Yours cheesy
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:
- The Teams App is now RESPONSIVE! A big deal in the 21st century. Try opening that app on your phone now!
- The readme got a manual for newbies. Next year’s RailsGirls will profit from our startup problems.
- The daily status update entry form is on a way more user-friendly spot
- The activity stream on the root page has avatars and is streamlined
- A “Fork me on Github”-ribbon for bigger screens
- Seeds for the Job Offers
- And for our fellow developers, there is a season phase switch in order to get access to phase-dependent settings
- We left our cheesy mark on the FFaker seeds:
###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:
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 :)
###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!
###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:
- André Medeiros
- Thijs Cadier
- Yorick Peterse
- Hans Gerwitz
- Shannon Thomas
- and Nathan Van der Auwera and Ariejan de Vroom, for filling in for the other coaches during their holidays
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.
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.
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.
And let’s not forget… the organization! The people who enabled all of us to experience this life-changing summer #wecanteven.
All of you THANKS, it’s been AMAZING! <3
Yours cheesy,
Maud & Roos
