Creating our own Plugin, Yeeey!
Hello Hello!
We are the Team BerlinDiamonds, consisting of Jen and Kaja. It is the 4th week of the RailsGirls Summer of Code and we already feel like we have never been doing anything else, because it feels so natural to come to our beautiful office at our coaching company ABSOLVENTA and keep building and refactoring our plugin for Discourse. But before we tell you more about what we have been up to, here is a little bit about us:
Kaja
I am a passionate Ruby developer and a member of the Rails Girls Berlin. Originally I studied philosophy and historical linguistics, but I soon discovered my love for programming and am now a junior Rails developer. Besides coding I also love playing football, eating and learning new stuff. Oh and I am addicted to the internet in general. I just learned to accept it and use that in a good way.
Jen
Since I originally come from photography and psychology, I love to connect creativity and coding. So building web apps with Rails is just the right medium for me. I also joined the Open Tech School Berlin and soon met the Rails Girls Berlin at some events at our co-working space. I love to travel and see beautiful things and I can do some tricks on the skateboard.
The First Days
On our very first day, we came to the office and found our desks set up beautifully with confetti and welcoming messages. We received our chipcards for entering the building and because we have already been setting up the environment on our local computers, we finally could start looking at the actual tasks for this summer. While our office, our supervisor and all of our coaches are in Berlin, our mentor and the app owner are in Canada. So arranging a kick of call with our mentor took some planning because of the time and space difference. But forunately Discourse has a huge community called Discourse Meta. As we already knew that our task would be to create a plugin for Discourse that allows the Admin User to backup his app to a clowd provider, we followed some tutorials on Discourse Meta on How to install a plugin and looked at the Backup-To-Dropbox-Plugin in order to understand the structure of a Discourse plugin. So when we finally had our call with our Mentor the third day, he was gladly surprised how far we already were and he gave us our first really good feedback. We were very flattered and pleased with ourselves and so the following weeks went very smoothly with a lot of motivation from our side and allways encouraging feedback and really good explainations from our mentor’s and our coaches side. Coding for the RailsGirls Summer of Code felt like being freshly in love and it made our cheeks blush from euphoria. Not kidding.
Our Coaches
We are very lucky with our team of coaches. First of all we have a team of 2-3 coaches at our coaching company who are sitting next to us daily. They are very much in love with Ruby and asking them a question about an issue with the code mostly is followed by a little spontanious lesson enthusiastically explained with haptic examples like Monkey classes and banana methods. All of them have their fields of expertise and together they form a big universe of knowledge. We also have some geniuses in our remote coaches, who regularly fall into deep discussions about wether a plugin should be constructed like a gem or not and other fascinating questions in our slack channel. We follow these “fights of the giants” with big interest because there is a lot to learn from it.
Our Plugin
We already got quite far within the first weeks and finished building a plugin for Discourse that can upload backup files to Google Drive. If you want to check out the code and see our progress, please take a look at our Github Repo. Although the plugin itself is technically working, as good coders we will still refactor our code and also create a reusable structure in order to build more backup plugins after that.
All in all this project has really made us feel more competent and growing with every problem we solve. We feel very empowered and happy and are very thankful for the chance of being part of the RailsGirls Summer of Code. Thanks to all contributers and organizers! We love it <3
