Obrigada, Rails Girls Summer of Code!
Wow, it’s hard to believe that the summer is almost over! And it is even harder to believe that we started working together on this project only (almost) 3 months ago… At the beginning of the project, we were excited to be a part of all this, but we had no idea what was ahead of us. Now we can say that we were part of an amazing project. It was a great summer and we will be always grateful for this opportunity!
Obrigada - or thank you if you don’t know Portuguese :), RGSoC!
How was our experience?
During our summer, we learned… A lot! We had the opportunity to learn much more than simply programming in a new language or using new tools, but also about teamwork! And many times that was our biggest challenge! We have learned that communication is one of the most important thing when we are collaborating with several people - remotely or not.
In addition, we learned a lot about APIs implementation, Rails, Ruby, MySQL, Git… Oh, all the rebases that didn’t work, such special moments!
So far, what did we do?
Our summer project is the Public Lab, a community and non-profit democratizing science to address environmental issues that affect people. They are really cool, check it out!
Two months ago when we started working on the project, we had to spend a lot of our first week studying the Public Lab code and documentation. We chose to work on the API because it was something new for us. We studied the basics such as what is an API, what is a RESTful API, RubyGrape and Swagger - an open source tools for creating and documenting API’s.
After refactoring some part of the API we were able to identify the endpoints that needed urgent improvements and we worked hard on making some of them more efficient. Our work was mostly done on the back-end but we are really proud of the new /search page that we are working, that will be soon alive on the project’s website.
We used the Github Projects page to keep track of our work and to break our tasks into small parts:
And thank you so much to our amazing team:
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Our supervisor Mayar, you’re so sweet and helped us a lot during our summer <3
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Our mentorJeff, thank you for your time and all of your reviews of our countless Pull Requests :D
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And of, course, our coaches, Thiago and Julio. You helped us so much, especially when we were stuck or lost xD. You are an inspiration for both of us, keep shipping! :)
What’s next?
Well, now you can call us the Brazilian housewives developers coding! Now we are super ready to embrace new challenges to come! See you around, RGSoC!