We are Team Vegemite

Posted on by Ramya and Kylie

Categories: blog and student posts

Team VegemiteTeam Vegemite with our coaches Tim, Kevin and Jo

We are Team Vegemite: Ramya Ravindranath and Kylie Gusset from Melbourne, Australia. We are working on Exercism.io, a website that offers crowd-sourced code mentorship where you can practice having thoughtful conversations about code. Katrina Owen is our project mentor, Jo Cranford, Tim Moore, Kevin Yank, Sushma Girish and Keira Hodgkison are our coaches with their employer Culture Amp being our wonderful hosts. Vi is our project supervisor (and member of last year’s Australian Rails Girls Summer Of Code Team Team Koala).

Team VegemiteTeam Vegemite eating Vegemite!

Ramya

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.

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.

Kylie

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.

What we’ve worked on and learnt in the last month:

  • Creating issues
  • Getting the local development environment set up and working.
  • A new color scheme for Exercism, which is adding onto and improving the current colours.
  • Research on Exercism, UX and fonts, in order to make further changes.
  • Website updates of copy.
  • Learning Git and Ruby.
  • Solving ruby exercises on Exercism.
  • Teamwork
  • Understanding the domain model of Exercism.
  • Learning Sinatra framework, writing specs with Minitest and learning test driven development approach.

Achievements:

We have submitted 4 pull requests and 4 of them are merged :)

Events:

Team VegemiteOur Winter of Code at camp.js with Jed + Sharkie from Thinkmill

Ramya & Kylie have attended a few camps and conferences:

  • Camp.js - a Javascript camp in Sydney, where Kylie gave a talk on scent for coders and we met Jed + Sharkie from Thinkmill, the company behind Keystone.js - another RGSOC project! Here’s Ramya’s writeup of her experiences.

  • Rails Camp - a camp devoted to Ruby On Rails programmers where the weekend is spent meeting and learning from others in the community.

  • 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.

  • 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.