Meet Team KaUlah
Who are we?
We are Kasia and Ula from Warsaw, Poland. We met on Ruby on Rails basic weekend course organized by Coders’s Lab in November 2014. When we finished it, we started to think what we should do next. We decided to apply for RGSoC 2015 but we weren’t chosen as a team. We didn’t give up and applied for 2016 edition and that’s how KaUlah team was born :) You probably may guess how we created our team’s name, but we’re going to explain it anyhow. First two letters are from Kasia’s name and remaining part is from Ula’s name. Some of you may tell that it sounds similar to known Mexican coffee liqueur „Kahlua”. It was our inspiration and finally occurs that both words are anagrams :)
Our team
KaUlah Team with coaches. From left: Tomasz, Kasia, Ula and Piotr. (Photo: Piotr Stachewicz)
Ula: I was a financial specialist and then one day I encountered coding, started to work on it, learn, research and met a lot of fantastic people who helped me. I am involved into Geek Girls Carrots meet-ups, coordinate Python and mentoring SQL courses, and I go deeper and deeper into it. So in my free time I am helping others to run into IT, also I like traveling, mountain hiking and watching old episodes of TopGear.
Kasia: I started programming two years ago at home and then on Coder’s Lab RoR course. Before programming I was occupied by PhD studies in chemistry. Finally, it turned out that programming is not so different from chemistry, you research, experiment, learn and at the end get results. In my spare time I pet my two lovely cats (Janusz & Grazynka) or play handball.
From left: Yorick (mentor), Grzegorz and Tomasz (coaches), Lucas (supervisor). (Source: gitlab.com and Lucas Pinto twitter account)
Above you can see pictures of great developers who are helping us during this summer: Piotr Szotkowski and Tomasz Stachewicz from Rebased (first picture, they are joining RGSoC for third time!) and from GitLab Tomasz Matczukin and Grzegorz Bizon (first time coaches). Our mentor is Yorick Peterse (who was a coach last year) and our supervisor - Lucas Pinto (who is a newbie as we are). We are working at coaching company office so we meet Tomasz and Piotr everyday. With others we communicate via slack channel and Discussion section under issues. So far we’ve mentioned our team but on our slack channel there are more people who support us - other GitLab employees.
What are we working on?
When we saw the list of projects available for RGSoC GitLab Community Edition became our number one right away. Previously we developed our small apps into GitHub. And now working on GitLab CE give us amazing opportunity to see how repository system is build and how it works. GitLab is an application to code, test, and deploy code together. It provides Git repository management with fine grained access controls, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds, wikis, and continuous integration. Contributing to GitLab CE is an amazing experience and fun.
What tips do we want to share about our journey?
- Always check your branch.
- Tests are very important.
- Be patient - ask, check, read before you push.
- Remember to rebase and squash.
- Don’t miss empty lines.
- Learn and learn - it’s great!
- You can improve your code.
- Issue is almost always more complicated then you thought.
What will we do next?
- Finish all issues in progress.
- Find issues, features and bugs for the next weeks.
- Write more code.
- Learn as much as we can.