🎶 A Song-like Summer 🌞

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Janakshi & Kalpani

Spending a song-like summer!

Our summer is like a song, sometimes we don’t know the lyrics, but we still enjoy the song. 🎶😌 And then we sing the song till we are familiar with the lyrics. Just like that, we were struggling with some concepts but we enjoyed learning and using those concepts in the best way possible. Just like some songs introduce you to new styles and make you in love with them, our RGSoC journey was a starting point to many important things that made us more passionate about what we do. And even though our summer song is going to end soon, we will always enjoy its music.😇 So let’s see how interesting our summer song is so far..

Listening to song

Enjoy the song.. (Image : Her.ie)

How challenging it is?

So far, throughout the RGSoC journey, we’ve faced many challenges.

Finding a place to work – This was not a challenge at all. We asked from APIIT Sri Lanka, because we always knew, universities will never say “No” to the real need of students, and they did say YES.!! So finding the room was a success!

Finding coaches – This was also not a problem since we first contacted coach Kasun, and he helped us to find the other coaches. Thank you Coach Kasun.

Time management – Since one of us has to deal with the lectures and we participate in many tech events, together and as individuals apart from RGSOC, we had to find time to cover the working hours that we are going to miss. Actually we had a great option for that. Working during weekends from home. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t enjoy our weekend. Visiting your friend’s home during weekends, means, Fun!! It is very relaxing and we are enjoying it a lot. And look what we had to deal with.. 😹

Team Fusion Kitty

Working from home be like.. (Image : Janakshi’s Tab)

Learning new technologies and contributing to Open Source Projects – Since we were new to most of the concepts used in this project, sometimes we were stuck having no clue what to do to solve some problems. So we had to learn them from scratch. This was us when we were stuck, looking miserable..

Struggling

The struggle was real.. (Image : Google images)

To overcome situations like above, we helped each other in our learning curve and got lots of help from our coaches, mentor and our supervisor. We worked on many hands-on tutorials together and helped each other to learn fast. So it was not that difficult to complete our learning curve and head back to the implementations.

This is our first Open Source project contribution and summer project. So we also had to learn the best practices of contributing to open source projects.

Learning was our biggest earning!

At first, we were completely new to Git, since it was our very first summer project and we weren’t familiar with most of the git concepts. So during the first two weeks, we learned a lot through tutorials and our coaching sessions. So here we are now, playing with Git in style.. 😎

Like a Boss

The Git Bosses.. (Image : giphy.com)

We were selected for the project OpenDF , since both of us were familiar with Java EE and were ready to solve some of the issues with that knowledge. But our mentor had a different plan for us. So we were given the task to develop a file browser using ReactJS. Actually we think it was an opportunity. Because both of us had no clue about developing a react component. Not even a little! But now we can, at least a bit.😅 So our mentor opened a door for us to learn something new.., which we think was a blessing.

Since we were new to the world of ReactJs, we were struggling to figure out how React works, how to work with react boilerplates, how to test react components, what Redux-saga is and etc. So we learned about each of them while working. And we still do. Thanks to our study hours, our mentor and our coaches, now we can work with react components and understand how it works. From each tutorial, each code reviewing session, each coaching session and from each demo session we learned something new and we could improve our work.

Achievements so far..

So far we’ve learned many new things about Git, ReactJS, React boilerplates, Redux-saga, Testing react components, API documentations, Swagger and etc. And the best thing is, we’ve already been able to apply most of these concepts successfully.

We used Trello as a project management tool to manage our tasks while Git as a version control system. And we must mention our cool daily logs 😎. There are 58 daily logs already! 📝✅ They made our work more organized. And so far we’ve developed three react components called SearchView, TreeView and DetailView for our file browser and have got two of them merged already with the FileBrowser container! 😇🎉

So this is how our project work looks like, at the moment.

Team Fusion Project from Janakshi Dulanga on Vimeo.

Bonding with the Community

The motivation you get from RGSoC is remarkable. We used this summer as a great opportunity to network with the tech community in Sri Lanka. As the first step we participated in Business, Law and Technology Conference 2017 – APIIT. And there, Janakshi presented her final year project and was awarded too. Then we participated in few other competitions and achieved some victories too. And these competitions, helped us two, to become a better team. 😇

On our RGSoC day-off, after enjoying our little team time with ice cream sessions, we participated in Colombo Javascript Meetup at WSO2 Colombo and learned lots of new things about JSON Web Tokens, Securing NodeJS Rest APIs with JWT and about NodeJS Security. And it was our first Meetup!🎉

Day-off

A well spent day-off. (Image : Meetup app and Kalpani’s phone)

Next comes the competitions and achievements during RGSoC,

Janakshi :

Presented her work at Business, Law Technology conference organized by APIIT and won the best researcher award for the Technology track.
Selected for the final round of 19 th National best quality ICT awards 2017( NBQSA 2017). And now she’s in the winner circle.

Kalpani :

Participated in SheCoderess v.1.0, which was a hackathon organized by University of Uwa Wellassa, Sri Lanka. And her team won the first place.
Participated in Hackx competition, which was organized by University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka to seek innovative ideas. Her team got selected for the final round.

Both of us:

Both of us participated in the Hacktitude competition. This was organized by 99x Technologies. The best thing is, both of us got selected for the final round too. 😇

Helping hands

We got a lot of help from our coaches and our mentor to learn these new things very fast while getting the help from our supervisor to manage the project work. And they were always there when we got stuck with issues in our code or any other thing.

Our mentor, Milindu Kumarage, Thank you, for your boundless patience with our work and for helping us when we were stuck with development issues.
Our supervisor,Ramón Huidobro, Thank you, for being so flexible when we got problems with managing the time, for guiding us to do the right thing and for motivating us.
Our lead coach Kasun Delgolla, Remote Coach Tharindu Delgolla , Coach Imran Hishaam , Coach Udani Gunasena , Coach Anuradh Caldera and Coach Damini Satya , thank you all for spending your valuable time, on those valuable coaching sessions and helping us to be better at our work, than we used to be.
And, of course, a big thank you to everyone from the Rails Girls Summer of Code Team who made our summer of code experience, a perfect one! Because of you guys we had a great summer which was full of new experiences and awesome memories.

Coaches

Our coaching sessions. (Image : Kalpani’s phone, Slack and Google hangouts)

After this summer

Thanks to RGSoC, this summer is so far the best summer in our lives. And it has opened doors for, new opportunities, new friends, new way of thinking and etc.

We believe, we can do more after this summer. After RGSoC, we would love to continue our contributions to OpenDF. And we also have a long-term goal to join RGSoC as coaches to help new teams, once we’ve gathered more experience. See how impressed are we from our first RGSoC experience? 😌 And we’ll be giving our support to the tech community more and more in the future, by joining meetups, conferences, competitions and engaging in many more open source projects.

And we must mention about the Conferences! Because we will be flying to Australia in 2018 to participate in RubyConf AU 2018 🛫🇦🇺 and will be participating in DEV DAY 2017 🇱🇰 conference as well. We are so excited! 😁🎉

Nothing to worry

When everything works fine.. (Image : giphy.com)

Last but not the least, we would like to say thanks to everyone for supporting us throughout this journey. And THANK YOU RGSoC for giving us this awesome opportunity. 😇 Thank you all for letting us have a song-like summer. We will always remember our song of RGSoC.. 😌🎶