We are team Perifericas!
Who are we?
We are Emma and Geisa from Salvador, a beautiful city in Bahia, Brazil.
We first met at Raul Hackerspace, where we are active members. We both care about diversity and, at RaulHC, we organized some hack nights to promote diversity and now we’re living this amazing experience with other 19 teams around the world. When we received the news that we would be the first team from Brazil participating on the RGSoC, wowww. We just want to say how grateful we are for this great opportunity.
Coach Aurium, Geisa and Emma - (Image: Geisa Santos)
Our team
Emma: I’m a trans girl. I love to learn and to listen to metalcore music. I created the Raul Hacker Club in our city to motivate people to build interesting things and to make a hacker scene here :D. I’m interested in security and, for this reason, I’ve created a security research group with some friends (UserX, Gjr). On my free time, I like to study reverse engineer and cryptography/stenography. When I saw Nomi Marks (sense8) for the first time, I thought “I can be this girl”.
Geisa: I’m a 220v person. I love to learn and I’m curious about everything. I’m an Advertising and Marketing graduated, with a MBA in Systems Information Management. Because I have suffered a lot for being a woman when I started working in the tech market, I support several local initiatives that promote diversify in tech. I co-organize Rails Girls since 2013 and, last year, I started a PyLadies chapter at my city. I also teach web, social media and entrepreneurship, once a year, at a non-profit organization for teens that live in the suburbs.
I love games, books, book clubs and study groups. You may say I’m a serial book clubber.
Online meeting with menthor Maren Heltsche, coaches Daniela Feitosa and Brena Monteiro and supervisor Ines Coelho (Image: Ines Coelho)
Four senior developers are helping us during this summer: Brena Monteiro, Rails Girls organizer from Governador Valadares; from Salvador too, we have Daniela Feitosa, that also co-organizes Rails Girls Salvador; Aurium, an enthusiast of hacker culture, open scource and free software; and User_X, that is a member of LampiãoSec, an infosec study group (the same group that Emma is).
And we want to thank RGSoC organization for giving us an amazing supervisor (which is also a Portuguese-native speaker): Inês Coelho. She participated in the RGSoC 2015 edition.
What are we working on?
When we saw the list of projects available for RGSoC our eyes fell immediately on Speakerinnen. Our only thought was: we need to work with them. Speakerinnen is a platform that provides a list of women who have expertise in a determined field of knowledge, enabling conference organisers from any topic to find and connect with appropriate female speakers. So there are no more excuses like “there’s no women to invite” or “we couldn’t reach a woman with expertise in that filed”.
What have we achieved thus far?
Our first goal was to spread this project in our community, so we translated the platform to Brazilian Portuguese. This is being reviewed and soon we will be to connect more women by engaging the Brazilian community to this cause. We are working on others issues too (Emma already sent another PR to production).
Also we were invited to be in charge of Speakerinnen’s expansion at Brazil in the long term. That is awesome! Ruby Monsters are the most important Ruby group that we know, they rock! And they’re trusting us to take care of their project in our country for long. We are so honored!
A short video filmed by Geisa Santos to show you the stunning view from Raul Hackerspace window, where Perifericas are hosted
What tips do we want to share about our journey?
- Be calm
- There's no need to solve all the issues in a week
- Trust in yourself
- Community is all. There are lots of people around the world trying to increase diversity in tech and they will help you learn
- Test always. Always.
- Before starting code in a project you want to contribute, read all docs, check the "blames", try to understand how they developed it. And run tests.
- Don't panic and don’t try to break your laptop when something persists not working as you want or as advised by the guide
- ERRORs will be common. Accept it, and will be less painful
- Try to get fun. Computing, tech, programming and hacking are amazing
- "It's aliveeeee!" is the new Eureka
What will we do next for the project?
- Solve the issues we set and the rest of the list :D
- Work on design thinking and user experience with the whole team
- Create gems (it's a fun and curious part - we love it and want to practice more)
We've been following the others blog posts from our colleagues and we're dying of curiosity to know the origin of their teams' names.
_Is there anyone curious to know the origin of ours name?_
Our team is named after Perifericas, an initiative that aims to introduce to programming and technology teens, elders and youngers from peripheral Salvador. We also develop activities to engage minorities to STEAMED (added Arts, Education and Design to STEM).
Thanks for reading!
If you want to talk with us, check out these channels:
Twitter:
@geisasantos
@emmapinheiro
Our blog about RGSoC 2016: