived right into their first tech conf.
<a href="https://twitter.com/jendiamond">Jen</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/joyicecloud">Joyce</a> were part of this week’s <a href="http://distill.engineyard.com">Distill 2013</a> in San Francisco. And they didn’t just hear some talks and met many new people, they also held <a href="https://twitter.com/jlsuttles/status/365657514483793921/">their first lightning talk</a>! Congraz you two!!! We are very proud ♥</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/946290/6063865a-032d-11e3-813d-0079d36a0673.jpg" width="500" /></p>
<p>No rest for the wicked, though. The conferencing continues stroke upon stroke. Next week will see <a href="https://twitter.com/ninabreznik">Nina</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/juliaguar">Julia</a> at <a href="http://2013.jrubyconf.eu">JRubyConf</a> as well as
<a href="https://twitter.com/majakomel">Maja</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/laurawadden">Laura</a> at <a href="http://2013.eurucamp.org">eurucamp</a> both happening in Berlin.</p>
<p>In case you haven’t seen this one yet: <a href="https://twitter.com/theophani">Tiffany</a> put together <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/talk/">everything you have to think of</a> when giving a talk - including all those little bits and pieces that can go wrong when you enter the stage. This makes for a perfect cheat sheet on upcoming talks. Yay!</p>
<p>Team New Rosies is attending the <a href="https://thestrangeloop.com">Strange Loop Conference</a> in St. Louis on Sep 18-20th and Laura and Adriana can’t wait to <a href="http://newrosies.tumblr.com/post/57672769089/holiday">meet fellow attendees</a>. So if you know anyone attending Strange Loop or you’re going there yourself, just drop them a line.</p>
<p>###News from the teams</p>
<p>It is simply jawdropping to follow our students along their way, watching and working on all kinds of tutorials, implementing feature after feature and, of course, testing testing testing ;) Here are a few highlights and interesting reads from this week.</p>
<p>Team D* <a href="https://twitter.com/carolina/status/365069323011760128">woke up one morning</a> only to find their autocomplete feature of the search function for Diaspora being successfully merged. <a href="https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/4335">Check it out on Github</a>.</p>
<p>Alicja and Wiktoria of Team Species+ wrote an encouraging and insightful recap of their week:
<a href="http://dalach.blogspot.de/2013/08/life-on-rollercoster.html">Life on a rollercoaster</a>. Facing problems in all areas of their coding work, there was this terrible feeling of constantly getting stuck. But they kept calm and eventually found a way out for each of their problems. Here they are in the middle of understanding AngularJS:</p>
<p><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mB7cCcThsz0/UgJCPSFSykI/AAAAAAAACIQ/J_UHse2yexU/s1600/rgsoc33.jpg" width="500" /></p>
<p>Team Punchgirls <a href="http://punchgirls.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/developer-youve-got-an-e-mail/">reached a milestone</a> in their app development. They have implemented all the must-have features to have a minimal viable app. Congraz!</p>
<p>Nina of Team Spree <a href="https://twitter.com/ninabreznik/status/365429729383288832">recommended</a> an article on the <a href="http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/8-regular-expressions-you-should-know/">8 most common regular Ruby expressions</a>. While you’re over there, don’t miss the rest of <a href="http://net.tutsplus.com/">net tuts+</a>, in case you don’t know it yet.</p>
<p>Happy Monday everybody!</p>
Meet Team DysaniaVyki and JZhttp://twitter.com/krainboltgreene2013-08-05T00:00:00+00:002013-08-05T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/meet-team-dysania<p>Hi! We’re <a href="https://twitter.com/toastergrrl">Vyki</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/jzeta">JZ</a> of <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/20">Team Dysania</a> from Los Angeles, California, and we started as part-time RGSoC student volunteers on July 8. This summer, we’re web interns by day (Vyki at the <a href="http://www.smgov.net/departments/pcd/">City of Santa Monica</a>, JZ at <a href="http://www.disneyanimation.com/">Walt Disney Animation Studios</a>), and Ruby OSS developers (with coach <a href="https://twitter.com/krainboltgreene">Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene</a>) by night.</p>
<div style="text-align:center;font-size:.85em;font-style:italic;"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2158875/906813/348f7db4-fce2-11e2-9046-da644b6e65b8.jpg" width="80%" /><br /><span>FYI: we know how to make balloon arches</span></div>
<p><strong>The word “dysania”</strong> is defined as the state of finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning…which we found to be fun and appropriate for our team name since we both suffer from this condition.</p>
<p><strong>We first met</strong> at Rails Girls Los Angeles in April 2013 (hosted by <a href="https://twitter.com/jlsuttles">Jessica Lynn Suttles</a>, coach of <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/2">Team Bundler</a>), which was the first time either of us had ever started learning Ruby/Rails. After that, we were hooked, getting more involved in the LA Ruby/Rails community, and attending local meetups and study groups.</p>
<p><strong>We first heard about RGSoC</strong> through <a href="https://twitter.com/railsgirls">@railsgirls</a> and immediately wanted to participate. We were both aspiring software developers interested in starting to contribute to OSS, and we considered RGSoC to be the perfect introduction. We were excited about the idea of immersive hands-on learning while contributing to a real project. The fast pace and sheer amount of information would keep us on our toes, but we would have each other, our coach, and our mentors to keep us on track.</p>
<p><strong>Our project is working on <a href="http://www.discourse.org/">Discourse</a>,</strong> a 100% open source Rails forum software. Kurtis (aka Captain Kurt) first introduced it to us, and we found it to be the most interesting out of the Ruby OS projects we considered. We believed in its cause, and were especially drawn to the fact that <a href="http://meta.discourse.org/">Discourse is so welcome to contributors</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Our goal for the summer</strong> is to extract all <a href="http://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-a-onebox/4546">oneboxing</a> into a Ruby gem. Oneboxing is a feature of Discourse where if you include a link to a site (e.g.Twitter, Wikipedia), it will try to create a usable snippet/preview for you automatically. By extracting this feature into a gem, it can be used by projects other than Discourse, and will also make testing much easier since the code will be more modularized. If time permits, we’ll also be implementing oneboxing for other popular sites that aren’t supported yet.</p>
<p><strong>So far, we’ve been working on</strong> the beginnings of our <a href="https://github.com/dysania/discourse-oneboxer">discourse-oneboxer</a> gem. We pulled in all of the oneboxer files and specs from Discourse and restructured them to work within the gem, removing Rails dependencies and fixing tests using RSpec. We’re now rewriting some methods that we don’t have good tests for. We’ll be registering our gem on <a href="http://rubygems.org/">rubygems.org</a> soon (possibly today!), which is pretty damn exciting. And of course, we like to think we’ve been getting better at Git and pair programming a little bit every day.</p>
<p><strong>We’d say our happiest moments so far</strong> are at the end of every session with Captain Kurt, when we realize we’d been focused and in the zone for 2-3 straight hours.</p>
<p><strong>If we could code anything in the world…</strong> Vyki would build OSS applications for city governments to improve workflow and transparency in the city planning process. JZ would invent teleportation.</p>
<p>Feel free to follow us on <a href="http://github.com/dysania">GitHub</a> or our <a href="http://dysania.github.io/blog">blog</a>!</p>
How to give a talkTiffanyhttp://twitter.com/theophani2013-08-04T00:00:00+00:002013-08-04T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/how-to-give-a-talk<div class="announce">
We are so happy to announce that <a href="https://twitter.com/theophani">Tiffany Conroy</a>
poured her wisdom into this article for you.
Tiffany, interaction designer and developer at
<a href="http://soundcloud.com">Soundcloud</a>, started the project
<a href="http://weareallaweso.me">weareallawesome</a>
where she aims to motivate women in tech to get more visible and speak at
conferences. Being a speaker herself, she has started a wonderful collection of
resources to help you with that - from articles on how to be a role model to
practical tips on how to make good slides.
</div>
<h2 id="a-simple-formula-for-talking-about-your-project">A simple formula for talking about your project</h2>
<p>On an opening slide, have your name(s) and Twitter handle(s).
Introduce yourself using 30 words or less. You don’t have to mention RailsGirls.
Using one or two slides and less than 2 minutes, explain the problem that your project addresses.
Show a slide with your project name or logo, and introduce your project by name. Maybe mention RailsGirls if you want, if you have not already.
Using four or less slides, explain how your project addresses the problem.
Optionally, use one slide to talk about difficulties you encountered.
As a conclusion, discuss any future plans for the project, or how people can learn more or follow your work.
Close with a “thank you” slide that shows your names(s) and Twitter handle(s) again.</p>
<h3 id="basic-tips-for-short-talks">Basic tips for short talks</h3>
<p>Here are some tips on how to look and feel like a pro while giving your talk:</p>
<h3 id="show-how-excited-you-are-about-your-project">Show how excited you are about your project</h3>
<p>Bored speakers are boring. Enthusiasm is contagious.</p>
<h3 id="be-prepared-and-practice">Be prepared and practice</h3>
<p>Know exactly what you want to say, and practice it out loud a few times. You don’t have to memorize word for word. At least once, you should practice your talk while standing and advancing your slides.
If you and a partner are presenting together, then rehearse together. Only switch speakers once or twice, and don’t interrupt each other.</p>
<h3 id="slides-are-for-illustration-purposes-only">Slides are for illustration purposes only</h3>
<p>If your slides have more than a few words each, no one will listen to you talking. Bullet points are very tempting but are almost always a bad choice.</p>
<h3 id="demos-have-a-backup-plan">Demos! Have a backup plan</h3>
<p>So you want to do a live demo.
The internet will fail. Your code will break. Always make screenshots or a video as a backup plan.
Also, if you are going to do a demo, then rehearse switching from the presentation mode to the demo and back again.</p>
<h3 id="test-your-tech-setup-before-your-talk">Test your tech setup before your talk</h3>
<p>Find a time <strong>before</strong> your talk to test your laptop with the projector. Make sure your notes are showing on the laptop and the presentation on the big screen. If you need audio, make sure the audio is connected.
Just before presenting, make sure you <strong>CLOSE</strong> all applications that you do not need for the presentation, <strong>especially</strong> messaging apps like Twitter, Skype and email clients. Under your Energy Saver options, change the timeout so your computer won’t fall asleep while you talk. Put your phone in Airplane Mode.</p>
<h3 id="stay-calm-and-dont-rush-yourself">Stay calm, and don’t rush yourself</h3>
<p>If you need a moment to find something on your computer, or find your place, or remember a thought, go ahead and take the moment. I like to have a bottle of water with the cap kept on so that if I need to think or slow down, I can take the cap off, take a sip, and put the cap back on to give myself time.</p>
<h3 id="never-apologize-even-when-it-is-your-fault">Never apologize, even when it is your fault</h3>
<p>If you have technical problems, or forget something, or made a mistake, do not apologize.
Never apologize for being unprepared. If you are unprepared, be as confident as you can be with what you do have, and keep it short, so you don’t waste people’s time.</p>
<h3 id="end-before-your-time-limit">End before your time limit</h3>
<p>If no one is timing you, time yourself. In the very worst case, if you start to run over, jump to your final slide, thank everyone and say “Unfortunately I have used all my time, so please talk to me afterwards”.</p>
Week review: Hammertime, Twitter lists and heavy conferencingRGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2013-08-03T00:00:00+00:002013-08-03T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/saturday-two<p>What a week! We can’t even decide what to tell you first.
Well, okay first things first. First, you’ll get a hug! This week from Team Unicorn ♥</p>
<p><img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BQq6zb4CcAA_kK7.jpg" width="500" /></p>
<p>##Conferencing</p>
<p>This week could have been called <em>the week of ultimate conference raffling</em>. As you probably know already, we got some tickets from awesome confs and this week the raffle fairy <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/the-big-conferenc-raffle-winners/">picked some winners</a>! Wohoo! This means no less than that beginning with eurucamp next week, our students will start to rock the tech confs of this world! ♥♥♥</p>
<p>##Hammertime, terminal tools and congratulations</p>
<p>Okay, let’s have a log ;) at our Teams:</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/905691/eef2e6e6-fc47-11e2-9269-8b768b32d071.png" /></p>
<p>Carsten, the coach from Team Highway to Rails
<a href="http://highwaytorails.tumblr.com/post/57157801324/day-23-2-8-2013-congrats-carsten-and-nantje">had a special day</a> and Team Inchworms revealed how to make your co-workers <a href="http://inchworms.net/blog/2013-08-01-merge-urge/">do something ugly</a> into their ASCII with a terminal tool:</p>
<p><img src="https://dyrci3isikb50.cloudfront.net/files/167790/original/loop.gif" /></p>
<p>Also, Team Highway to Rails, Inchworms and Species+ <a href="http://dalach.blogspot.de/2013/08/parser-will-go-to-paris.html">will meet in Paris</a>,</p>
<p>Team Diaspora <a href="https://n-1.cc/blog/view/1728439/lost-in-translation">realiye tjat khey jave fprgpttem pme tomy tjomf</a>,</p>
<p>and for Team Bundler it’s <a href="http://rgsocbundler.github.io/2013/07/30/week3-day11.html">hammertime</a>.</p>
<p>##TweetTweet</p>
<p>We are blown away by all these witty, smart and funny articles all the teams are writing. If you can’t get enough, too: <a href="http://bit.ly/rgsoc13stu">follow them on this twitter list</a>.</p>
<p>##RubyRubyRubyRuby!</p>
<p>Thanks to RGSoC mentor <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/users/115">Andy</a>, everybody spent some minutes, hours, days addicted on this:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior#/"><img src="http://defendingdiaspora.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/ruby-warriors1.png" alt="everybody is obsessed with ruby warrior" width="550" /></a></p>
<p>We bet in a minute you’ll be infected, too. Warrior.attack!</p>
<p>Have a ruby weekend!</p>
<p>P.S. Of course this is only a tiny fraction of what happened this week. Check out more here: <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org">https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org</a></p>
Conference Raffle: Here are the Winners!Anikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-07-31T00:00:00+00:002013-07-31T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conference-raffle-winners<style>
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<p>Hooray!</p>
<p>As you know, we rolled up our sleeves to get you some
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/conferences/">free conference tickets</a> to make your summer even better and send you out into the
coding community.</p>
<p>We have been offered no less than <strong>49 free tickets</strong> at some of the best Ruby
conferences on 3 different continents. Most conferences offer free
tickets, which is really fantastic, but some of them will even cover flights
and accomodation for you. And all of them are really worth visiting!</p>
<p>You are invited you to attend, talk, mingle and meet some of the most awesome
members of our community.</p>
<h4 id="a-very-warm-thank-you-to-all-of-these-amazing-conferences">A very warm thank you to all of these amazing conferences!</h4>
<p class="thanks">
<img src="http://i717.photobucket.com/albums/ww173/prestonjjrtr/Thanks/thanks.gif" align="left" width="180" height="100" />
<a href="http://2013.arrrrcamp.be/"> ♥ Arrrrcamp</a>
<a href="http://devcon-oct13.events.co.il/"> ♥ DevCon TLV</a>
<a href="https://distill.engineyard.com/"> ♥ Distill</a>
<a href="http://www.dotrb.eu/"> ♥ dotRBeu</a>
<a href="http://2013.eurucamp.org/"> ♥ eurucamp</a>
<a href="http://futurestack.io/"> ♥ FutureStack</a>
<a href="http://2013.jrubyconf.eu"> ♥ JRubyConf</a>
<a href="http://madisonruby.org/"> ♥ Madison Ruby</a>
<a href="http://railsisrael2013.events.co.il/"> ♥ Rails Israel</a>
<a href="http://rubyshift.org/"> ♥ RubyShift</a>
<a href="http://13.rupy.eu/"> ♥ RuPy</a>
<a href="http://socoded.com/"> ♥ SoCoded</a>
<a href="http://www.startechconf.com/"> ♥ StarTechConf</a>
<a href="https://thestrangeloop.com/"> ♥ Strange Loop</a>
<a href="http://wickedgoodruby.com/"> ♥ Wicked Good Ruby</a>
</p>
<p>You sent us your <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=rgsocconfs&src=typd">wish lists</a>.
We made our brains fume by thinking about how to implement the raffle and and our
conference raffle fairy has written some code. If you want to look at our
cards you can find the logic behind all this
<a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/rgsoc-teams/blob/master/lib/confs.rb">here</a>
The gist of it: We made sure that everybody who applied had a good chance of winning a ticket and that
nobody came away empty-handed. We also applied the rules announced on our
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/conferences">conferences page</a>.</p>
<p>Now heeeeere you can watch how winners were picked. Make sure to watch it
<a href="https://vimeo.com/71424538">in HD in fullscreen mode</a>,
it’s fun :)</p>
<div class="videoWrapper">
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/71424538" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen">
</iframe>
</div>
<p>Here’s the full <a href="https://gist.github.com/svenfuchs/e557df65a033367030c9">transcript of the raffle</a>.</p>
<h2 id="and-finally---drum-rollll">And finally - drum rollll</h2>
<p>Here come the winners:</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Conference</th>
<th>Date</th>
<th>Name</th>
<th>Team</th>
<th>Twitter</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>RuPy *</td>
<td>11-14.10.</td>
<td>Maja Komel</td>
<td>Spree Girls</td>
<td>@RuPy</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RuPy *</td>
<td>11-14.10.</td>
<td>Nina Breznik</td>
<td>Spree Girls</td>
<td>@RuPy</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>dotRBeu</td>
<td>18.10.</td>
<td>Wiktoria Dalach</td>
<td>Species+</td>
<td>@dotRBeu</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>dotRBeu</td>
<td>18.10.</td>
<td>Alicja Cyganiewicz</td>
<td>Species+</td>
<td>@dotRBeu</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RubyShift *</td>
<td>27-28.09.</td>
<td>Anja</td>
<td>inchworms</td>
<td>@rubyshift</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RubyShift *</td>
<td>27-28.09.</td>
<td>CarlaD</td>
<td>inchworms</td>
<td>@rubyshift</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>eurucamp</td>
<td>16-18.08.</td>
<td>Laura Wadden</td>
<td>RailsGrrls</td>
<td>@eurucamp</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>eurucamp</td>
<td>16-18.08.</td>
<td>Nicole Felhösi</td>
<td>RailsGrrls</td>
<td>@eurucamp</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Distill</td>
<td>08-09.08.</td>
<td>Jen Diamond</td>
<td>Bundler</td>
<td>@distill</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Distill</td>
<td>08-09.08.</td>
<td>Joyce</td>
<td>Bundler</td>
<td>@distill</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Strange Loop *</td>
<td>18-20.09.</td>
<td>Laura Garcia</td>
<td>New Rosies</td>
<td>@strangeloop_stl</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Strange Loop *</td>
<td>18-20.09.</td>
<td>Adriana Palacio</td>
<td>New Rosies</td>
<td>@strangeloop_stl</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SoCoded</td>
<td>19-20.09.</td>
<td>Angela Ebirim</td>
<td>Hackety Hack</td>
<td>@socodedconf</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>StarTechConf</td>
<td>25-26.10.</td>
<td>Cecilia Rivero</td>
<td>Punchgirls</td>
<td>@startechconf</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>StarTechConf</td>
<td>25-26.10.</td>
<td>Mayn Ektvedt Kjær</td>
<td>Punchgirls</td>
<td>@startechconf</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Madison Ruby</td>
<td>22-24.08.</td>
<td>Jacqueline S. Homan</td>
<td>Hackety Hack</td>
<td>@MadisonRuby</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>dotRBeu</td>
<td>18.10.</td>
<td>Tam Eastley</td>
<td>Highway to Rails</td>
<td>@dotRBeu</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>dotRBeu</td>
<td>18.10.</td>
<td>Susanne Dewein</td>
<td>Highway to Rails</td>
<td>@dotRBeu</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RubyShift</td>
<td>27-28.09.</td>
<td>Victoria Martinez</td>
<td>Unicorn</td>
<td>@rubyshift</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Arrrrcamp</td>
<td>03-04.10.</td>
<td>Oana Sipos</td>
<td>Oana</td>
<td>@arrrrcamp</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SoCoded</td>
<td>19-20.09.</td>
<td>juliaguar</td>
<td>D*</td>
<td>@socodedconf</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Madison Ruby</td>
<td>22-24.08.</td>
<td>Hester van Wijk</td>
<td>Unicorn</td>
<td>@MadisonRuby</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>dotRBeu</td>
<td>18.10.</td>
<td>CarlaD</td>
<td>inchworms</td>
<td>@dotRBeu</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RubyShift</td>
<td>27-28.09.</td>
<td>Maja Komel</td>
<td>Spree Girls</td>
<td>@rubyshift</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>JRubyConfEU</td>
<td>14-15.08.</td>
<td>Nina Breznik</td>
<td>Spree Girls</td>
<td>@JRubyConfEU</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>FutureStack *</td>
<td>24-25.10.</td>
<td>Laura Garcia</td>
<td>New Rosies</td>
<td>#futurestack</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RubyShift</td>
<td>27-28.09.</td>
<td>Tam Eastley</td>
<td>Highway to Rails</td>
<td>@rubyshift</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RubyShift</td>
<td>27-28.09.</td>
<td>Susanne Dewein</td>
<td>Highway to Rails</td>
<td>@rubyshift</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Arrrrcamp</td>
<td>03-04.10.</td>
<td>Victoria Martinez</td>
<td>Unicorn</td>
<td>@arrrrcamp</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>JRubyConfEU</td>
<td>14-15.08.</td>
<td>juliaguar</td>
<td>D*</td>
<td>@JRubyConfEU</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Wicked Good Ruby</td>
<td>12-13.10.</td>
<td>Hester van Wijk</td>
<td>Unicorn</td>
<td>@WickedGoodRuby</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RubyShift</td>
<td>27-28.09.</td>
<td>Oana Sipos</td>
<td>Oana</td>
<td>@rubyshift</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RubyShift</td>
<td>27-28.09.</td>
<td>juliaguar</td>
<td>D*</td>
<td>@rubyshift</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>DevConTLV</td>
<td>10.10.</td>
<td>Tam Eastley</td>
<td>Highway to Rails</td>
<td>#DevconTLV</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>DevConTLV</td>
<td>10.10.</td>
<td>Susanne Dewein</td>
<td>Highway to Rails</td>
<td>#DevconTLV</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RailsIL</td>
<td>09.10.</td>
<td>Tam Eastley</td>
<td>Highway to Rails</td>
<td>#RailsIL</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>RailsIL</td>
<td>09.10.</td>
<td>Susanne Dewein</td>
<td>Highway to Rails</td>
<td>#RailsIL</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="font-size: 0.8em;">*) domestic flights covered</p>
<h2 id="congratulations">Congratulations!</h2>
<p>We are so grateful for all those fantastic conference organizers pulling all
these free tickets out of their magic hats for you. And we couldn’t be more
happy: You get to go to fantastic conferences and in most cases
meet other RGSoC students to rock the conference days with!</p>
<p>Oh, how we wish we could be there too and see you all spread your wings and
fly into the community … but we hope, you’ll keep us in the loop and tell
the world how your first conferences have been!</p>
<p>Now we even have
<a href="https://gist.github.com/svenfuchs/da286e31644172928958">a few tickets left</a> …
that calls for another raffle! We will let you know what happens next soon.</p>
<p>Happy conferencing, you lucky, lucky students! ♥</p>
<p><img src="http://s3.favim.com/orig/40/caroo-cat-cats-computer-cute-Favim.com-337157.jpg" alt="" /></p>
Introducing team Highway to RailsTam and Susannehttp://twitter.com/highwaytorails2013-07-29T00:00:00+00:002013-07-29T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-highway-to-rails<p><strong>We are team <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/14">Highway to Rails</a>.</strong> We chose the name because of the ACDC song “Highway to Hell”. When you replace the word “hell” with “rails”, it really sounds like we’re doing something incredibly exciting, which, of course, we are!</p>
<p>“Don’t need reason, don’t need rhyme<br />
Ain’t nothing I would rather do<br />
Going down, party time<br />
My friends are gonna be there too<br />
I’m on the highway to RAILS.”</p>
<p>We heard about RGSoC first and foremost on twitter, but we’re also members of a weekly Rails Girls project group in Berlin, so news quickly spread. We applied because we’re both at a sort of turning point in our lives: we want to change career paths, we’re interested in coding and technology, and it sounds like fun.</p>
<p>Unfortunately we weren’t accepted to the summer of code. However, we had already found a place to work (tables in the IT department at <a href="http://www.absolventa.de/">Absolventa</a>) and a couple coaches (Carsten and Felix, developers at Absolventa). Luckily, the company was as sad about us not getting in as we were, and were nice enough to create two internship positions for us. So now we’re summer of code volunteer students, working full time on a project called event_girl that Absolventa will hopefully use when it’s done.</p>
<p>Event_girl is the brainchild of the Absolventa IT department. Since they’re sponsoring us, it makes sense to work on something they have knowledge about/is useful to them. But don’t worry, it’s still open source! (painfully so… our commit history at this point is insane). Event_girl is a way for an individual person or company to keep track of a bunch of tasks happening in the background of a system, set restrictions such as date/time/frequency, and check to make sure various tasks are being fulfilled, or (and this is the hard part) aren’t being fulfilled.</p>
<p>We’ve started our our app from scratch, and so far we’ve laid the foundations with twitter bootstrap, a couple models/view/controllers, set the restrictions, nested our resources, and done some testing with Rspec. This week we started looking into Action Mailers and our app actually sent us an email!</p>
<p><strong>Happiest moments:</strong></p>
<p>Tam’s happiest moment so far isn’t anything specific, but rather, a kind of ritual. Carsten writes various things for us to do on index cards, and then when we finish them, we rip them up and put them in a glass. It’s a great feeling to look at that index card, know we’ve done the somewhat confusing thing written on it successfully, and then rip it up and put it away. At the end of the summer we’re going to throw them in the air and dance around in the ensuing mess (and then clean it all up).</p>
<p>Susanne’s happiest moment so far was when Absolventa said they’d sponsor both of us as RGSoC volunteers! She also enjoys the feeling of finally being able to (kind of) understand what the model-view-controller is all about.</p>
<p><strong>If you could code anything:</strong></p>
<p>Tam loves audio and making podcasts, and has a mini dream of making an app where users can upload field sounds they record directly onto a corresponding map. Things like this already kind of exist, but not to the extent she’s looking for.</p>
<p>Susanne still wants to program an app where people around the globe can add favourite bakeries onto a map. They could add specifications like “sells dark bread”, “sells pretzels”, “sells gluten free bread” and so on. (Susanne is German, so whenever she travels she really missed German bread.)</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/4237285/855647/b3b3bbc8-f52b-11e2-892b-2cad134523e7.jpg" alt="Tam and Susanne" width="400" /></p>
Weekend hug, fellow geek girls and conference calls!RGSoC teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2013-07-27T00:00:00+00:002013-07-27T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/weekend<p>Because it’s weekend, we have a very special hug for you - a mix between a crocodile hug and a dragonball-power-spell. We figure, everybody can use one of these once in a while (especially while coding!;)</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/867486/b15158fc-f6fe-11e2-8854-a990e3a43dd3.gif" width="560" />
<br />
<i><font color="grey" size="2px"> Hugging here are: Organizer
<a href="http://twitter.com/langziehohr">Anika</a>, Mentor
<a href="http://twitter.com/pxlpnk">Andy</a> and Organizer
<a href="http://twitter.com/floordrees">Floor</a>
</font></i></p>
<p>Soo, what’s been going on this week?</p>
<p><a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conference/">The Conference call</a>! Did you pick your favorite ones yet? You have until monday 12:00 pm to tweet us your whishlist (no, we are not Santa, but we’re trying really hard to ;) )</p>
<p>Team Hackety Hack is preparing <a href="http://teamhackety.wordpress.com/2013/07/26/july-26th-week-2-unanswered-questions-filter/">a screencast</a>, Team Species+ got visits from <a href="http://dalach.blogspot.de/2013/07/when-indiana-meets-macgyver.html">McGuyver and Indiana Jones</a>,
Diasbits know more about <a href="http://defendingdiaspora.wordpress.com/2013/07/25/jekyll/">Jekyll</a> than-you-do and New Rosies are offering you <a href="http://newrosies.tumblr.com/post/56494607526/creating-our-rack-framework">a sneak peek</a> at their newly created Rack framework (which they’ll release on GitHub soon-ish).</p>
<p>Over in Berlin team Highway to Rails learned about the <a href="http://highwaytorails.tumblr.com/post/56431303669/day-17-25-7-2013-more-action-mailer">difference between the internet and the web</a>. And they received an email from their app ;)
Team Bundler in LA tries to <a href="http://rgsocbundler.github.io/2013/07/24/week2-day7.html">make their tests fail</a> (really!) and
Magda learned about the <a href="http://lipen.co/til/more-is-new-less.html">essence of refactoring</a>.</p>
<object width="560" height="315"><param name="movie" value="//www.youtube.com/v/s4Rjy5yW1gQ?version=3&hl=en_US" /></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /></param><embed src="//www.youtube.com/v/s4Rjy5yW1gQ?version=3&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" /></embed></object>
<p>Do you love this as much as we do? The video is proving once again that we have nothing to prove: Women can be geeks, too! Make sure to check it out! Maybe some of you want to submit your own crazy picture to http://geekgirlvideo.tumblr.com/ (and represent Rails Girls Summer of Code!).</p>
<p>… and this is only a selection of what has been going on this week. Check out more here: <a href="teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org">teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org</a>.</p>
<p>Have a geeky weekend, everyone!</p>
Go to a conference - We have free tickets for you!RGSoC Teamhttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2013-07-26T00:00:00+00:002013-07-26T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/conference<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/862757/f30569be-f5fa-11e2-97ee-1b32a3da5138.png" width="600" /></p>
<p><em>time to meet the crowd</em> ♥</p>
<p>At Rails Girls Summer of Code you work hard and learn new stuff every day, for
3 months, a summer full of love and code.</p>
<p>To make this an even more complete experience for you we’d like you to join a
nice conference. Enjoy the great vibe, learn a few new things from the talks, chat with fantastic people and get to know the lovely community!</p>
<p>For this we have been offered no less than <strong>55 free tickets</strong> at fantastic
conferences on 3 different continents for you. On top of that some conferences
even include <strong>free flights and hotel</strong>, too. And all of them are very worth
visiting!</p>
<p><strong>Everyone</strong> who has applied for Rails Girls Summer of Code as a student <strong>can apply for this</strong>, no matter if your application has been selected.</p>
<p>Please read more here:
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/conferences">http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/conferences</a> and apply until Monday, 12:00 pm CET.</p>
Meet Team Rails GrrlsLaura and Nicolehttp://twitter.com/_railsgrrls_2013-07-24T00:00:00+00:002013-07-24T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/rails-grrls<p>We are Laura and Nicole, a.k.a. <a href="http://railsgrrls.tumblr.com">Team Rails Grrls</a>. We started our Summer of Code in Mid-June at the Soundcloud HQ office in Berlin.</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/868424/ae3cadf2-f79d-11e2-9dbd-333bb6d1697e.png" alt="Laura, Nicole and coach Duana" width="400" /></p>
<p>After the first few weeks of getting more familiar with Ruby, Rails and programming concepts in general, last week we couldn’t wait to get started with our first project, the <a href="https://github.com/mokus80/learners_directory">Rails Apps Learners Directory</a>. So far, we’ve set up an authentication system through GitHub and added a rating feature (without using a gem!).</p>
<p><strong>Why ‘Rails Grrls’? What does the name mean?</strong></p>
<p>It’s a reference to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_grrrl">Riot Grrrl punk rock movement</a> that started in the early 90’s. Feminism isn’t dead and we want to spread the word that feminists rule.</p>
<p><strong>How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?</strong></p>
<p>We both heard about the SoC at the RailsGirls Anniversary Workshop on May 4th this year.</p>
<p><strong>Laura:</strong> I want to apply my coding skills to projects for social justice - coding websites and other tech things that need doing. My background is in nonprofits working with queer and gender non-conforming youth, and I want to be able to go back to those movements with more skills to offer.</p>
<p><strong>Nicole:</strong> I applied because I want to become a software developer and think the project will give me a good foundation to get started with.</p>
<p><strong>What are you working on?</strong></p>
<p>The first project is to build a crowdsourced directory of Rails-learning resources within RailsApps. The open source community will be able to post, rate and categorize the resources.</p>
<p>The second project will be to build our own programming language using Rubinius and document the process as a tutorial for others.</p>
<p><strong>What is your happiest moment so far?</strong></p>
<p>Everytime we fix something we get an adrenaline rush (and do a high-five). And sometimes we get cookies from our coaches…</p>
<p><strong>If you could code anything in the world, what would it be?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Nicole:</strong> I would use my skills to contribute something meaningful to this world. Sounds cheesy, I know, but it’s the truth.
<strong>Laura:</strong> I would code an app that would swallow Facebook and Google and make them less evil. Kidding, kind of :P</p>
icecode daysAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-07-22T00:00:00+00:002013-07-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/icecode<p>Berlin is sweating in the summer heat and we find it super hard to concentrate.
So today not much words.
Just some really cool code for you:</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/835992/aa605424-f2e6-11e2-8450-bf2b98e8ef92.JPG" height="400" /></p>
<p>Did it help? ;)</p>
Fridayhugs, Soundcloud interview and HTTPAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-07-19T00:00:00+00:002013-07-19T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/friday<p>It’s friday and here is a hug:</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/825994/e75bd29a-f07a-11e2-9088-3af69f8bcbad.gif" height="300" /></p>
<p>This is our favorite FRIDAYHUG so far from Team Species+. On their [blog] (http://dalach.blogspot.de/search/label/RGSoC) you can find other friday hugs, read about if working in cafés … well works and how they use d3.js.</p>
<p>This week, Konstantin Haase wrote down HTTP for Team Inchworms with <a href="http://inchworms.net/blog/2013-07-18-get-requests/">pen and paper</a> (!).
Team Bundler started <a href="http://rgsocbundler.github.io/2013/06/30/hello-world.html">their summer of code</a> and Team Highway to Rails <a href="http://highwaytorails.tumblr.com/post/55700336007/day-12-17-7-2013-nesting-resources">ripped up another to-do index card </a>.</p>
<p>Also, one of our dear sponsors, Soundcloud, interviewed <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams/3">Team Rails Grrls</a> on their <a href="http://blog.soundcloud.com/2013/07/19/rails-girls-summer-of-code-welcoming-nicole-and-laura/">blog</a>.</p>
<p><img src="http://cdn.tutsplus.com/net.tutsplus.com/authors/jeffreyway/1269259657_omg_cat.gif" height="190" /></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/826290/aa8a971e-f081-11e2-9832-1003ab117a06.png" height="190" /></p>
<p>WOW, we feel super amazed and proud to see one of our teams getting 10:48 min of fame. ♥</p>
<p>But this is only a few of what has been going on this week. Check out more here: <a href="teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org">teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org</a>.</p>
<p>Good friday, everyone!</p>
Introducing inchwormsAnja and Carlahttp://twitter.com/_tyranja_2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:002013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/introducing-inchworms<p>Hej Everbody,</p>
<p><strong>We are the inchworms</strong> and we chose that name because the coding process for us is like crawling inch by inch. Also we like this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyasgr9mn3s">video</a>.</p>
<p>We’ve been working with Rails Girls Summer of Code for two weeks now and here is a short review…</p>
<p>In the first week we tried and managed to get the hang of the Ruby framework Sinatra. In the second we were busy with screencasting our newly acquired knowledge for other beginners. The first week went pretty fast, the second was a bit exhausting because we had to review and redo everything on a Mac with an older version of Ruby (previosly we both worked with Ubuntu). But also we learned a lot! Primarily how to cope with failure.</p>
<p><strong>We’re both in the rubymosters project group</strong>, where we meet once a week and learn how to code. It was there we first heard about the Rails Girls Summer of Code. Since we both enjoyed learning how to code so much we thought RGSoC would be fantastic to participate in: we could spend every day, not just one evening a week, learning.</p>
<p><strong>Our RGSoC-goal is</strong> to understand how to build a couple of sample apps with <a href="http://sinatrarb.com">Sinatra</a>, produce some screencasts for installing and working with Sinatra, refactor some Sinatra tests, and in the last month build a web application for the visualization of a large public dataset of EU farm-subsidies. We will do this together with the <a href="http://okfn.de/">open knowledge foundation</a>.</p>
<p><strong>We choose the Sinatra project</strong> as it’s a ‘lighter’ and more basic framework than rails. We thought it would help us understand on a deeper level how rails and all other web application frameworks operate. The motivation for the visualization-project was to build something useful that helps make sense of a large dataset about an important EU program. We also want to help the open source community and give something back.</p>
<p><strong>The happiest moment</strong> was when we got code working on a first attempt without resorting to google or asking for help.</p>
<p><strong>If we could code anything in the world</strong> Anja would like to code a new internet without surveillance, or at least a mail program with easier encryption, and Carla would like to recode her own brain.</p>
<p><strong>We have learnt</strong> that work isn’t finished in one day, that you have to think a lot about the code and how it could work (or work better), and that you have to get used to failure :-)</p>
<p>Anja and Carla</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2013/inchworms-twins.jpg" alt="Anja and Carla in front of the Computer" width="400" /></p>
<p><em>image courtesy <a href="https://twitter.com/zaziemo/status/351742254945280000/photo/1">@zaziemo</a></em></p>
Inchworms break the first groundAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:002013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/inchworms<p>I guess you are as curious as we are about our teams, right?</p>
<p>So from now on every week we’ll present a team to you that will tell us a little bit about themselves, what awesome stuff they are up to and how things are going.</p>
<p>Later today we are beginning with the Berlin based <a href="http://inchworms.net/blog/">Team Inchworms</a>. Stay tuned to learn more about Sinatra, what Carla and Anja’s happiest moment was so far and how they came to their team name.</p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2013/inchworms.gif" height="230" /></p>
<p><img src="/img/blog/2013/inchworms.jpg" height="230" /></p>
The beginningAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-07-13T00:00:00+00:002013-07-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/the-beginning<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/792581/fdabc3fc-eba7-11e2-9fcc-b114f9a1d44f.png" align="middle" height="300" /></p>
<p>Our journey has begun and we’re right on track, code island starboard ahead!</p>
<p>Since July 1st we wrote 222 emails,<a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/"> 133 blog posts </a> have been posted by the teams, they spent more than 99 hours of coding - and this is only the beginning!</p>
<p>It’s been now 12 days since the summer of code officially started and here are the students of 12 teams saying hello world and obviously being super happy about their Summer of Code! Thanks to everybody who made this happen ♥</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/792560/1d1326d8-eba6-11e2-8fb3-2de8298fb07b.png" width="600" /></p>
First day of Summer!Anikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-07-01T00:00:00+00:002013-07-01T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/first-day-of-summer<p>It’s finally arrived! It’s 1st of July and the Summer of Code starts in 3….2….1…..</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/731300/2df67a3c-e268-11e2-99ee-c85dfa8693fb.png" alt="pistols_2 copy" /></p>
<p>HAPPY SUMMER OF CODE EVERYBODY! We are so happy to have <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org">you all</a> on board and we are so much looking forward to spending a fantastic summer with you. We couldn’t be more excited!</p>
<p>To make this wonderful day even better, we are proud to announce this wonderful news:</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/731309/61e43686-e268-11e2-8268-826a52ed5c62.png" alt="nerdies copy" /></p>
<p>The amazing girls from <a href="http://unerdwear.com">Unerdwear</a> are supporting Rails Girls Summer of Code! Because they don’t have money to give they will give nerdy boxers. Yeah, you heard right! <a href="http://bit.ly/14IgyNM">Read the full story on their blog.</a></p>
<p>They will produce a limited Rails Girls Edition of unisex Nerdies and donate all the profit to RGSoC. WOW, this is such a wonderful idea. We just can’t decide, which of the wonderful designs we should pick - so we need your help:
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.471110572982504.1073741829.136157603144471&type=1">Vote for your favorite design!</a></p>
<p>–
more:</p>
<p>Two teams have already blogged - Read about their first day:</p>
<p><a href="http://inchworms.net/blog/2013-07-01-first-day-of-school/">http://inchworms.net/blog/2013-07-01-first-day-of-school/</a></p>
<p><a href="http://dalach.blogspot.de/2013/07/first-day-of-rgsoc.html">http://dalach.blogspot.de/2013/07/first-day-of-rgsoc.html</a></p>
Please join: new organizers teamsRails Girls Summer of Code organizershttp://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc2013-06-23T00:00:00+00:002013-06-23T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/new-organizers-teams<p>Got some spare time and a knack for PR, community management, Sponsoring or Coding? Awesome!
We could use some helpful hands and can offer a wonderful summer of experience and of course <a href="#cats">cat gifs</a> ;)</p>
<p>Part of the reason is that [Sven] (http://twitter.com/svenfuchs) will have to step back from working on Rails
Girls Summer of Code a little bit starting July and focussing on [Travis] (http://travis-ci.org)
again. During the first weeks he will still be available about half-time and
[Anika] (http://twitter.com/langziehohr) will continue to be available full-time, sponsored by Travis.</p>
<p>These teams would love to have you:</p>
<h3 id="campaign-and-sponsors-management">1. Campaign and Sponsors management</h3>
<p>Sponsors need to be paid special attention to until after the program as much
as possible … eventually they’re the ones who allow us to pay so many people!</p>
<h3 id="helpdesk-and-team-supervision">2. Helpdesk and Team Supervision</h3>
<p>The idea is to organize remote support
(answering questions on IRC etc) for when teams get stuck and local coaches
aren’t available.</p>
<h3 id="blog-newsletter-and-press">3. Blog, Newsletter and Press</h3>
<p>This team writes up news in order to keep our community in the loop, and tell
the world about how the teams are doing, whats going on and share some nice stories.</p>
<h3 id="website">4. Website</h3>
<p>This team takes care of the website and makes sure it stays up to date with the
progress of RGSoC.
The team is still looking for someone with design skills and others who’d
like to help out.</p>
<h3 id="teams-app">5. Teams App</h3>
<p>The app should be mostly done before July, but might need updating once in a
while.</p>
<p>Sven can still take care of this for the time being, but it would be cool if
someone with solid Rails dev skills could take this over.</p>
<p>If you’d want to know more or like to help, ping us here:
<a href="http://twitter.com/railsgirlssoc">RailsGirlsSoC</a> or here
<a href="mailto:rails-girls-summer-of-code-community@googlegroups.com">community mailing list</a>.</p>
<p>There will not only be lots and lots of karma points, but also love and maybe even cake&confetti for helping out ;)</p>
<p>Let’s get this started: <a id="cats"></a></p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/702990/358cbf34-dda1-11e2-8ec6-c95b2a031ad7.gif" alt="cat-laptop-o" /></p>
Teams application and the team logSvenhttp://twitter.com/svenfuchs2013-06-22T00:00:00+00:002013-06-22T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/teams-application-and-team-log<p>Our little <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams">Rails Girls Summer of Code Teams application</a>
is getting closer to actually being useful.</p>
<p>This application is meant as a central place to aggregate activity at
Rails Girls Summer of Code, and it now can be used to register your team (we’ve
already added all sponsored teams), add team members and profile information.</p>
<p>Here’s how to use it:</p>
<h4 id="your-own-account">Your own account</h4>
<p>Signing in through GitHub will create a user account on our side. If your account
has already been added by one of your team mates then you’ll claim your account
by signing in through GitHub.</p>
<p>Once signed in you can update your profile information. Please tell the
community a little bit about you, maybe tell why you’re participating, what you
hope to get out of this, etc.</p>
<h4 id="your-teams-profile">Your team’s profile</h4>
<p>On the <a href="https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams">teams list</a> check if
your team has already been added. If you’re already part of this team then you
can update your team’s profile.</p>
<p>If you haven’t been added to your team, yet, then ask one of the members to
sign in and add you. They will need your GitHub handle for that (the GitHub
handle is your user/login name, the one that appears in the URL when you go to
your GitHub account).</p>
<p>Please work with your team to make sure that your team’s profile tells the
community about your project plan, how and where you plan to work, … everything
that might be useful or fun to know :)</p>
<p>If your team has a GitHub organization (you might want one and they’re free
for Open Source) then please add the handle. If your team has a Twitter
account, then please add it, too.</p>
<h4 id="your-teams-sources">Your team’s sources</h4>
<p>Your team can register “sources” from which this application will try to
aggregate updates.</p>
<p>Please add your team log and any other blog that is relevant for your team,
by registering its RSS or Atom feed URLs. Read more about the
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/team-log">team log here …</a></p>
<p>Please also add all the GitHub repository URLs that you are planning to
work on as sources. Currently this won’t actually do anything, yet, but we
plan to aggregate information from there, too.</p>
<h4 id="just-ask">Just ask!</h4>
<p>You can always find us on IRC for quick questions or issues:
<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net#rgsoc">#rgsoc on irc.freenode.net</a>.</p>
<p>Read more about how to use and set up IRC: <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/summer-of-code/wiki/IRC">https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/summer-of-code/wiki/IRC</a></p>
<p>If you think something is unclear or should be improved, or if you find a
bug, then please <a href="https://github.com/rails-girls-summer-of-code/rgsoc-teams/issues">report an issue</a>.</p>
<p>Or email us at <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a></p>
New Teams On Board!Anikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-06-20T00:00:00+00:002013-06-20T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/new-teams-on-board<p><a target="_blank" href="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/678318/9af6e1a2-d931-11e2-9c7e-f9fc36677bc4.jpg"><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1711357/678318/9af6e1a2-d931-11e2-9c7e-f9fc36677bc4.jpg" title="summer" height="500px" /></a></p>
<div align="left"><font size="1px"><font color="#CAD4D4">image: polyvalentimago.tumblr.com</font></font></div>
<p>It’s getting really warm outside in Berlin. And Rails Girls Summer of Code is getting closer and closer!</p>
<h3 id="team-number-10">Team Number 10</h3>
<p>We are super happy to announce that with the support from <a href="http://www.frontfoot.com.au/">Front Foot</a>, <a href="http://readmill.com">Readmill</a>, <a href="http://gnip.com">Gnip</a> and with <a href="http://soundcloud.com">Soundcloud</a> becoming a gold sponsor plus extra donations from our amazing community<a href="#duana">*</a> … we can now offer
another sponsored team-spot for RGSoC!</p>
<p>And that spot goes to this amazing team:</p>
<p><strong>Jaqcueline Homan (USA) and Angela Ebirim (UK) working on Hackety Hack.</strong></p>
<p>With this we are also welcoming our first remote team on board! Hello you two,
wonderful to have you!</p>
<h3 id="plus-10-volunteering-teams">Plus 10 Volunteering Teams</h3>
<p>Also, we are thrilled that the following students have registered as volunteering teams!</p>
<ol>
<li>Aileen Alba & Candy Jimenez</li>
<li>Carolina García & Julia Döring</li>
<li>Hannah Winter</li>
<li>Hélène Martin</li>
<li>María del Carmen Berros García</li>
<li>Melanie Murray & Tina Kumar</li>
<li>Michelle Brideau & Nicky Owen Victoria Martinez & Hester van Wijk</li>
<li>Oana Sipos & Maria Iloaie</li>
<li>Tam Eastley& Susanne Dewein</li>
<li>Prithvi Venkateshmurthy</li>
</ol>
<p><em>(listed alphabetically)</em></p>
<p>This is so awesome! We will do everything that we can to support you with all
our <3.</p>
<p>Hopefully, many more students will follow and we can have a really great
Summer of Code together. Let us know if you want to join as a volunteering
team: <a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a></p>
<p>We are so happy that you are joining RGSoC and we are looking forward to a fantastic time.
May the ☼ be always with you!</p>
<p>–</p>
<p><a id="duana"></a>
#### Help Duana get off coffee</p>
<p><img src="http://s3itch.svenfuchs.com/duana-20130620-001216.jpg" title="duana" height="140px" /></p>
<p>Here’s the full <a href="https://twitter.com/starkcoffee/status/346923737288937472">conversation</a> :)</p>
Rails Girls Summer of Code teams announcedAnikahttp://twitter.com/langziehohr2013-06-13T00:00:00+00:002013-06-13T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/students-selection<p>We are both very much thrilled and equally humbled about how Rails Girls Summer
of Code over the last few weeks has grown into a huge program that is very
likely to make a real difference.</p>
<p><strong>This community just rocks!</strong></p>
<p>We are proud to say that we have received 80 applications from over 140
students from <a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students">all over the world</a>.
Among them some are outstandingly well prepared, some come with an amazing
support network from coaches and local communities, some include outright
moving personal stories.</p>
<p>We have reviewed all of these applications and they have been rated by a
committee of 9 members. This was quite some work, but we are very happy to say
that we have finalized this process yesterday. So we can now announce our first
group of participants.</p>
<p><strong>Congratulations for being accepted into Rails Girls Summer of Code go out to
the following teams!</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Carla (Australia) and Anja (Germany) to work on: Sinatra and Farm Subsidy
Open Government Data</li>
<li>Cecilia (Argentinia) and Mayn (Norway) to work on: Open Source Job Board</li>
<li>Jen and Joyce (both USA) to work on: Bundler</li>
<li>Laura and Adriana (both Colombia) to work on: Rails (Conductor)</li>
<li>Magdalena (Poland) to work on: impress.js</li>
<li>Maja and Nina (both Slovenia) to work on: Spree</li>
<li>Nicole (Germany) and Laura (USA) to work on: RailsApps and Rubinius</li>
<li>Saskhi and Pallavi (both India) to work on: Diaspora</li>
<li>Wiktoria and Alicja (both Poland) to work on: Species+</li>
</ol>
<p>(ordered alphabetically, not by ranking)</p>
<p>If you have applied and your team is not on this list - don’t worry. That does
not mean your summer can’t be a Summer of Code!
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students">Here’s what you can do.</a></p>
<h3 id="about-the-selection-process">About the selection process</h3>
<p>We have tried very hard to make the selection process as fair and objective as
possible. We also want to be transparent about this, so here’s how it worked:</p>
<p>Applications were rated by the criteria given on the
<a href="http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/students">students</a>
page. Ratings were given by 9 members of the committee individually and
collected in a simple Rails app. This allowed us to compare ratings based on
various <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measures_of_central_tendency">measures
of central tendency</a> (fancy term from statistics for different ways to
calculate averages, means etc.).</p>
<p>Even though ratings were given individually, for each application individual
ratings were pretty close most of the time. In the few cases where they
differed more we’ve had a short discussion, looking out for potential
misunderstandings or missing information, and gave the opportunity to amend
ratings if applicable.</p>
<p>After completing this process the top rated group was already very obvious. For
the remaining few slots we have looked out for applications that added extra
diversity to the list, especially in respect that haven’t been caught by the
rating system well. E.g. we added one application for the fact that it was the
only well rated one for a pure Javascript project, and we have added one team
that could afford coming on board for a reduced stipend easily.</p>
<p>From what we know this process was similar to how many conferences select
speakers: identifying a pre-ranking based on a system that tries to ensure
objectivity as much as possible. Then balancing the end result with regards
to criteria that could not be captured by the system easily.</p>
<h3 id="sponsors-for-last-minute-seats">Sponsors for last-minute seats</h3>
<p>The sheer number of fantastic applications that we have received has blown us
away, and we were sad about every single application that didn’t make it in.</p>
<p>We are still actively looking for sponsors so we can hopefully add at least
a few extra last-minute seats.</p>
<p>Head over to our campaign page <a href="/campaign">to donate!</a></p>
<p>If you have contacts to companies that might be interested in supporting this
short term, please send us an introduction to
<a href="mailto:contact@rgsoc.org">contact@rgsoc.org</a>.</p>
<h3 id="lets-kick-this-off">Let’s kick this off!</h3>
<p>We are very excited about this first, huge step.</p>
<p>None of this would have been possible without the amazing community we’re all part of.
Thank you so much!</p>
<p>Expect more updates on the next steps soon, and get ready to kick off on 1st July :)</p>
<p>We can’t wait for this!</p>
<p><strong>Thank you so much for your wonderful applications!</strong></p>
Hello, Rails Girls World!Svenhttp://twitter.com/svenfuchs2013-06-12T00:00:00+00:002013-06-12T00:00:00+00:00http://railsgirlssummerofcode.org/blog/hello-world<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>puts "Hello, Rails Girls world!"
</code></pre>
</div>
<p>Welcome to the first post on the Rails Girls Summer of Code blog!
Hopefully we’ll end up having a bunch of great content for you here.</p>
<p>If you want to join us, much appreciated! You can submit a pull-request
on our <a href="https://github.com/RailsGirlsBerlin/summer-of-code">GitHub repository</a>.</p>
<p>Oh, and if you want to subscribe via RSS, grab the <a href="/blog.xml">blog feed</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, here’s how we feel about the getting the Rails Girls Summer of Code
going:</p>
<p><img src="https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2208/648568/b9513848-d42f-11e2-8d82-9b4ced34529f.gif" alt="image" /></p>