I used to believe that software development was not for me (too hard!).
I started to study programming from scratch about one year and 8 months. Since then, I have already built one entire system, worked for a company and starting with big data studies.
Technology makes me believe that I am capable of anything.
I believe that being a programmer made me more concerned about the woman’s role in the society.
My dream is to become a digital nomad and work remotely from different places around the world!
I helped promote an event of Rails developers into my current city - and I want promote Rails Girls here.
I prefer Telegram than What’s App (Of course I want to make this clear for the rest of the world)
My programming life started in the university when I learned some languages like C, Java and PHP. But I just started to work with as a developer in the last course year and since then I’m coding (more specifically with Ruby on Rails for last 3 years)
Juliana (Photo: Juliana dias)
The journey to find a partner
Since I (Amanda) started working in technology, I’ve become involved with women in tech groups.
In a beautiful day, in a WhatsApp group related with woman who codes, some girl sent the RGSoC link.
I loved the idea and I had all the pre-requirements except another girl to partner with me.
Since then, I started a really long journey looking for a girl to apply with me. It was not easy, in fact, I did not know how hard it would be.
I published in Facebook groups, I talked with college girls, I asked for help for the conference’s organizers. There was nobody.
When I was almost giving up, Juliana answered a message from one of the Facebook groups I had posted.
From then on we began to fill out our application form, with little hope since there were many girls competing.
When we heard about our approval, we almost did not believe!
Juliana already had some open source contributions, but for Amanda this is the first time.
Us: Juliana and Amanda (Photo: Kaio Magalhães)
Our project choice
Since the beginning, we loved the RGSoC idea and our wish was to contribute to it. It was not difficult to choose our first option for the project. We were already sure that RGSoC teams app was the one.
We love the idea of inclusion that this amazing project promotes. It is really nice to see initiatives that care about women in tech.
Participating in RGSoC contributing to RGSoC teams app makes us feel members of this team that cares so much about the inclusion of women in the open source world.
Our team - the coaches
Fortunately, we have people around us that are here to help no matter what.
This support makes all the difference, and maybe this is one of the things that are missing for more women to start in technology: A friendly environment with supportive people!
I’ve worked with a lot of projects in a lot of different languages like PHP, C#, Java, Javascript, Groovy, and Ruby. With a lot of frameworks like Grails, Rails, React and NodeJS. For a lot of platforms like Desktop, WEB, Android, and Hololens.
I love programming related topics like code quality, software engineer, best practices, design patterns and I write about it always that I have time to.
We also count on Juliana’s brother support. He is always really helpful and close.
He has been working with ruby on rails for six years.
That is our team!
All the team together! (Photo: some guy that was passing by)
Our team - remote members
Last, but not least we will present our dear remote members - our two mentors Carsten and Max and our supervisor Ines.
Our mentors are always around and involved with our PR’s. Their suggestions always make our code better. It is really good to have help from them, with all their attention and care.
Ines is our dear, sweet, lovely supervisor
She helps us with all the thing (not code related) and also she talks with us about random things and Game of Thrones.
Our team is the best!
Our dear remote team! (Photo: Github)
What do we want
We would love to use our experience as RGSoC students to organize a Rails Girls event here in our city.
In this event, we will talk about our summer and we will help girls to start coding with ruby on rails.
We have already found a company to help us on this and we are really excited!
We believe this will encourage more girls to participate in these initiatives.
We think this is necessary because where we live, it was really difficult to find a partner.
We want to show the girls that they can do it and we want to show them all support we had and make them interested in applying to RGSoC next year.
Follow us closely
We have twitter, facebook, medium blog…
Feel free to follow us, add us on all social medias and everything. We love to get close to the community, let’s stay close!
That is our story! we are open to answering any question, just ping us on twitter and we can start talking!
How they started to get into the open source world!
Jona and Xheni met each other 5 years ago at the University of Tirana, Faculty of Economy because both of them wanted to study for Business Informatics. At the beginning they didn’t “like” each other a lot because Xheni was an Inter fan while Jona a Milan fan, different teams that play in Italy and their fans “fight” a lot with each other. YES, you read it very well, so don’t get surprised if they know football rules/ football players/ teams pretty well because they are crazy about football. The good news is that they found something in common, yaaay 🙂 They attended together the first edition of OSCAL, Open Source Conference Albania, the first conference in Albania dedicated only to open source software. After meeting a lot of other FLOSS enthusiasts at the conference, they discovered Open Labs that is the community behind OSCAL. Open Labs organizes a lot of events dedicated to different open source projects like GNU/Linux, Mozilla, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, LibreOffice etc. Both of them were intrigued by the world of Linux, that’s how they first started contributing to open source and became FLOSS advocates. Now that they have been part of Open Labs for four years, you see them part of different open source communities because being part of a community has helped them a lot to gain new experiences, learn new things, make new friends and have fun!
Team Codeaholics - Jona and Xheni at Open Labs hackerspace. (Photo: Jona Azizaj, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)
Jona was really interested to learn more on how to be a Linux system administrator that’s why she is part of the Fedora Project and became the first Fedora Ambassador in Albania promoting this operating system in her country. On the other hand Xheni was really interested on security stuff and that’s why she is studying Msc in Information Security and wants to become an ethical hacker. In the meanwhile, they have discovered the gender gap that exists in tech industry and especially in open source communities, something they don’t face at their local hackerspace because 70% of the members are girls. That’s why when they travel to different conferences they try to share the situation they have at Open Labs with other people to encourage them and feel more motivated. Even though not all the girls part of Open Labs know how to code, they are willing to learn, that’s why Jona and Xheni want to help girls start coding and get them on board. Their future plans include establishing a Django Girls and Rails Girls local community, starting with some beginner workshops at Open Labs.
Team Codeaholics - Working time! (Photo: Kristi Progri and Jona Azizaj, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)
RGSoC, let’s apply!
Jona’s and Xheni’s latest involvement into open source is Nextcloud, a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting service, where their contributions consisted mostly on promoting Nextcloud and translating it in their local language (shqip).
At OSCAL (third edition) they met Jan-Christoph Borchardt and had the chance to talk with him. After some months, they saw his tweet about a
dedicated scholarship program that aims to foster diversity in Open Source since 2013, called “Rails Girls Summer of Code”. Both of them were
really enthusiast and happy to hear about such a great opportunity that could help girls develop their skills and gain new exciting experiences. After posting this on the Open Labs forum to share it with all the girls, they even organized an “unofficial” meeting with all the interested girls to help each other with the process. It was the first time that 4 teams from Albania applied to be part of RGSoC!
Why Nextcloud?
After picking each other as teammates, Jona and Xheni had to decide about the project they wanted to spend all their summer working on. Wait, what about the name of the team?
Hmmm let’s say they needed only a couple of hours to find the appropriate name for them. And it was not very difficult, because both of them are CODEAHOLICS. Yes, I mean it! They stay awake all night long and they like to sleep in the morning because for them is way easier to work when the place is very quiet, people are sleeping and the only thing that they can hear is their favorite music. Okay now let’s get back to the topic. After scouting all the projects listed, the first one that was deemed a perfect fit for them was Nextcloud. Why? Because they were already using it and they were familiar (not a lot) with the community. Both of them believe that when you use something and you like it, it’s very easy for you to start promoting and working on it, in this way you will always do something that you love and are not forced to. They decided to work on the contacts app and documentation part during the summer.
After finishing the application all the albanian teams were “stressed” waiting about the final result. Who could imagine that we would be one of the lucky teams, being the first albanian team part of RGSoC! Imagine their happy faces when they saw the approval email, yaaay :D
Codeaholics at Open Labs hackerspace during. (Photo: Anxhelo Lushka, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)
Meet their amazing team!
The Nextcloud mentor is Jan-Christoph Borchardt, their coaches are: Joas Schilling, Morris Jobke, Aldo Ziflaj and Edi Hoxhalli, and their supervisor is Benedikt Deicke. They will be working and keeping in touch with them for any issue they might face, help they might need, etc. They have organized their workflow by creating a project at the Contacs app repo on Nextcloud organization on GitHub. To communicate with each other, they use IRC, you can find them on #nextcloud-contacts and #nextcloud-dev. Spreed app is their favorite choice when it comes to do the weekly video call with their supervisor. Xheni and Jona are really happy to be part of the Nextcloud community and to have this amazing team ready to help them when needed. End of August they will be in Berlin to attend the Nextcloud conference and meet in person all the community members. They will have the opportunity to share with the participants their experience as RGSoC students working on Nextcloud, so if you will be in Berlin make sure to be part of the conference!
Codeaholics and their amazing team! (Photo collage: Anxhelo Lushka, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)
Codeaholics just kicked off their first RGSoC event in Tirana!
On 1st of July they organized their first event at Open Labs Hackerspace at 6pm. A lot of participants attended and they were really interested on this scholarship and eager to learn more on how to apply for the next round of RGSoC. They also had a short video call just to say Hello to their amazing team, kudos to Laura and Jan for joining the video call. After the introduction to the program and the video call, they had a small party with the participants, that made the atmosphere more friendly and enjoyable.
Codeaholics during kick off event at Open Labs. (Photo: Anxhelo Lushka, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.)
By the way, do you know the great news from their municipality of Tirana?
The Municipality of Tirana, the biggest municipality in the country serving over 800,000 citizens, goes free open source by using Nextcloud! An important contributor in raising the public awareness on the importance of free open source culture in general and the public administration embracing it in particular, has been the local community of the Open Labs Hackerspace where Xheni and Jona are involved.
What they have done so far?
Nextcloud is a safe home for all your data – community-driven, free & open source. It is a very big project, with more then 30 teams working on contacts app, calendar, android, server, spreed etc. The project has a very detailed documentation which helps a lot, also a very active and friendly community. Being part of RGSoC and working on this specific project doesn’t mean to write only code but at the same time combining it with tutorials, learning new stuff not only related to AngularJS but even other concepts related to their work, put in practice what they both already know and shape their skills. Therefore, working on this project has helped them a lot related to the AngularJS part, their coaches have been really helpful (and patient :P) with them when they were working on different issues related to the Contacts app. Jan has done a great job with them, identifying some starter issues to work on, and working on the workflow they are following.
Nextcloud organization on github.
And…
…Jona and Xheni want to thank everyone involved, their mentor Jan, their coaches Morris, Joas, Aldo and Edi, their supervisor Benedikt, and also the amazing RGSoC organising team for offering one of the best ways spending the summer to all winning teams!! Keep up the good work.
Hello! We are Ipshita and Prachi of Team 200 OK, from New Delhi, India, working on coala this summer. One month into Rails Girls Summer of Code already and we didn’t even realise how time flew by. What a whirlwind of a month!
She is extremely meticulous and will not take anything up without making a checklist for it
She has a very eclectic taste in ‘get psyched’ music, much of which blares through her headphones as she works through this summer. Also, she loves to sing as she works, much to the annoyance of her teammate (sorry Prachi!)
If you want her to be your friend, just get her a cup of coffee and something nice to eat. She is a huge foodie!
She can stop almost any work midway and scribble poetry at the first piece of paper she gets her hands on.
She is already overjoyed that you’re reading about her! blushes
She is the antithesis of Ipshita. Her desktop and working area is disorganised chaos. You can only and only find your way through folders, if she is there to guide you.
She works well under pressure, but only if she has a deadline to meet.
There is no easy way to say this but her jokes suck.
She reads. A lot. Like a person who has been starved of any reading material for years. She also quotes random facts that have no relation whatsoever with the conversation on hand.
She is secretly dancing at the prospect of people reading this and her becoming famous. (You have high hopes, Prachi)
(L-R) Prachi and Ipshita; Image taken by Prachi
How I Met My Teammate
Back in the first year of college, we were introduced to each other by a mutual friend who thought we’d get along. And boy, did we get along! From being co participants in a college festival to being best buddies, we’ve come a long way in these three years.
The innumerable similarities and common interests we share are the major reason for us getting along like a house on fire. Our shared love for poetry (both of us are writers), reading, music, programming and of course, Harry Potter, ensure that there is never a dull moment when we’re together.
So it was no surprise when we decided to form Team 200 OK and team up with each other for participating in various competitions. Here’s a fun fact behind our team name. 200 is the HTTP response code for success and that was our primary motive behind coming together to work - be successful together with your best friend <3
The One With The Application
Prachi came across Rails Girls Summer of Code sometime in December 2016 and immediately decided that it was an ideal 200 OK thing to do. Ipshita, too, agreed instantly. Both of them started keeping an eye out for the application period.
Once the applications opened, we realised that we were as spoilt for choice as a child in a candy store. Both of us couldn’t believe the variety of projects and the technologies being used, in the shortlisted projects for RGSoC 2017.
The Game of Projects
Having some basic programming experience in Python, we started looking up projects working on it and stumbled upon coala, a unified interface for code analysis and linting, irrespective of the underlying programming language. We were extremely captivated by the concept and started interacting with the community and the project mentors. What really tipped the scales in coala’s favour and made us choose it as our first choice project was the extremely vibrant, robust and beginner-friendly nature of the community. There is an extremely detailed and self-explanatory newcomer’s guide to contributing, which we got our hands on as soon as possible, and picked up a few newcomer issues in the application period itself. The project mentor for coala, Udayan, helped us formulate a proposal of our work and a timeline of events, which we could follow through the course of the program.
As the deadline drew closer, we were so fixated by coala, that we didn’t even think of getting involved in any other project. It was coala all the way for us <3
When we got a mail from the organising team in April, we really couldn’t believe it. The subsequent interview with Anika and Ramon and finally, the much awaited results, were actually a dream come true!
We were one of the four teams from India which made it to the top 10, making it the only country apart from Germany to achieve such a feat. Wow! It was indeed a moment of pride and joy for us to be a part of this wonderful initiative.
coala Logo
Five Reasons Why coala
Our project, coala is a code analysis tool. So, developers at coala write bears to help you check for bad coding practices, styles etc. in different languages. And who doesn’t want to help people write maintainable code?
coala can be used by anyone around the world, whether they have contributed to the project are not.
Bear writing at coala is of basically two types:
— Native Bears
— Linter Bears
A lot of programming languages already have linters implemented, so if a project uses a language that does not already have a linter bear we do not need to implement it on our own. Linter bears are python wrappers (since coala is in python) around existing code linting tools available in other languages.
coala has a very robust CI pipeline including checks for commit and code quality (of course!), Travis, Appveyor, Circle CI and codecov.
Oh, and something that we have experienced for the first time at an open source org — at coala, the more code reviews you do — the faster your code gets reviewed by the community (they have a lot of developers and so a lot of PRs!) So, we need to perform code reviews too :D
The Crew
As is true with any show, it is the people behind the scenes who actually make it all happen. For us, our wonderful coaches, Vidur, Tushar and Suryansh, our beloved supervisor Mayar (we like to call her our team buddy) and our project mentor, Udayan, are the people guiding us through this summer. We are incredibly blessed and humbled to have such a supportive team, which is the actual reason for getting a 200 OK this summer! We can’t thank you people enough! <3
(clockwise order from top left) Udayan, Prachi and Ipshita, Mayar, Vidur, Suryansh, Tushar (Photo collage: Team 200OK)
Our coaches are all our seniors from college and we already knew them very well in person. They have guided us all throughout our college life and jumped at the opportunity of doing the same through Rails Girls Summer of Code too.
Vidur Katyal is an avid competitive programmer and developer. He is also a closet filmmaker and scriptwriter. He is currently working at Bloomberg as a Software Developer.
Suryansh Tibarewal loves to create things which leave a high impact, meet and collaborate with people on new technologies and is a self-professed kindle freak who reads startup origin stories at leisure. He is currently working at Booking.com as a Graduate Software Developer.
Tushar Sinha is a programming geek who also secretly enjoys videography. he is an avid rail fan and aviation enthusiast, He is currently working at Expedia as an Associate Software Developer.
Our supervisor, Mayar Alaa, is from Cairo, Egypt and a student of Computer Engineering. She is also an alumna of Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016.
The Fortnightly Blog Theory
In case, you wish to follow our RGSoC journey in detail, we also blog fortnightly on our Medium blog. So far we have written about writing linter bears and the community outreach at RGSoC. Do visit us, we’ll be waiting ;)
This year’s program has started off with a bang! As today marks the start of the fourth week of RGSoC, we thought you would be interested in seeing what our amazing teams have been doing since the first day of our program.
From enjoying Global Kick-off events to having their kick-off calls with team members, from making their first pull request to preparing for conferences, our students are ready to mark their presence in the open source world.
Our teams are having fun with kick-off calls & their projects (Credit: RGSoC Teams)
One amazing thing to note this year: we have teams from Sri Lanka (Team Fusion), Albania (Team Codeaholics) and Russia (Team Alexa) for the first time! If you’re interested in knowing where the other teams are from, check out this post.
Yesterday, we had our @RailsGirlsSoC kick off celebration! 🎉So our coaches joined to help us planning our project & finish eating the cake 😁 pic.twitter.com/65jDBAYQ8L
Team Fusion on their kick off call celebration (Credit: Team Fusion)
Been at Pydata Moscow meetup today, they wrote "RGSOC" on our badges. Not sure if it qualifies as a kick-off party, but it was nice. pic.twitter.com/rzybOP2dLD
Team Alexa at PyData Moscow meetup (Credit: Team Alexa)
Looking at the progress of our teams, this seems to be a wonderful start of the program. Stay tuned for blog posts from our teams to follow their amazing journey and checkout their daily logs on our Teams app.
Our 2017 teams :) (Image: Laura Gaetano)
Follow us and our teams on twitter for more updates. And let’s enjoy the journey of our awesome teams this summer together!
Four years ago I was on the tube late at night in London. Some drunk girls were being noisy and boisterous, squealing and moaning about their painful feet in their high-heels.
A goth-attired man in his mid 30s looked up from his book and said “don’t wear those shoes if they hurt, no one wants to hear your shrieking.”
“Oh, go home and listen to your Morrissey albums!” said one of the girls.
I caught her eye and grinned and asked them where they’d been that evening. They said they had just finished their final exams and were about to graduate and started asking me about myself.
I told them I worked at a startup and I made apps. “Wooaaahhh you are clever!” they chimed in response. I was bending the truth, I edited xml in apps — basically a tester/ proofreader but it felt very good to gain the approval of these impertinent girls.
That’s what set me off on this journey to learn to create applications myself.
After 4 years of going to meetups, hackathons, many online tutorials and a 3-month boot camp, I met my teammate, Vanessa. Like me, transitioning into web dev after a different career — as a water technology and sustainability expert.
Our project is worldbrain.io, a Chrome extension which helps scientists organise and search their bookmarks and history. We were attracted to the idea of helping researchers in science and we thought it made a good mix of both our backgrounds.
We are building a notification centre which allows admin users to log on and send updates to users, using Pouch db, React, Mongo and Node.
And now it’s already the end of week 4 and these 3 months are going so fast. Although we are doubtlessly learning a lot, at times I feel like a roiling mess of frustration. Nearly everyday I have to give myself a pep talk in the mirror and spend 5 minutes google image-searching ‘Michelle Obama working out’. However, my kate-bush-song-listened-to-to-lines-of-code-written ratio has fallen from 10:1 or 5:1.
It feels so lucky to be in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, right in the centre, in summer — surrounded by creative, flat-hierarchy companies and awesome people, giving us their limited time and sought-after skills willingly.
We’ve been really lucky to get so much support from our mentors and coaches — so much so that we would like to start a “Male Allies in Tech awards”, to let people know that the tech industry has more than stories of sexism and harassment. One of the prizes will include a t-shirt that says “This is what a male ally in tech looks like”.
She helps us with all the thing (not code related) and also she talks with us about random things and Game of Thrones.
