So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish! :D
The summer’s over already? We had to pinch ourselves to let the reality sink in! However, looking back at the last three months, we are amazed to see how far we have come. Though we have previously interned at a few other places, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the Rails Girls Summer of Code experience was one of a kind! Apart from giving us memories to cherish, it also marked the beginning of our Open Source journey. We were collaborating from three different timezones with our mentors Brandon, Nick, and team present in the USA, our supervisor Linda in Berlin and we here in India! This was something really unique. This was also the first time we were working in such a diverse setting and we got to experience that it does not matter what gender, country or race we belong to. It’s what we do that defines us and that is all that matters. Working with people from a diverse set of places is also very interesting as there is so much to share and know about people living outside the realms of one’s country. It was also great to learn about the experiences other teams were having and each story was so inspiring!
This summer we worked with OpenLMIS. We introduced OpenLMIS and the team in our introductory blog. Have a look at it here in case you missed it! When we jumped on the wagon, we wanted to make sure that we learn as much as possible through this program and with this aim in mind, we got our hands dirty both in backend services and frontend UI. The three major features we worked on are -
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SMS Service
- The idea was to notify users for any updates related to their accounts. OpenLMIS had an email notification service but there wasn’t one for SMS notifications. Since users check mobile phones much more frequently than emails, this feature was very essential.
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Cordova Application
- One of the essential requirements for OpenLMIS is to shift their web application to handheld devices. This was one of the major aspects we worked on during the summer. Cordova provides us with mobile development framework to build cross platform apps using Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, etc.
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Mobile UI Prototypes
- We enjoyed the most while doing this! The UI of OpenLMIS web application is more suited for desktop than for mobile devices. Over the past one month, we worked with Nick towards understanding user needs and coming up with lo-fi mockups to modify the present UI to fit in small screens.
What we learnt?
Some of our key learnings this summer -
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Working and collaborating across different time zones!
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Got introduced to RESTful Service and Spring BOOT.
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Developing multi-platform mobile application through Cordova (which was something that we never tried before)
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Playing around with the Docker Toolbox
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UI Prototyping, understanding user needs, iterating over proposed models based on feedback and patience!
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Much much more!
Thank you Mentors, Team and RGSoC!
We would like to thank our mentors Nick and Brandon from the core of our hearts. We haven’t met mentors as patient and awesome as them. We pestered Nick throughout the summer for minutest of troubles and he was always ready to help us out. Thanks Nick for actually caring about our learning and sharing very useful advice. Though we could not cover all the resources you shared with us, we will make sure to continue even after RGSoC. Thanks Brandon for giving us this amazing opportunity and connecting us with the awesome OpenLMIS community. We will always cherish this experience.
We would also like to thank the entire OpenLMIS community. We are grateful that we got to present the work in the Showcase meeting and the Product Committee. It was really fun and we got some really cool feedback. We were amazed by the diverse set of people working at OpenLMIS and we are sure this experience will take us really far. We hope our little contribution was of some help. We would especially like to thank Mary, Tenly, and Josh for their support!
A big thanks to our supervisor Linda for checking on us on weekly basis to know if things were going smoothly and if we were in need of anything. Be it providing information regarding conferences, blogs, or finding extra coaches, you were always a great help! Also, we are grateful for your reminders to make sure we don’t slack while putting up daily logs!
Thank you Thank you Thank you RGSoC! For coming up with such a great community including developers, coaches, mentors, supervisors and participants and it keeps growing each year! This gave birth to a culture of collaborative learning and growing where easy and free exchange of ideas, skills and knowledge has been made possible! Thanks to each and every person making RGSoC possible! We also feel it wouldn’t be wrong to say -
We are also thankful to GOTO Berlin and RGSoC for giving us free tickets to attend the GOTO conference taking place on 16th and 17th November in Berlin. If things go as planned, we will soon share our experience at GOTO in another blog. Fingers crossed!
With a heavy heart we bid our final Goodbye! And we being hardcore Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fans would like to say it in style - So long, and thanks for all the Fish RGSoC! ;)