DV Team Farewell
Time’s up!
What an incredible experience!
While most of people went on summer holidays to unwind, we decided to do the opposite. Working throughout summer, combining our full time job with a part-time Summer of Code experience. After an intensive three months of 60+ hours work, it’s hard to believe this Rails Girls Summer of Code experience is coming to an end. Read what the DV Team learned during this coding summer.
Living Style Guide - PIMD
Living Style Guide is the Open Source project we have been selected for. It helps developers to create front-end style guides easily with SaSS and Markdown. The project is created by Nico Hagenburger (designer and software programmer) with the help of Jen Geacone-Cruz (Content Director). Our main tasks were linked to the porting of the project from Ruby to JavaScript: to refactor and enhace code, implement plugins, test code in Vanilla Javascript and improving the documentation.
Our main targets:
- Easy to use in JavaScript projects – in build tools and within the browser
- Extendible: The main API is the DOM tree known from the browser
- Compliance with CommonMark specs – Markdown files render perfectly on GitHub; all additional commands will be CommonMark compliant and won’t leave ugly artifacts when used in README.md files on GitHub
It resulted in a new plugin on npm packages, called PIMD. PIMD stands for “Processing Instructions for Markdown” and is the base for the JavaScript version of LivingStyleGuide – an API to extend Markdown by DOM manipulations as known from the browsers.
How did we work on it?
Before the project began, we gathered to organize ourselves and created a list of desired outcomes. Our summer would be successful, if we achieved the following:
July: plan, learn as much as we can, connect with the RgSoc-community and start contributing to Living Style Guide making our first contribution to open source
August: keep working hard and make the best out of the summer!
September: finish the Javascript version & test Living Style Guide.
October: finish the last issues for PIMD project and hopefully be ready to find and start a new tech job as Junior Front End Web Developers in Barcelona when the summer is over.
From the beginning, we tried to stay organized and clearly communicate our goals. Yet, with no timeline in hand, opposite time schedules, no real idea about how the code worked and no instructions, we worked on random issues. One month gone, we lost the excitement without the inputs from the mentors. That changed when we discussed it with our supervisor Lucas and met our new mentor Bright. Things went much better from that moment on, we were lucky to have coaches that are very talented, no only in coding but also in explaining and lifting our spirits.
Daily log
Once the project started, we made a daily log with what we did that day.
Each day we had at least one sit-down where we’d ask about each other’s progress and maybe even teach each other what we learned or how to build something.
After three months of research, tutorials, building and deploying, we finally built the minimum viable product of our project. The last month, we refactored, tested and added new features to each component.
Lessons and Challenges: Things we learned along the way
One of the best and worst parts of our project is that we were given freedom to build using whatever stack we wanted. It was very freeing and made us feel like our mentor really trusted us with making the right decision.
However, as newbie developers sometimes we would spend days or even weeks researching different technologies, not knowing if we could overcome the steep learning curve. It was a challenge itself to know when to ask questions and ask for help, to manage frustration and to know when to stop and get proper rest.
The best parts of the experience were the small victories, the aha moments, sharing the journey with really caring people, admiring Nico’s work and hoping we can be at that level some day.
Spending three months, peppered with lots of success and failure, we loved every minute of it! Which is the best lesson of all from working on the RGSoC project this summer.
What RGSoC taught us
Besides contributing to open-source, we learned new tools and technologies and improved our skill-set. This is how Rgsoc helped us kickstart our careers and grow a lot as individuals.
We learned…
… it is really hard to predict and allocate time for building a new page or feature - because a lot can go wrong, and can totally derail the project.
… good communication is a huge part of a developer’s job and keeping everyone posted about our progress made a huge difference on our contributions and the team’s spirit.
… how to work with code that doesn’t have an immediate visual result, as we have been working before with websites and games and never with a so complex project.
… a lot about unit testing and the different frameworks and assertion libraries.
… how to work remotely with different people and how to collaborate to other people’s projects
… to back up our code if we are going to experiment Dr Frankenstein style with Git and Github
… advanced Git and Github uses, getting to a proficient level
… how to use Gulp and implement plugins
… more advanced ways of using npm and modules
… about lint, prettier and other code formatting tools
… how to create better documentation and how important it is
… the importance of paying attention to detail, syntax and style
… how amazing and helpful the dev community can be!
Achievements
We learned a lot during summer. Among others how to spent hours working on the same problem, freaked out,miscommunicated, lost our code, worked with complete opposite work schedules, were stuck, tried pair coding, coded alone, changed mentors, shifted projects, went to an incredible JavaScript conference, met awesome people, learned the open-source world, faced our fears and doubts and just kept going. Step-by-step. And our hard work paid off, we are celebrating with a few milestones:
- The PIMD-project was released as an npm package.
- We created a PIMD Live Demo and documentation file.
- We implemented new plugins
Thanks
We would not be able to thank RGSoC enough for all we learned through this summer. A big big thanks to RGSoC and all the Sponsors for giving us this opportunity and the organizors for their constant support. And of course, this summer would not have been so amazing without…
Our mentors: Nico and Jen. We could not have hoped for better mentors. Thank you Nico for all the patience, guidance and kindness you received us with. We won’t forget the experience of being part of your great project. We hope we can meet you both soon!
Our Coaches: Tobias (React developer-based in Düsseldorf, Germany), Tetiana (Ruby Developer-based in Kharkiv, Ukraine), Cristina (full-stack-developer-based in Barcelona), Bright (React mobile developer- based in Berlin, Germany) and Bogdan (JavaScript Developer-based in Kharkiv, Ukraine), thank you so much for all you help, time, energy, patience, source-code sessions, exercises, positive vibes, laughs and so much more
Our Supervisors: Lucas Pinto you had a big impact on our summer of code, thank you for caring for our well-being throughout the summer and always being there for questions, support and for sharing your own experiences. Srishti thank you for taking over when Lucas went on holidays and for continuing supporting us.
RGSoC-Community: Thank you for being so responsive and helpful. We loved to meet you all and have the opportunity of sharing our journey with so many amazing people.
The Journey Continues…
We will for sure continue to code. And are planning to find a job in tech in Barcelona by the beginning of 2019. We want to finish our Front-End Nanodegree, learn React and build up our portfolio with projects built the past months. We also want to learn more about some of the technologies, frameworks and tools we discovered during our journey with Living Style Guide.
We don’t know yet what the future holds for us but we have some idea of where we want to go next. We both want to keep working very hard to become full time Front End Developers. Diana wants to build up her skills on technical writing and Violeta will continue improving her current skills on UI and UX Design.
If you want to keep following our coding journey, here are some links:
Our Medium Account: we wrote during the Summer of Code about our journey and the conferences we attended.
Diana’s Github
Diana’s Linkedin
Violeta’s Github
Violeta’s Linkedin
Violeta’s Twitter
PIMD Project Repository
Living Style Guide Github
RGSoC daily logs: a history of every team hard work during the summer