92 days of Summer of Code

Posted on by Gyujin and Sujin

Categories: blog and student posts

Time flies ✈️ We could not be happier with the decision we made to apply for RGSoC and cannot believe it is time to say goodbye already. This summer has been literally amazing.

Learned so many things First of all, we could experience how other great developers work — how they discuss the issues and co-work through Github and slack, how they maintain the product people from all over the world use, how hard it is and how well they manage them. The maintainers were super busy working on Babel 7 which was released about a month ago.

Reading tons of open source codes also helped us a lot. This part actually took the most of our time and was the hardest part. Add to the Babel document site with Repl which we worked on and Babel Core, we had to go through Docusaurus since Babel document site is built on it, ASTExplorer, Redux Devtools, CodeSandbox and other several JSON tree view libraries. Taking time to understand various projects helped us a lot with JS project structures, how these wonderful open source products are implemented and learned how others approach problems. We got able to grasp others’ code quicker, speed up our code reading skills. :)

Of course, we got to know better how Babel works inside. We studied about AST(Abstract Syntax Tree) and Babel core. It was also our first time to use CSS-in-JS and flow, static type checking system for JavaScript.

But the most important thing we learned was OPEN SOURCE SPIRIT! This summer was a great opportunity for Sunshine team to learn about not only actual technical skills, but also open source spirit — improving by cooperation, not competition. Friends in Babel community and RGSoC were so nice and generous, they helped us a lot with the code and also constantly found good aspects in our works. We learned how to stay positive and thoroughly evaluate others’ work with warmth — the most valuable asset to keep working as a developer. It really helped us to be confident. Now we have no fear to dive into the open source world!

After RGSoC * Keep workin’ on We know that it would not be easy but we still hope we can keep contributing to Babel Project. Of course, we want to improve our first merged PR, Time Travel UI and also AST output panel we worked lately. Other than that, someday we want to implement Redux or other state management system! :) * Sujin will continue to pursue her Master’s Degree study in Music and Engineering. * Gyujin is going to keep working as a frontend engineer.

Thanks to

Dear RGSoC team! We cannot say thank you enough to our super kind and lovely supervisor, Ana Sofia Pinho! She was always kind and helping, our team relied on her so much. We cannot imagine our RGSoC without her and so sad to say goodbye. 😢 We’d also like to thank Saptak who helped us to keep on track when Ana was on vacation, Vaishali and Ramon who interviewed us and gave us this great chance. Our team also had a fantastic opportunity to meet Ramon in person when he visited Seoul for holidays! We hope we could meet other RGSoC members too!

Awesome mentors from the Babel! Henry Zoo , Bryan Ng and Logan Smyth gave us so many ideas for Repl and always answered kind and fast even though they were super busy to manage release next version of Babel (which was released on 27 August! tada! 🎉 — Babel 7 Released · Babel). We also send a word of gratitude to Ives van Hoorne, he helped us understand how react-sandpack will be integrated to Babel Repl.

Our local coaches! We thank Hyeonsu Lee, so much for visiting us often and helped us understand other open source projects. Joeun Park, even though she could not help us in the last month due to her busy work, as a female developer, her presence was such a big support for us. Dohyung Ahn helped us a lot to figure out what to do for the project, answered really quick on slack when we had questions. Byungjun Yoon is the only coach who volunteered, he gave us big smile and joyful vibe. Seongjun Kim, a warm hearted Ruby professional, always tried to monitor us if we are on track even though he was not a JS developer. He was our emotional prop!

Thanks to all of you for awesome 3 months!! We will never forget this summer. ☀️