Team kindr3d – Saying Bye!
[Content Note: again, many animated gifs]
How much can change in just three months?
Apparently quite a lot. We wanted to tell you how in one summer we became better developers and hopefully better humans as well.
so many memories already!
We feel so lucky to have spent those three months learning, communicating and building things. We suddenly became part of a bigger community of people who care about each other and are ready to give their time to help beginners. It is very humbling and empowering to feel surrounded by amazing people. But at the same time we became aware of giving back our gratitude to the this community. Also we learned the value of beginners. Our enthusiasm and drive are valuable and and needed in the world where innovation is the king.
beating negativity and self doubt - Source: giphy
We’ve also got to work at a big tech agency and look into the life of “real devs” from the inside (spoiler, there is a lot of free food).
Discourse achievement
We spent a lot of time carefully picking our project for the summer. Having worked on Discourse, with a whole feature just by ourselves was challenging, to say the least. Yet it also allowed us a great deal of creative freedom. Our mentor Robin was so supportive that most times he would encourage us to step out of the road for a while and dig into learning things which were less related to our project just so we would figure out the answers by ourselves.
so many winding roads - Source: giphy
Building a dashboard for the statistics of a forum is not a simple task and we found ourselves jumping from databases, rails api to d3 to ember, sass and templating engines and trying to make sense out of the connexion between all these elements was probably what took us the most time.
waaaaait! - Source: giphy
Yet for the first time we were working on the big well organised project, where all perks of best practices were apparent. And it has disciplined us quite a bit.
Because of the visual nature of our project, it was important to have a design in mind, so we tackled a bit of user experience and came up with a visual solution (still very much in progress though). It was a lot of fun brainstorming with paper and scissors.
A week of conferences
Conference “season” felt a bit like field trip for us. We’ve got to be roommates for a while and experience Berlin’s vibrant tech scene while on the project and met many more people involved in the open source community. Everyone was lovely and supportive of us. And we had resources and time to objectively look at our skills and achievements.
Photo by Fiona Castiñeira
We visited two conferences in one week, it was quite an overwhelming experience. But Yay! to learning, meeting tech superstars and a warm Berlin September. The most surreal experience was learning Rust from people who made Rust and were very happy sharing and teaching us.
happy learners at the first RustBridge
As we tried to make the most of our trip we met up with the two awesome RGSoC Berlin teams. On a monday evening, we headed to Ganz Oben office and joined Team Joda at Ruby Monstas meetup (they are all just lovely and do wonderful work exploring code and building nice things).
Future
Without this program we probably would not have gained the confidence to keep on learning and building serious careers in tech. It was really enlightening for both of us to find each other’s support as two women passionate about coding. And then because of rgsoc find more people like us out there. (shoutout to Rails Girls, Techettes, RGSoC, Rubymonstas…). Stepping out of isolation and learning together while seeing other people’s works inspire us played a big role in our road to empowerment. Let’s never stop learning from each other, folks!
Photo by Veronica Jonsson
Right now we are both looking for ways to establish ourselves in tech professionally so we can keep learning and getting better. We had time to learn how to learn, and started building our careers about life-long self-improvement and kindness to others. As far as open source goes, we are totally part of the cult now and hope to continue contributing.
We are no longer living in the same city, but the summer experience keeps us together, we have great things ahead, like a Beyond Tellerrand Berlin Conference in November!
Many Thanks
We are lucky-lucky women who have been surrounded by wonderful people all this summer long. We send love to our patient and supportive supervisor Max and most zen mentor Robin. Thanks to the coaches for sticking with us and showing us more than we expected to find. But most of all we send love to the community of people who spend their time to make other people’s day brighter. We love you Rails Girls! Keep on being awesome!
- Source: giphy