The end of an amazing Summer Of Code program – RGSoC 2015

Posted on by Nidhiya and Anjaly

Categories: blog and student posts

The Rails Girls Summer of Code program was one of the best experiences we had in our life. By the way we are Team Hackrgirls; Anjaly Elizabeth is a good front-end developer and a passionate designer and Nidhiya - 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 RGSOC organization. We never expect that we could be one among the worlds 16 teams who got sponsored for the RGSOC. 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 – impress.js ( a 3D presentation tool) with the one and only Bartek as mentor. We were literally thrilled to know that we got the great person behind the impress.js as our mentor. Katrin Kampfrath 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. ;)

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.