Happy Ending, yet not the end!
Rgsoc and Us
What a roller coaster ride it has been! It is disheartening to realize how soon it has ended. RGSoC is one of the most beautiful communities we could ever be a part of at this stage. We really learnt so much from our fellows and the community members. The best thing we learnt was giving back; giving back to the community which taught you multiple things, giving back to the society by helping out and supporting more people to get into tech.
What RGSoC taught us
We would not be able to thank RGSoC enough for all we learned through this summer. Let alone be the fact that we are now comfortable reading huge codebases (Yes, we got the opportunity to work with two amazing Projects :D). RGSoC gave us the visibility in college and other communities in our city. It opened so many new doors for us to explore and learn. Besides contributing to opensource, we learned new tools and technologies and improved our skill-set. It gave us motivation to be a part of the open-source communities and boosted our confidence of giving talks in their meetups.
At one such opensource meetup, Akarsha also met the co-founder of her early-stage startup ‘Invadex’ which she is going to represent in the Alpha program of Web-summit this November which is regarded as “The Largest Tech Conference in the World”. And because of our exposure with Scikit-Image, Ramya decided to pursue research with the Image Analysis and Biometrics lab of our college. This is how Rgsoc helped us kickstart our careers and grow a lot as individuals.
A big big thanks to Rgsoc for giving us the opportunity and for their constant support.
Our journey
Well, in short, the most amazing summer till date ! We spent nights working on a problem, had arguments, submitted proposals, shifted projects, volunteered at conference, met siraj raval, learned new UI libraries, gave talks, stalked data-science people together and what not. These were a small fraction of the awesome memories this summer gave us.
Initially starting with Susi AI server as our project, we were happy to work on artificial intelligence for chatbots, though rule based. With no timeline in hand, we worked on random issues and created skills for susi. One month gone, we lost the excitement without the inputs from the mentors and looking at the situation, orga team changed the project for us. It was a blessing in disguise since we got to work with Scikit-image. It is a python library for Image analysis. We were so lucky to get such amazing mentors. They assigned us the task of analysing the performance of fast_histogram wrt numpy histogram and benchmarking them for all instances in the entire repo which we successfully completed.
Things we learnt in these 3 months:
- Proficiency with git
- Jupyter notebook
- Virtualisation
- Image analysis in Python
- Data extraction using API’s
- Working of AI chatbots
- React JS
- Using Docker and Heroku
Our journey ahead
This is not the end, this is definitely not the end!! We are planning to continue to contribute to Scikit-Image. Apart from that, we are super excited to attend Websummit this November. And we are Organizing Django Girls Lisbon on 5th November to let more girls fall in love with programming and open-source..
See, how happy we are. :D
If you are there in Lisbon during that time, come join us!! :). Also, next, we’ll organize Django Girls, Delhi in December/January. And next to this, we’ll be going for Rubyconf in February’18. Also, we are now active members of the local communities and we will continue to learn and grow; and keep promoting RGSoC wherever we go !!