Heya! We are Rahmeen and Akshita of team $we init. We both study in New Delhi, India, and are working on Probot this summer.
The Dreamers:
Rahmeen
She is incredibly ticklish and smiles and laughs hysterically in ways that are most contagious.
She is super clumsy and is capable of tripping over absolutely nothing
She writes a lot to mute the demons in her head and reads voraciously. You can find her scrolling through her Quora feed almost always.
She has this habit of quoting random Shakespearean, Tagore and Frost quotations and then justifying their relevance in the ongoing context.
She claims of being organised but her hostel room tells another story.
She has motivational one-liners all around her working area- on the white board on her wall, the sticky notes on her desk, on her laptop skin and in her own highly-persistent RAM (yes she remembers a lot from everything inconsequential and forgets the significant).
She loves music, sings a lot but never believes anyone when they tell her she sings well.
She believes “Life is all about rising from the ashes you once witnessed yourself reduce to” and possesses a high resilience factor.
Akshita
She is a big foodie, and you will mostly find her in college canteen, eating (xD).
She is a Quora lover and loves to draw inspiration from others’ lives and stories.
She loves to hangout with her friends, in and around Dwarka and visiting the same places again and again. ( She has visited Hashtag and Pacific Mall, innumerable times with her friends).
She loves to make a strict time-table of tasks in hand but rarely follows it.
Completely opposite to her partner Rahmeen who has an amazing memory, she is quite forgetful and would be found digging up stuffs.
She loves working in collaboration with others and is passionate about her work.
What unites us?
We’re both majoring in Computer Engineering from the same University, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, University of Delhi, and are in the same class. We met on Day 1 of college and have been good friends ever since. We started working together when we took an online course on web development. Brainstorming and discussing vividly on assignments and lectures taught us way more than we could have ever imagined. By solving each other’s difficulties and doubts and constantly encouraging the other in their lows, we ensured that neither of us was left behind.
Working with each other was such an enriching and enjoyable experience that we decided to team up with each other for nearly every project we took- classroom presentations, curriculum centric projects, Hackathons and now RGSoC. It would be no exaggeration to say that our common love for programming brought us in togetherness and strengthened our friendship.
We were sitting next to each other(inseparably as always) attending a tech talk by our most adorable seniors, Prachi Manchanda and Ipshita Chatterjee when we first heard about RGSoC. Immediately we looked at each other and it was clear. We had a new goal, a new dream and what made it special was that we wanted to live it and realise it together.
And then was formulated “$we init” over a plate full of sizzling chilly potatoes at the college canteen. Rahmeen, the creative was suggesting mind blowing names as “OneHotEncoder”, “Sopho-no-mores” and Akshita the critic was invariably rejecting them all. And then, together again, they zeroed down to “we’re in it”, more “terminally” (please say you get the pun) stated as “$we init”. Rahmeen couldn’t be prouder of “terminalising” the team name thus (It’ll break her heart if you didn’t appreciate her).
Why Probot?
Having worked with Javascript for almost a year now, we have fallen in deep love with it. NodeJS is one framework that we are extremely passionate about. We have worked with Node on multiple hackathon projects and want to explore it further.
Even before the project list was announced, we were perusing all the then ‘pending’ projects and that was when we found ‘Probot’ and were blown away by its idea almost immediately. We were completely excited by the concept of building Github Apps to automate github workflow. The fact that even we, who are mere beginners here, could install these apps on our repos and see the magic happen, was enough to transport us to the Probot slack channel within minutes after the after the announcement of final projects on 1st February.
The extremely welcoming nature of the community left us in awe. The project mentor, Gregor Martynus, replied to our introductory message on slack within seconds of sending them. He also supplied us with all relevant documentations to get us started. Never had we received such prompt and warm responses to our doubts from any organisation. And like that wasn’t enough, Gregor invited us to probot’s office hours. It was an unbelievable experience, to join such accomplished people on call right on the first day of introducing ourselves on their slack channel!
‘Probot’ seemed a perfect choice to us for three major reasons:
* It is in the language and framework we’ve previously worked upon. Nodejs and Javascript are things that we want to explore further and excel in.
* The idea of the project was completely awesome, given the usability, creativity and reach it promised.
* ‘The Probot Community’ is the most promising community that we could ever build.
To be able to work on a project of such reach and impact under the guidance of brilliant developers from across the world drew us towards Probot and the humility, support and niceness of these amazing developers has held us in it!
The Support System
Gregor (Mentor)
A member of the RGSoC family for a fourth year now, Gregor is one gem of a mentor. We cannot forget how warmly he welcomed us to the community, inviting us for office hours right on day 1 of introduction. Since then, he has been a constant support, has always kept us motivated and has made us feel so comfortable that we feel that we belong with Probot already! <3
Bex and Jason (Co-mentors)
They are both GitHub employees and maintainers of probot for quite some time now. They have been amazing mentors and have always offered help, generously. :’)
Divjot (Coach)
A 2016 batch passout from our college, Divjot is a full-time Software Developer at Swiggy. We wouldn’t be exaggerating if we say that he’s the absolute best senior one could ask for. From resolving out most messed up javascript doubts in minutes to giving detailed life lessons (and one liners like “Don’t worry! If you want to give up, you’re doing something right”), he is one person we can always depend on, without a second thought. He’s vegan and Pun-jabi, funny and a hard taskmaster, loves JS and cooks amazing food.
Saksham (Coach)
A two-time GSoCer a 2017 passout from Delhi Technological University, Saksham is always happy to help. And not most people will believe but we found him on Quora (Yay, Rahmeen’s infinite quora scrolling is not always useless). Saksham has a lot of experience with Node.js and loves to share his knowledge abundantly. Workaholic as he is, he’s worried about lack of work when we don’t ask him doubts too frequently, and very cleverly this his how he keeps us on our toes. (Don’t worry we’ll trouble you a lot in the days to come XD)
Manish (Coach)
Our batchmate and a 2018 GSocer, Manish is a very good friend of ours. Being a CodeHeat winner under FOSSASIA, he is extremely passionate about contributing to open source and loves to help others too.
Mananpal (Coach)
A senior year student from our college, Mananpalhas won almost every hackathon he has ever participated it. Being an extremely passionate developer and open-source enthusiast, Manan has this knack for developing some really cool projects. He works actively for promoting open-source among the students of our college and is an amazing person.
Saptak (Supervisor)
A graduate from IIIT Allahabad, Saptak is a passionate open source contributor. A GSoC ‘16 student with FOSSASIA, Saptak is currently working as a Software Developer with Gitcoin. We’re super excited to work with him throughout the summer!
Alina and Sabine (photo by Alina Leuca and Sabine van der Eijk)
We’re well on our way to being a fully-functional team, finally! Today Sabine and I met for the first time to code together and get our wits about the project :) Being part-time comes with its perks, but also its drawbacks.
On the one hand, we have time to do our favorite activities: hang out with the dogs, go surfing, and maybe even take a weekend break away from Amsterdam. On the other hand, both of us have part-time jobs we have to worry about and work around our schedule. We are honored to be one of the first part-time guinea pigs though, and are super excited about Stretchly! We’ve already started work, and are still slowly digging our way through all the code. It’s our first time working with Electron as well, so we’re learning tons already :)
A bit of what happened this week:
We had our first call with our mentor Jan on Wednesday, and he is wonderful! He gave us ideas for first issues and functionalities, and has already helped us figure out how to contribute to the project. We’re excited for a potential visit from him some time during the program!
We also had our first call with our supervisor Ana Sofia and had a blast! Besides discussing all the oportunities we’ll have to meet up in Portugal or Amsterdam, she also helped us a TON to feel welcomed into the program.
On Saturday we got together to work on Stretchly again, and were lucky to have our coach Dan with us the entire day. We managed to get a lot of work done, and especially decipher the app a lot more with his help.
We completed our first little feature – translation of the app into Dutch, and our first pull request!
We had our first dinner with all the coaches!
This was a huge highlight of our week! It was Sabine’s first time meeting Eden, and both of our first time meeting Jack. We got to know each other a bit, and it helps us feeling more comfortable with our coaches. We can only hope it makes the coaches more comfortable with us as well! We hope to do this again (maybe once a month?) during the program.
potatoCode team! (photo by Alina Leuca and Sabine van der Eijk)
What comes next
We’re super excited and super nervous! We’re sure the next 3 months are going to bring a lot of learnings, laughter, and also tears!
The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Step
And here’s how the journey of Team Rubies started!
Atibhi had just started learning Ruby on Rails and was googling some random error, when Google redirected her to the official page of RGSoC.
She started reading up on it. The more she read, the more convinced she became that she had to apply to this program !
The next step was finding a teammate. She messaged a few people and Prateksha seemed the most interested ! She was her immediate junior in college and was enthusiastic about exploring new avenues.
Together they embarked on the journey of becoming RGSoC 2018 scholars.
Atibhi and Prateksha (Credit: Simran Dokania)
Atibhi & Prateksha - They are enthusiastic ECE undergraduates from IIIT Bangalore, India. They are working on if-me this summer which is a community for mental health experiences.
Whenever life gets serious, they watch FRIENDS to let their hair down. They want to dress like Rachel, eat like Joey, joke like Chandler, love like Ross, organize like Monica and run like Phoebe.
Atibhi is a 3rd year Undergrad student who thinks she is Monica Geller’s real life version. She has lost over 30kgs and can be found reading or coding if she is not worrying about how to become fitter. She is happiest when travelling. She makes sure she knows the historical background of a new place before she visits it and can spend her nights at museums.
An electronics student by day and open source contributor at night, she hopes to someday combine her love for hardware and software !
Prateksha is a 2nd year Undergrad student, who can be found humming a tune or dancing to one if she isn’t coding. Solving algorithms keeps her engaged in her free time. She loves shopping and exploring new places. She enjoys meeting new people and interacting with them. It amuses her to know about different cultures and ideologies. Apart from this, she loves organizing and volunteering at events.
Finding Coaches
They had found each other but now they had to find coaches. They found four awesome coaches.
Aditya T - Aditya is their senior at college. He is specialising in Pattern Recognition and Signal Processing. He is presently an Artificial Intelligence developer for Klarity Law and did his GsoC 2017 with Systers.
Athitya - To the outside world, he’s a Mechie at IIT,Kharagpur. But, with the help of his friends at IITKGP, he codes. He’s a wizard with Ruby and did his GSoC 2017 at Ruby Foundation. He is interning at Intuit this summer.
Gaurav - Gaurav is their super senior at college who interned at Microsoft this summer. He is a coding enthusiast and a proficient web developer. He works on how Machine Perception can help us reach from Artificial Narrow Intelligence to Artificial General Intelligence. He did his GSoC 2017 at Berkman Centre.
Raounaq - Raounaq is a passionate software developer who uses Ruby to express in code what defines him. Apart from coding he played for a football club from Delhi, India. He also likes to travel.
Brihi - Atibhi’s childhood friend, RGSoC 2017 scholar and a person who loves Code, Coffee and Music. Brihi can work with anything that is associated with Data, Machine Learning, and AI. Even though she isn’t their official coach, RGSoC 2018 wouldn’t have been possible without her. From reviewing their application to jumping with joy when they got selected, she has been their biggest supporter throughout the process !
Choosing a project and interacting with the mentors !
They had chosen their project even before the list of official projects had been announced. They were thrilled when their primary choice “if-me” got selected for RGSoC’18.
They could relate to “if-me” and wanted to contribute to the mental health community. Here is their first contact with Julia, their mentor way before the official list was announced.
Our first mail to Julia!(Credit: Gmail-Atibhi)
After this, Julia added them to slack. The slack community was amazing. They had previously worked with Ruby on Rails and wanted to start with ReactJS components in if-me. If-me community helped them learn Javascript and then React. By February,they had submitted their first PR. Yes ! It was in React !
Apart from the community being so helpful, their mentor Julia had a unique ritual. She would do weekly shout-outs where she would thank people who worked on an issue or helped if-me in any way.
To know that their contributions were valuable motivated them further.
Here is how the weekly shout-out looked like !
Weekly Shout-Out (Credit: Slack-Julia)
Moreover, Julia mailed them if-me stickers and a handwritten card !
Stickers and Card (Credit: Atibhi's Phone)
They had fallen in love with the community and were thankful to be a part of it. Being RGSoC scholars to work for “if-me” was just the cherry on top !
Best surprise of their lives !
On 5th April, they got a mail for the first round of interview.This was their first ever interview and they had butterflies in their stomach!
After the interview, they had their fingers crossed and were eagerly waiting for the results.
Soon it was the time for results! 17th April was finally here! Both of them were anxious and were continuously checking their mails. At 12:30 AM they received a mail saying that there was another round of interview.
They thought that their first interview wasn’t good enough and this was the final chance for them to redeem themselves.
By 19th April they had gone through their proposal multiple times and brushed up their technical knowledge. The interview was scheduled to start at 9 PM and they sat nervously in front of their laptops at 8:30 PM. At 9 PM the interview started. Little did they know that this is what RGSoC meant by “interview”.
Accepted to RGSoC 2018!!(Credit: appear.in-Screenshot)
… a dream that they had been chasing for over 4 months had finally come true. It was no interview, it was the final results. The RGSoC team told them via live call that they were selected.
The Team
The Team, Left to Right and Top to Bottom: Julia, Srishti, Camille, Prateksha, Atibhi, Aditya, Gaurav, Nishiki, Alvaro, Athitya, Raounaq (Credits: Slack - Julia, Srishti, Nishiki, Alvaro; GitHub - Camille, Athitya; Google Hangouts - Raounaq )
Mentors
Julia
She is the founder of the “if-me”, she started it in 2014 as an undergraduate student. She is a developer and storyteller who loves to be creative in web and mobile development, art, writing, and speaking.
Camille
Incorrigible humanist and full-stack web developer excited about interdisciplinary collaboration, open source software, and facilitating supportive team environments. She is helping us with Ruby on Rails.
Alvaro
He is currently a 4th year CS undergrad at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, specifically the branch of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. He has experience in web development, virtual and augmented reality and 3D printing. He is also helping us with Ruby on Rails.
Nishiki
He’s a web developer aiming to build products that deliver value for good causes. He is helping us with ReactJs.
Supervisor
Srishti
An RGSoC’16 alumni, she’s a Product Security Engineer at Citrix. She is also a Graphic Designer,Pianist, Multilingual programmer and an avid book reader. She wants to use her knowledge to make a change.
Their goals for the summer !
They want make friends from all over the world. They also want to discuss new programming paradigms, gain new insights and knowledge from the open source community.
The summer has begun and the moment for which we had been waiting since the past so many days has come. It is time to get started with RGSoC this year. Let’s familiarise you with our team -
Both of us are undergraduate students at NSIT, Delhi, majoring in Computer Engineering. We are best friends and buddies since day 1 of college. We have been sharing our rooms and memories since then, and obviously being partners in crime! 😈 (just kidding) , in coding and in the wonderful program which we are all a part of -> ‘RGSoC’.
Mentor - Josh Matthews
Josh is the most experienced person in our team. He has been working with Servo since almost the beginning and considers Servo like his own child. Are we right Josh 😛? Needless to say he is the most helpful person without whom we couldn’t have started with Servo and reached our current state. We really value your efforts.
Supervisor - Rakhi
Rakhi is a previous RGSoC student with Servo. She is the best person to know what our current level of understanding of the project must be, as she herself has been through the same phase. She is responsible for catching hold of us all and making sure we are doing things on time. Happy to have you with us! 😁
Coaches - Manraj Singh & Gauri Kholkar
Manraj is our super senior in college who works as a Software Engineer at Practo. He is a community leader at DuckDuckGo and has a lot of knowledge and experience in Open Source. Since he started the open source community in our college, we were sure he would be as excited as we are, to work with him. It is not of much surprise that he happily agreed to coach us! 💃
Gauri is an experienced Rust programmer who did her internship with Mozilla under the prestigious Outreachy programme. We came to know about her from the RGSoC page itself, where she had mentioned that she wanted to coach a team for Servo. She is a happy and cheerful person indeed. We plan to trouble her with lots of doubts this summer 😜
The journey till now -
We got to know about RGSoC when seniors from our college Prachi and Ipshita got selected for it last year. After that fine day, we wanted to be a part of such a program which could help us contribute to such a large community under the mentorship of talented and experienced people.
So we made sure that we started looking for organisations on time. By mid-January, even before the organisations were finalized, we started making our mind on which project to apply for. We started understanding and making small contributions to our first project. But after few days came the shortlist of projects…….A small set back for us, the project that we wanted to apply for didn’t get selected :(
Source: Giphy.com
But nevermind, we began looking for some other projects.
We took one more week, installing new code bases and getting in touch with mentors and the community, figuring out which project was the perfect match for us. We finally narrowed down on Servo, Mozilla. It was something scary and challenging for us:
It offered us Rust, a completely different programming language. We had worked with C++ and Python before, but Rust was different. It had features from more than 10 different languages. Primarily it was safe, fast and concurrent! 😎
It had a really large code base with more than 2000 live issues. Also, we had never ever got the unique opportunity of working with browser engines.
So we decided to get our hands dirty. We implemented our very first API DOM Doge Api in Servo. We were able to do it only because of the blog post written by one of the past RGSoC scholar who gave insights into how a basic API can be built and how the workflow of the whole API should be. This task was something that we were able to complete within a day (But it was literally a lot of effort, solving the small errors that came up each time we tried to compile the code.)
Ahh, we were so happy :P
Source: Giphy.com
Source: Giphy.com
Then we started implementing our own functions in that API. It was interesting to see the code we wrote working in a browser.
By this time we had started feeling a bit confident about writing some code in Rust. We then pinged our mentor Josh to ask for his feedback and we asked him to suggest us some already existing beginner friendly issues in Servo. He was really helpful and guided our baby steps to start with our work. He also made us aware of the type of issues which would help us with our work in RGSoC. We wouldn’t have been able to solve our first issue if we would not have received the help from the community members through the IRC channel of Servo. The people in open source are awesome. We still remember, how we were stuck on a very simple thing and asked silly questions but there were patient people who helped us with all the doubts.
For the rest of the month of February, we kept working on some more issues, taking help from our coaches and mentor and celebrating after every PR getting merged 💥 We liked the project so much that we decided to invest all of our time and energy into one project only despite the fact that selecting two projects increases the chances of selection. We were motivated to make some substantial contributions for such an awesome community.
Simultaneously we also started working on our application which is extremely crucial for being selected. We would like to specially thank Aishwarya and Prachi, who helped us by reviewing our application and making sure it’s perfect!
Finally, we would like to thank each other. It was our strong bond of friendship and support which lead us to applying for RGSoC together as a team.
We hope we have awesome 101 Days of Summer 😉 with Servo.
Team GirlsCode MK: Eva and Georgina (Photo taken by Eva)
Georgina:
My dad is an electrical engineer who loves gadgets and was always buying new technologies that we got to play with at home. I have been using technology for a long time and have a lifelong love of all the great innovations in my lifetime. I am an IT Trainer, qualified teacher, which evolved into developing in visual basic to create solutions for document production. I studied for my degree with the Open University and achieved my BSC (Hons) in IT and Computing to complement my MCSE and other technical qualifications whilst raising my family.
With a young family the demands of teaching were not flexible so I started my own business, training and working short term contracts for a variety of companies, and developing software. I joined Girls Code MK to gain new skills in a friendly supportive environment where we share tips on coding, this is where I met Eva.
Hobbies?
I have had a lot of hobbies and like to experience lots of things at least once. I now love badminton which I am part of a milton keynes club, watching films except horror, reading self development books, socialising and networking and of course solving problems with tech.
Favourite dish?
I love cooking but favourite is most chinese stir fries.
Morning person or night owl?
I can be both but not at the same time! If I am inspired or socialising I can stay awake much too late!
Which country is at the top of your must-see countries?
I would love to see all the ancient wonders of the world.
Favourite programming language?
I don’t think I have a favourite, but easiest to start again is Javascript.
Favourite productivity hack?
I like to make the most of my time so my favourite to avoid overload is GOOP. Standing for Goal - what is one goal to focus on, Outcome - what does it look like, Obstacles - what obstacles can stand in the way of your goal and Plan - what plan do you have for overcoming those Obstacles.
Eva:
Originally from Slovenia, Eva moved to Milton Keynes after living in China for a number of years. After working as a teacher, translator, podcast host, project manager and ecommerce manager (not all at the same time!), she has recently found her calling in programming. Since September 2017, Eva has been dedicating most of her waking hours to learning how to program and inspiring other women to do so as well. She founded and hosts GirlsCode MK, beginner friendly meetups and workshops where women of any age, background and skill can come and learn how to code in a welcoming environment.
Eva and Georgina met at a GirlsCode MK meetup.
Hobbies?
Indoor climbing, singing in a choir, playing table tennis, juggling, watching basketball (NBA!) and spending time outside with my dog.
Favourite dish?
Pizza!
Morning person or night owl?
Morning person. I go to bed at 10pm (at the latest!).
Which country is at the top of your must-see countries?
Costa Rica.
Favourite programming language?
Javascript.
Favourite productivity hack?
Getting at least 8 hours of sleep. Also coffee. Lots of coffee.
GirlsCode MK meetups (Photo taken by Eva)
Coaches and supervisors
On our exciting coding journey, we’ll be joined by a team of enthusiastic, supportive and hopefully (extremely) patient people!
Coaches:
Rob, Neil, Kalan and PJ
Bahmni mentors:
Ivo and Wolf
RGSoC supervisor
Ramón
2. The Place
Bletchley Park Mansion - the headquarters for British codebreakers during World War II. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Our office space couldn’t have been more inspiring! We are based at the heart of Bletchley Park home of the codebreakers.
For one of her earlier projects, Georgina built a tribute page for women codebreakers in Bletchley Park (Codepen link)
3. The Project
Bahmni (Source: Bahmni.org)
The project will be working on during the summer is Bahmni, a low-resource hospital management tool based on OpenMRS - an open source, medical record system. Bahmni was started in 2012 and is currently being used in 29 countries around the world!
It’s a live and working app with a huge code base and while it will definitely be challenging, we’re very excited at the opportunity of making Bahmi better and even more effective.
4. The Plan
Our primary task is to add a person module to Bahmni. Currently it’s only possible to register people as patients in Bahmni, but we would like to add the functionality of adding persons - for example to register people for pre-screening appointments.
Technologies used: React.js, Node.js, RESTful APIs, PWA
