We are the Team CodeBears based in Berlin. Both of us got into coding after attending a Rails Girls Beginners Workshop in Berlin almost to the date one year ago. So this blog post is also our personal coding anniversary.
CodeBears Neta and Rete at the SoundCloud office / Photo by: Alon Peer
How we met
Actually, even though both of us attended the same workshop, we didn’t meet there. After the workshop two new study groups formed and we met in both, realising that we had been to the same workshop. One of those groups - RubySprouts - was smaller and very cozy. It was also very practical from the very start: the coaches thought us while working on a real group project. We liked that approach very much.
With time the group got smaller and smaller until it was only the two of us as students and four coaches. We were lucky :) Starting our RailsGirls adventure, none of us had imagined that this study group would entirely turn into a RGSoC team half a year later as three of our RubySprouts coaches are actually also our RGSoC coaches!
Rete
When I first heard about the Rails Girls Summer of Code at the Beginners Workshop I thought to myself, “oh this is what I wanna do”, but didn’t think that I would already be experienced enough to apply in February. I always kinda had this option in the back of my mind, but I wasn’t sure if I would still be in Berlin, if I would have a job or what my situation in the summer would be. Fortunately, all the pieces fell to the right place and I managed to fulfil my initial thoughts and wishes :)
Neta
With a background in psychology and history, I didn’t imagine programming would be so much fun! Moreover, I didn’t expect to work on a full-time project after less than a year of studying. Every day since last summer, I discover more and more how fun, hard, challenging and frustrating this experience is to me. One thing is certain: I want more!
How was our application process?
Even though we already knew each other and both of us had thought about applying for some time, we first talked about applying as a team 4 days before the deadline, which luckily got extended by one week :). So within those crazy few days we worked non-stop on the application: we found six coaches, chose a project and issues from it (we were so happy to see we are the first to pick diaspora*!), managed to get SoundCloud as a coaching company, wrote tons about our motivation, experience and why we really have to do this summer of code.
The intense application process proved us that we can work well together, as we complement each other quite well with our skills and work processes. Other than that we realised we are both vegetarians, like pets and more little stuff that makes it more fun too work together.
Who is on our team?
##### We are very proud to present our great team: Chiara is one of our coaches from the RubySprouts study group and self taught Ruby on Rails backend developer through RailsGirls Berlin with 4 years experience, betrayed the frontend development to join the dark side and never came back. Dani is a backend engineer at SoundCloud. He has used mostly Scala and Ruby so far and is interested in system design and functional programming. David is one of our coaches from the RubySprouts study group and a Ruby developer, hacking on the basic income @meinbge. Glauber works at SoundCloud mainly with Scala and little bit of Ruby/Sinatra, but worked with Ruby/Rails for 3 years professionally before and a Ruby/Rails enthusiast since 2007. Also had some experience as full-stack. Jano is a backend engineer at SoundCloud, in the past he has worked in both startups and the enterprise world as programmer, architect and team lead. Also, he has spoken in different Ruby conferences in South America, Europe and USA. Laura is one of our coaches from the RubySprouts study group and a former RGSoC student. She worked at ThoughtWorks 2.5 years (mostly python, javascript, devops) and is interested in security and server admin. Liron is a UI developer at Dell-EMC, coaching us remote on frontend issues.
And then of course there are our project mentor Lisa and our supervisor Fanny
Team Code Bears / Collage by: Rete and Neta
How is the summer going so far?
We are super happy to have this amazing team supporting us. Our coaches have excellent coaching skills and either help us out with the issue we work on, git mess on our computers or prepare sessions on single topics such as TDD, databases, ActiveRecord, Ruby basics, Reg-Ex and much more. This has been super helpful and we feel that we have been learning a lot not just on Rails but also on software development in general. The combination of learning from tutorials, working on the source code and watching the way our coaches work was very productive and satisfying so far. After a lot back and forth our first pull request got merged this week, which is amazing!!
What are we working on anyway?
Diaspora* is an open-source distributed social network that takes privacy issues serious. Check it out here. It is a huge project, with more then 300 open issues and a complex structure, all very challenging aspects. Luckily, the project also has an impressive documentation which helps a-lot, and a very active community. Therefore, working on this project does not only mean to write code, but also learn how to get involved in a very active community working on an complex open source project. It was super helpful that we - by coincidence - met an active member of the community who could give us useful insight into how the community works, alongside the constructive correspondence on github with other active members.
Finally…
…we want to thank everyone involved, our coaches, our supervisor, our mentor, our coaching company and also the whole RGSoC organising team for making this great learning experience possible for us!!
Hi! We are a team of computational linguists/Python/Django developers from Moscow, Russia. We are working on a JClub project. It’s a social network for LGBTQI+ people. It’s built using Django framework, and our goal is to make it multilingual.
Gives public lectures on computational linguistics, chatbots, machine learning, and all that AI stuff. Once managed to explain to a group of 11-year-olds how neural networks work, was (and still is) very proud of herself.
At 16 she made a promise to herself that she will never ever ever get into programming. Broke it at 19, first week at the university.
Listens to a lot of music. Like, A LOT. Used to spend most of her money on concert tickets, been to a 30+ shows.
Can’t do anything without tea, drinks up to 10 cups of tea per day.
Studied Indonesian for a year, just for fun.
Photo of Sasha and Sasha taken by Sergey Ershov
We met each other four years ago at the university. Despite the fact that we’ve been classmates, we met only at the end of the first year in preparation for the exam in language theory. Then we went roller-skating, and from there our friendship began. Many walks, board games, delicious food and joint projects awaited us in the future.
During these years, we worked together on many projects in various fields, from sociolinguistics to web development, and we’ve always been a great team, because we make each other stronger.
Back at the university Katya was one of the students, just like us, only a year older. After her second year, she started doing Google Summer of Code, received Anita Borg scholarship, and gave several talks about it at the university. She’s the person who inspired us (and many other students) to try and get into summer of code programs. Katya is not only our coach, she’s also our role model, and a person who gave us much needed moral support throughout the application process and first few weeks of RGSoC, when everything was unclear and kind of scary. Right now Katya works at Google, at London office, so we have to use Hangouts for our meetings.
Photo of Alexandra Ershova and Ildar taken by Alexandra Martynova
Ildar is a data scientist who we met before the very beginning of the program at PyData meetup. Before being our coach, he was a Django Girls mentor. When we told him about Rails Girls Summer of Code, he immediately wanted to be our coach. It is rare to meet a person who so unexpectedly appears in life and begins to play an important role in it. It turned out that Ildar, like us, is interested in the natural language processing (and, unlike us, knows Python and Django very well :)) He lives in Moscow, so we often meet for lunch and discuss our project. These lunches are very helpful, as everything becomes much clearer after our meetings.
Project
The JoopeA Club is a social network for Persian LGBTQI+ community. It is supposed to be a safe space for people of any gender and/or sexual orientation. Right now the social network is only available for people who speak Persian. Our task for this summer is to build support for other languages, so that more people could use the social network.
We picked this project not only because it matches our skills, but because we believe in its social importance. Living in a country where homophobia is the default option makes you appreciate safe spaces and communities where people are allowed to be themselves and can talk openly about their problems, without the risk of breaking the laws or being called names. We hope that our work for JoopeA Club will make at least some difference for some people.
We are the Team BerlinDiamonds, consisting of Jen and Kaja. It is the 4th week of the RailsGirls Summer of Code and we already feel like we have never been doing anything else, because it feels so natural to come to our beautiful office at our coaching company ABSOLVENTA and keep building and refactoring our plugin for Discourse. But before we tell you more about what we have been up to, here is a little bit about us:
Kaja
I am a passionate Ruby developer and a member of the Rails Girls Berlin. Originally I studied philosophy and historical linguistics, but I soon discovered my love for programming and am now a junior Rails developer. Besides coding I also love playing football, eating and learning new stuff. Oh and I am addicted to the internet in general. I just learned to accept it and use that in a good way.
Jen
Since I originally come from photography and psychology, I love to connect creativity and coding. So building web apps with Rails is just the right medium for me. I also joined the Open Tech School Berlin and soon met the Rails Girls Berlin at some events at our co-working space. I love to travel and see beautiful things and I can do some tricks on the skateboard.
The First Days
On our very first day, we came to the office and found our desks set up beautifully with confetti and welcoming messages. We received our chipcards for entering the building and because we have already been setting up the environment on our local computers, we finally could start looking at the actual tasks for this summer. While our office, our supervisor and all of our coaches are in Berlin, our mentor and the app owner are in Canada. So arranging a kick of call with our mentor took some planning because of the time and space difference. But forunately Discourse has a huge community called Discourse Meta.
As we already knew that our task would be to create a plugin for Discourse that allows the Admin User to backup his app to a clowd provider, we followed some tutorials on Discourse Meta on How to install a plugin and looked at the Backup-To-Dropbox-Plugin in order to understand the structure of a Discourse plugin. So when we finally had our call with our Mentor the third day, he was gladly surprised how far we already were and he gave us our first really good feedback. We were very flattered and pleased with ourselves and so the following weeks went very smoothly with a lot of motivation from our side and allways encouraging feedback and really good explainations from our mentor’s and our coaches side. Coding for the RailsGirls Summer of Code felt like being freshly in love and it made our cheeks blush from euphoria. Not kidding.
Our Coaches
We are very lucky with our team of coaches. First of all we have a team of 2-3 coaches at our coaching company who are sitting next to us daily. They are very much in love with Ruby and asking them a question about an issue with the code mostly is followed by a little spontanious lesson enthusiastically explained with haptic examples like Monkey classes and banana methods. All of them have their fields of expertise and together they form a big universe of knowledge. We also have some geniuses in our remote coaches, who regularly fall into deep discussions about wether a plugin should be constructed like a gem or not and other fascinating questions in our slack channel. We follow these “fights of the giants” with big interest because there is a lot to learn from it.
Our Plugin
We already got quite far within the first weeks and finished building a plugin for Discourse that can upload backup files to Google Drive. If you want to check out the code and see our progress, please take a look at our Github Repo. Although the plugin itself is technically working, as good coders we will still refactor our code and also create a reusable structure in order to build more backup plugins after that.
All in all this project has really made us feel more competent and growing with every problem we solve. We feel very empowered and happy and are very thankful for the chance of being part of the RailsGirls Summer of Code. Thanks to all contributers and organizers! We love it <3
Together_we_can_do_anything. Yes this is true. Rakhi and Neha met each other 4 years back in university. The journey of becoming friends from stranger was amazing. We had fun together and now working together on same project, Isn’t this amazing?. When we entered into our last semester this January, we realised after few months this is going to end. But RGSoC has given us an opportunity to work together. We were lucky enough to get in.
Story behind project selection and our Team Name:
We went through many projects and shortlisted two projects but both us attracted more towards Servo. The only thing we were scared about was none of us had experience with rust. That was the time when we both shared our thoughts about servo and after few days of discussion and research we were done with project selection. We both were computer science engineering students, we love playing around with 0 and 1, so here is our project- servo with team name #Serv0101.
Neha started her journey in the field of programming when she was in the mid of her 3rd year. So, it’s been one and half year since she started her journey. But after starting her journey she never stopped. She started with Learn IT Girl, then worked with a startup and then made to finale of Smart India hackathon and now finally in RGSoC. So this is a small journey in short period of time.
Rakhi graduated last month with Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering. She worked as an Outreachy intern at Mozilla last summer(2016). While at Mozilla, She helped in improving several distinct aspects of Firefox’s UI on all desktop platforms. Also, she was a Learn IT Girl Scholar. She has keen interest in computers and She love to code. Hence, She can be found near her system most of the time. Outside of Computers, She like to play Badminton, Volleyball and go on trekking sometimes.
You can find more about her here (http://rakhisharma.me/).
Mentor and Coaches:
Josh Matthews:
An amazing person we ever got to interact with. Sometimes we both discuss about how is it possible for a person to be filled with such talent :P. He is always up for the help. He is an amazing developer and a mentor. Everyone we interact with said us one thing, “You Girls are on safe hands”.
Ravi Sankar:
Ravi is Code fiddler, FOSS enthusiast, science lover, Pythonista, Rustacean, Mozillian, juggler, adventurer and rest we are still figuring out. Find more about him here: https://wafflespeanut.github.io
Rahul Sharma:
Rahul is passionately curious about computer science and programming. He is 2016 GSoC Intern with Servo and currently works at AtherEnergy. He also contributes to rustc, and other projects in the Rust Community. His interests includes systems programming, realtime web technologies, compilers and type theory.
About Our Work
Just like our mentor Josh Matthews (jdm on IRC) says on FosDem, “Basically all of the browser engines you are using were designed before the year 2000, and hardware at that time was very different. It usually only had one core, clock speeds were lower and you had much less memory available to you”
In Servo, things run in parallel. Also according to Josh “Modern engines will often be able to do the actual painting to the screen in parallel and then you have a loop between computing and executing. Even so there are a lot of serial and sequential operations that we believe we could do better”
We are working on making servo support responsive images.
We are Janakshi and Kalpani from Team Fusion, working on project OpenDF. We are not just any team, but the first ever Sri Lankan team, to be a part of RGSoC Journey and the one and only Sri Lankan team from RGSoC 2017! 😌🎉 We feel so lucky to be a part of RGSoC family and we thank Rails Girls Summer of Code team for giving us this golden opportunity.. 😇
So who are we?
We are two young ladies who love to code. But, that’s not enough for an introduction.. So this is who we really are. 👇
Janakshi : Janakshi Dulanga (22 years) is from Kegalle, Sri Lanka. She’s someone who loves to do lots of things, that’s right, a multi-tasker. Cooking comes first, then wandering about stars and music, and guess what? She loves Programming too.. She had to choose them all! She’s currently a software engineering undergraduate, from APIIT Sri Lanka, who’s waiting for her final degree results, and hoping to become a Software Engineer who can cook! 🔭💻👩🍳
Kalpani : Kalpani Ranasinghe (22 years) is from Kegalle, Sri Lanka. She is a Karate player, guitarist and pianist. She loves programming too. She wants to become a game developer and a Karate Referee in World Karate Federation one day. 🎮💻🥋 Currently she’s a computer science undergraduate, from University of Colombo School of Computing and apart from her studies she is playing for the Karate Team of University of Colombo.
So what are the similarities between them?
Both of them are from the same school, were in the same class, from the same area, having the same height, left handers when it comes to writing, and the list goes on.. And the most important similarity, that made them a part of RGSoC, is their love for being a part of something bigger. 😊✨
The origin story!
It started, with Kasun Delgolla (currently a coach of Team Fusion), mentioning Rails Girls Summer of Code, in front of Janakshi. Being an undergraduate, who has completed the degree and wanted nothing but a way to gather experience before stepping in to the IT industry, as soon as she heard about that, she was curious, so she googled, and got to know about the RGSoC program and thought to herself, “This is cool!” and then she went through the requirements, and tried her best to achieve them all. That includes coming up with a team!
Then having a teammate in her mind, she turned to Kasun Delgolla and Tharindu Delgolla, asking them to be a part of the team, as coaches. They said YES!!✌ and offered their help in finding the rest of the team coaches. The best part comes when Janakshi, asked from Kalpani to be her teammate. Janakshi didn’t know that Kalpani has lots of girls asking her to be their teammate for RGSoC, so she asked.
A screenshot of our first chat on RGSoC (Image: Kalpani)
They say, girls are experts in saving screenshots for later.. See what they got out of it now? Memories!
Just like that Kalpani took a bit of time to make her choice.. And guess what she said YES!!!..✌ See? Is it even possible saying NO to your childhood friend? Nah.. Because both of them knew, they are gonna make a great team..😇
Then they were preparing for the application . First they came up with the name Fusion, which means “The process or result of joining two or more things together to form a single entity.”⚛ Thank you google for letting us know about this beautiful meaning.
As the next step, they went through the approved project list, and kept their eyes on two projects considering their familiarity with the required skills. With the help of Kasun and Tharindu, they finalized their decision. While the application process is happening, they wanted to find a suitable working place. What place is better than the place you learned it all? yeah, that’s why they wanted to work in one of their universities.
“If you have to ask, you’ll never know. If you know, you need only ask.”
#### ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ⚡
They asked from APIIT Sri lanka, because they always knew, universities will never say “No” to the real need of students, and actually they did say YES!!..✌ See everything started with a YES for them.. So finding the room of requirement from APIIT, was a success! 🎉
Our little working space (Image: Janakshi)
Before submitting their application, they wanted to have a plan, a plan for everything, from the working schedule to , the project management tools. So they thought of using tools like Trello, and Slack. 📝✔ And they even had a plan for the working days that they are gonna miss. So they thought of mentioning in their application, how they are gonna cover up the workload, by working in weekends, if they ever miss a working day. May be having such plans, made them stand out from most of the applicants for RGSoC. Then they submitted their application after reviewing it many times, hoping to be one of the selected teams..
It was near midnight, for April 30th, when they heard the good news.. They got a mail from RGSoC team, saying “CONGRATULATIONS! We want to offer you a spot in Rails Girls Summer of Code 2017 as a sponsored team!”.🎉 They felt so happy and couldn’t even believe that they are one of those 20 teams, out of 190 teams, who got selected for RGSoC 2017! Oh the feels.. 💃
Celebrations peeps.. (Image: giphy.com)
So that was how the Team Fusion made it to the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2017. Such a great and inspiring story.. Isn’t it?
Our Team | The Cool Team
Since you all know about the two of us now, here’s an intro for the rest of our cool team. 👇
Coaches
Kasun Delgolla: He’s currently working as the Head of Mobile Development in
Riverview B2B- Sri Lanka. He’s a Enterprise Mobility & IoT Enthusiast. He’s loves to help people and play cricket. He’s our lead coach.
Tharindu Delgolla: He’s a well experienced software engineer from IFS- Sri Lanka, who’s also a technical consultant at the same company. He hopes to become a great film maker one day. Well, Good luck Tharindu!. He’s our remote coach, who’s gonna do the code reviewing for us.
Imran Hishaam: He’s a software engineer from Riverview B2B- Sri Lanka. He may be young, but he’s a genius and very passionate, when it comes to coding. He’s helping Team Fusion with ReactJS app development as a local coach.
Udani Gunasena: She’s a well experienced software engineer from ICTA Sri Lanka. She loves music and she’s a great pianist. And we must say, she has a keen eye, when it comes to reviewing UI designs. Currently she’s helping our team as a local coach.
Anuradh Caldera: He’s a software engineer from Riverview B2B- Sri Lanka, who’s currently working as an iOS developer. He’s a genius when it comes to development and the management of native mobile applications. He’s also great at frontend development and will be helping our team with ReactJS as a local coach.
Our Mentor
Milindu Kumarage: He’s a software engineer from Sysco Labs- Sri Lanka. He’s very enthusiastic when it comes to helping the IT Community in Sri Lanka. He’s doing the best he can to help us and guide us through all the project related work as our mentor.
Our Supervisor
Ramón Huidobro: He’s a freelance software engineer who knows how to have fun. He loves to help people. He enjoys swimming and hiking too. The best thing is, he’s our supervisor for this summer!
And this is our lovely team!😎👇 Looking fantastic right?
Our Fabulous Team.. (Images: Team member photos provided by themselves; RGSoC logo: twitter.com)
The Project- OpenDF
Project OpenDF is a cloud based digital forensics tool which helps forensics investigators in investigating forensics evidences. It enables the investigators, mine the evidences effectively and report successfully. Through OpenDF, the usability of analysis of processed forensics data can be improved. It supports team collaboration in investigations and has been able to increase the confidentiality and security of the investigation. Mind Blowing !!.. Isn’t it?
Mind blowing!.. (Image: Buzzfeed.com)
So what exactly are we doing with OpenDF?
During the summer, we are developing a new file browser component using React, so it can be integrated later, once the OpenDF UI is fully implemented in ReactJs. And also, we are hoping to contribute to document the OpenDF APIs. Well, that’s some exciting work, eh? 😁
How’s our journey with RGSoC so far?
It’s been only two weeks since we started our RGSoC journey, and we are already feeling blessed to be a part of this family.
Before July 1st
We had a list of tasks to be completed before July 1st, we tried to complete them all to have a better start. From May to June, we both tried our best to get familiar with the project technology stack. From the setting up of the environment for the project to coming up with a plan for each month and each week was done during the month of June. Since we love to do everything in proper and tidy way we started a Trello board to track our To-do list for each week and our improvement. We even created a GitHub account for our team and published a blog for our team, Team Fusion. Be professional!! 👆
Tidy-up! (Image: MakeAGIF.com)
During the last 2 weeks of June, we had many discussions with our mentor Milindu regarding the user requirements for the file browser. And we managed to finalize all of the requirements with the help of our mentor and our coaches.
So we were ready for the Start of RGSoC 2017! And were pretty confident too. Because we did months of preparing and had a great plan!.
After the start
Even before July 1st, the starting date of RGSoC, we knew this summer is going to play a huge part of our lives. So we couldn’t just start it without celebrating! That’s how our tiny kick-off celebration, which happened on July 3rd 2017, the very first working day of RGSoC, came into the picture. That was a wonderful and lovely day for all of us. Even some of our coaches could make it to the event. They helped us finishing the special cake! Actually they did the coaching for that too.. How to slice a cake better! 🎂🔪
And this is how our first day of RGSoC 2017 looked like.👇
Our first day of RGSoC (Image: Coach Kasun & Janakshi)
That Cake, Coffee and those team chats on the project and the plan, and our very first call with the supervisor, gave the start to our RGSoC journey, in the best possible way.
By the end of our 1st Week of RGSoC, we could finalize the user stories and the wireframes for all the requirements as planned. Actually sketching wireframes is the real deal, if you are someone who’s going through exam stress! You can ask about that from Kalpani.💆
Stress releasing.. (Image: giphy.com)
Opportunities were always on our side, we just had to take them. One day a very special person visited to see how we work. And that was professor Gamindu, from APIIT Sri Lanka. And he suggested an interesting way to improve how we work. That’s Scrum Meetings. According to his suggestions, we are starting Scrum meetings from this week onwards. And our Scrum Master, is none other than Dr. Gamindu, himself!
Our coaches are very helpful .. Although we disturb them every week, every day and actually every time, they do not hesitate to give us the best support they can give. And since we are learning most of the new technologies from scratch, their helping hands are precious to us..
Be it an UI related matter, an issue related to implementation, or project management issue, our coaches always made time to give us the best possible solution. So they saved us through the struggles. 😁
This is coach Imran, trying to teach some sense into our brains, on structuring the implementation for the file browser component.
First coaching session of coach Imran.. (Image: Kalpani)
So far we’ve had five coaching sessions which made us realize that there are so many things that we have to learn. The good thing is, because of their advices, now we are adapting to read more and gain knowledge rather than cramming video tutorials. :D
Thank you very much for everything you’ve done for us so far and making sure we are not stuck in the same place for years. (බොහොම ස්තූතියි | Bohoma Sthuthie .. 😁)
Thank you for real.. (Image: giphy.com)
For these three weeks of RGSOC, we have learnt about Javascript, Git, React , Redux, JSON, ES6 vs ES5, Swagger annotations, APIs and etc by giving our highest commitment.
Time is flying so fast. So, we started the development process. Currently we are working on the searchable fields panel and Query bar of our file browser. It is off to a good start! And now our weekly Trello boards looks good and the Done and In-Progress lists are keep getting populated! ✅
Our goals for this summer
We want to learn more about the technologies from the technology stack of OpenDF and other related technologies which are being used in the industry. And our final aim for this summer is to give our best shot at it and do our tasks, in the best possible way. And of course yes!, We are going learn so much! 💻📚😌 Both of us share our knowledge with each other. Most of the times we do self studies in separate machines and discuss the things that we have learned. That is a better a way to learn quickly. And we want to continue this throughout this summer. 😌
And most importantly, we all know that a work like this can be very stressful. But it depends on how we embrace it. So why don’t we enjoy it instead - which is the exact thing we do. 😎💃🍕🍨 Our team find these kind of work more entertaining, than frustrating, which makes it more interesting in return.
