The Miracle

Posted on by Nada Ashraf and Mayar Alaa

Categories: blog and student posts

The Miracle <3

Ruby's Secret Team taken by us @RGSoC-dayoff @ Cairo Tower

Learning Ruby on Rails and working on some applications, we thought we became experts, till the very first week of July… Suddenly, we found ourselves sailing on a very small boat, on a deep ocean, stuck in a very bad storm, not having any supplies to survive except hope, perseverance and determination. Day by day, we started to enjoy this adventure between the waves. Together we decided to fight these rough waves, the waves of ignorance. We discovered that we still have a lot to learn.
In our first call with our beloved supervisor Linda, she asked us a question: “what are your expectations after the RGSoC experience?” Our answer was mainly focused on the technical experience that we would gain, but now, after two and a half months we discovered that not only our technical background was enriched but also our non-technical.
We gained so many nice friends. We learned that the most passionate person needs motivation and appreciation from time to time. We also found that it’s important to ask questions but after doing some research. Finally, we decided that we should offer our help whenever we can.
Regarding the technical background, turned out working with gems is much harder than apps, simply because there are not much resources on gems and every gem has it own unique features and codes it’s a bit harder to understand its source code.Minitest:Unit is nightmare for a beginner in testing, simply because we can barely find any documentation for it, on the other side, you can find tons of information on Rspec. We’ve learned it the hard way, but it was worth it as we gained so much knowledge that will help us in the future.

Never in our wildest dreams have we thought that we would be where we are today. Preparing to attend a conference in Braga, Portugal and also giving a talk about our experience in RGSoC. There are lots of preparations for the conference, from visa appointment to booking hotels and flights and doing the trip planning, then the conference experience itself, we are really excited for this opportunity as it is a great chance to learn so much more about Ruby on Rails and meet lots of new people and most importantly Rails Girls organizers and Team LoadtoCode, we’re so happy that we’ll get to meet them finally. We’re very thankful for the opportunity given to us by RGSoC organizers and Rubyconf organizers, we do believe that this will be a life changing experience to both of us.

Our next step? Well, We’re totally looking forward improving our RoR knowledge and if we’re lucky enough we may get an internship to keep learning and gain more experience. Also, we want to share our experience and the knowledge we gained with other girls, we want to see more teams from Egypt get into RGSoC next year, it was a life-changing experience to us, for me “Nada”, I would keep calling it “the Miracle”.