Goodbye from team RubyGirlsQuito
So long and (and no thanks for the externalities) 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!
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.”
Soo… how was it?
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! :)
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 Dave Cottlehuber from whom we learnt that MacPorts are the evil and should not never (NEVER) be used, from stackoverflow’s boy Raki, 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:
“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 ;) )
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.
“One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.” – Ken Thompson
