Rubyherzlein - Last Blogpost of the Summer
Rubyherzlein & The Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015
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.
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:
- Git, GitHub and Version Control
- A brief history of Unix
- Binary and octal numbers
- Hexadecimal numbers
- Testing
- Pairing
- Shells
- Characteristics of programming languages: compiled vs interpreted, objective orientated, Functional, etc. example languages: characteristics, area of use etc etc
- Databases + SQL
- High-level vs. low-level languages
- Database migrations
- Stack traces (stack overflow)
- Recursion
- Regular expressions
- Vim as a text editor
- Inheritance in Ruby
- SSL
- _why the lucky stiff (Why_day is August 19)
- Environments (and environment variables)
- JavaScript and jQuery
- Garbage Collector
- Variable Scope
- Duck Type
This checklist looks pretty long, actually we probably covered much more ground than that!
Eurucamp
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.
Its really cool that a tech conference with that many women were our first ever! It sets the bar pretty high for future conferences.
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:
Important elements include: the Rails Girls Community, SoundCloud team, our SoundDrop project group, the conferences we attend and our twitter community!
Full Stack Fest
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.
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!
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 ;) !
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.
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.