We are Jenny and Sophie from Melbourne, Australia. It’s winter here! For us it is Rails Girls Summer Winter of Code! We are working on ifme.org- a community for mental health experiences. We can’t believe it has started and we are already in our third week.
Hot Wheels and Nexo Knight Advocate, learning ukulele, eating chocolate, fruit lover, curious about the world
Why coding? I am interested in languages and communities. For me coding is an interesting language that has the ability to create something of value to the community. I feel that this could be a way that I can contribute positively to the community.
Domestic household engineer & Tantrum and Meltdown negotiator. Unwinds by creating handmade cards and the occasional glass of white wine
Before becoming a full-time mother, I worked in the beauty industry, in some of Australia’s top spas, as a Beauty Therapist. I am now making a career change into web development and have been doing so by self-directed learning.
Programming is something that I enjoy and find great pleasure in. As a mum, I find it is a great way to escape from my everyday mother duties and focus on something which I find rewarding. I love the mental challenge that programming presents and the possibility of being able to conceive a new idea and bring it to life.
Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny
How we met?
We were both interested in applying for the RGSoC and were connected via a 2016 participant, Ramya. We organised to meet at a cafe and straight away clicked, as we shared many things in common. To get the ball rolling, we presented at a Ruby meetup one night and asked for volunteer coaches and had awesome experienced Rubyists approach us, offering to coach.
Why if me?
When we were looking through the open source projects, we instantly said it was the project for us. We believe passionately in the app and the aims of if me. Mental health is really important to us and we want to contribute to something that will have a positive impact on the world.
About our Project and Mentor
if me is a mental health communication app that allows people to share their mental health experiences in a safe and private space with their loved ones. If me is a free, not-for-profit open source software project.
Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny
Julia Nguyen, the founder of the project, started it in 2014 as an undergraduate student studying computer science at the University of Waterloo. During this time, Julia started writing and giving talks about her struggles with OCD, depression, and anxiety.
The idea for if me came from Julia’s experiences being a Vietnamese-Canadian struggling with mental illness and having conversations about it with her family. A main focus of the project is to increase conversations in communities lacking mental health education, including minority, immigrant, and English as a Second Language (ESL) communities. The site is offered in Spanish and the plan is to continue internationalization efforts. Julia, who was raised in a low-income family by a single-mother, believes it is important that the project remains free and not-for-profit.
Julia is so excited and honoured that if me is part of Rails Girls Summer of Code.
Coaches & Coaching Company
We work in the heart of Melbourne at our coaching company Zendesk, which is located in a beautiful building, which used to be an old bank.
Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny
At Zendesk, we are lucky to be working amongst an awesome team of Developers, with a wide range of experience. The team is really friendly and we feel at home here. They also have yummy snacks, coffee and lots of chocolate and avocados on hand, to help keep our minds focused and our tummy’s happy. We are so lucky to have such a generous Coaching Company.
Photo taken by Sophie and Jenny
We are blessed to have the support of our local Ruby community and RGSoC organisation. Thank You to our wonderful coaches; Adel Smee, Adam Rice, Simon Hilderbrandt and Tim Moore, our Project mentor Julia Nguyen and RGSoC Supervisor Vi Nguyen.
Our Goals (for the winter)
To gain as much experience working as part of a team on if me that we can contribute positively towards
During our time with RGSoC we would both like to develop our Ruby and Javascript concepts and testing
Hello World!🌍, we are Cynthia and Roselyne from Nairobi,Kenya🇰🇪. We are Code_Hoppers! Throughout summer we will be working on OpenFarm.
We met on Twitter while trying to find partners to collaborate with for the program. Once we connected we realized that we had so much more in common, other than our interest in participating in #rgsoc. We realized that we had both attended the same high school but in different years. We had both stayed in the same dormitory while in high school and we were Ruby on Rails developers. We were only left with one week before the applications for RGSoC closed so we quickly had to put our application together, submitted and hoped and prayed that we make it this year (Cynthia had applied the previous year and she was not successful😭) and as they say … the rest is history🎉.
Who are we?
We are enthusiastic Ruby on Rails developers!
Cynthia:
Jambo!! “Hello”
Cynthia Anyango here, I am a student pursuing a BSc in Information Technology at Maseno University. I am also a Ruby on Rails developer with an interest in contributing to Open Source projects.
Roselyne:
I’m Roselyne Makena. I have one year of experience in Rails. I spent a year in Accra, Ghana, learning software development. I also enjoy jazz music🎺 and taking nature walks.
Our Coaches
We have a great team of wonderful coaches helping us out as we work on the project.
Sigu:
Sigu is an Open Source enthusiast, remote volunteer developer and mentor at @AgileVentures, developer @CraftAcademyWilliam:
He is an Electrical and Computer Engineer from Kenya. He loves working on Open Source software and he tries to give back to the community whenever he can. Formerly a python developer, now a fully converted Rubyist.
Emmanuel:
He is a software developer currently working with Ampath Kenya, Eldoret. His preferred tools of trade are Ruby and Javascript (Node and Angular 2)😁
What are we working on?
We are working on OpenFarm. OpenFarm is a free and open database for farming and gardening knowledge. OpenFarm provides a platform for expert and beginner farmers and gardeners to share their knowledge in the form of Growing Guides.
We chose this project because it relates to farmers and trying to provide open farming knowledge to farmers is a noble cause; we also want to learn as much as possible about Ruby and Rails and Angular JS in the process.
During summer we hope to:
Make UI changes on the footer
Redesign the Homepage UI
Create a search page, ensure that the architectural flow in the search page is according to the description and fix the existing bugs
Work on a bunch of Newcomer issues
What are we looking forward to this summer?
We want to learn as much as possible, improve our programming skills and move to a higher level with our programming experience
We are looking forward to share this experience with the developers here and hope to encourage more ladies to take up Ruby on Rails
Have fun through this process, it’s never that serious 💃🏽
We would like to thank:
Our Mentor: Simon
Our Supervisor: Kasia
RGSoC Team
“Machine learning for the curious but scared!!” – that was the name of the Meetup where we (Ines and Marie) almost met each other. Indeed, we didn’t notice each other until nine days later when Marie posted this comment:
PyLadies meetup page
Ines read it, googled “Rails Girls Summer of Code”, read it again and went to bed. A crazy idea to spend a whole summer with coding! She has a job and and … Ines really wants to speed up her coding skills. So she decided at the next day it might be a good idea to meet Marie.
Six months later we are sitting together at the Hackdays at ImmobilienScout Berlin and writing this blogpost.
I could give you some data points about her (from Czech Republic, lives in Neukölln, studied German language and literature, …) but that doesn’t really say much about Marie. So let me tell you something else – and there are two obvious facts to talk about:
You can’t just visit Marie. You always visit Marie AND her Husky. Pushki. He will check you first (I am very happy that he accepted me) and spend the rest of the time running circles around you, begging for food, poking Marie’s knees and start again from the beginning. So if you ever struggle to distract yourself from work: Pushki will help you!
Marie loves Python. She can tell you about 42 reasons why Python is the best programming language ever(!) and why you should immediately start to learn it. She started learning Python about 1.5 years ago and never doubted if it was a good idea – even though it was not always easy. Some errors literally rubbed her sleep.
And Marie: who is Ines?
Photo by KAthrin Gütt
Ines is a Marketing expert, studied Museology and Art History and also lives in Neukölln (that’s why our name starts with NK).
Ines does not like text written in points (see this text!), she likes paragraphs.
She has deep knowledge of art dealing with mass surveillance. When Ines tells you the story of a surveillance photo, it makes a very scary impression! She could even write a book about it!
Ines connects elements together in a very original way that others can understand at the end of the day purely by accident. No idea how it is possible, but it works! Isn’t that impressive?! :p
Ines is very friendly to people, likes to be Marie’s teammate. :)
Ines likes to play beach volleyball and goes everywhere by bike in Berlin.
These are the great people making our project possible:
Our coaching company became SoundCloud. Our mentor for the project Foodsaving is Tilmann Becker. He is an expert in Web Development, Requirement Engineering and Software Architecture.
We have 6 coaches in our team:
Ellen König is a Data Scientist, works on A/B testing tools and machine learning, mainly works with Python and Django, and is our main contact for data understanding.
Dave Brotherstone is a Software Engineer, works with JavaScript, worked on Open Source Python projects, is one of our main contact coaches.
Duana Stanley is a Software Engineer, coach at Rails Girls, helps us with the organisation at the coaching company.
Daniel Temme is a Software Engineer, expert for test driven development and agile methodologies.
Stefan Nordhausen is a System Developer, works with Python and regularly teaches Python.
Ana Krivokapić is Software Engineer, works with Python, was a coach at DjangoGirls.
About Food
Enormous amount of food is wasted every day – in stores and restaurants, at home etc. and I think we don’t need to explain to you why this is a massive problem. That’s why a small but dedicated group of people started the Foodsaving & Foodsharing project in Germany, Austria, Switzerland in 2013. The website Foosharing was created for the purpose of surplus food exchange. Since then, the community has grown and people from non-German speaking countries started to be interested. So the organizers decided to build a multilingual platform called Foodsaving.
We would like to support this great project during our Summer of Code. Foodsharing & Foodsaving is a great project to learn all relevant basics we need to build a solid web application. The web application is using Python and Django in the backend and JavaScript (AngularJS) in the frontend. We learn about backend web development with Django REST Framework, API, PostgreSQL and virtual environment.
NK42 Plans @RGSoC’17
Improve our ability to understand and write code
Better orientate in technical documentation and find the solutions for implementation
Contribute to the foodsaving.world and support this great project
After RGSoC
@marie will be a great python/django programmer and will solve tons of issues.
@ines will understand all the data stuff and will never again spend a day figuring out how to install node with a version manager.
We are Shravika Mittal and Brihi Joshi, a duo from New Delhi, India working on Tessel this summer. It’s been a great experience since and we’ve tried to detail as much as possible 😁
Team 276linesofCode Logo (Credits: A very dear friend of ours — Saatvik)
The beginning of it all
As the famous Bollywood dialogue goes:
“Kehte hain ki…
Agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaaho, toh puri kayanat usey tumse milane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai”
which means: “It is said…that if you really desire something from the heart then the whole universe will work towards getting you that.”
Deep huh?! (Credits: giphy.com)
This perfectly summarizes our journey till July’17, when we started our Summer of Code. Exactly a year back, during the Induction Programme of our freshman year at our institute was when we first met — two confused, scared and shy humans who had absolutely no idea how we would survive the tech world 😰 We formed a small little study group (which often did all things besides studying together) of equally confused, scared and shy humans. We would hang out together in breaks, classes, post-classes and thus, the bond became stronger.
Cut to December 2016, when we came across the RGSoC website and within no time, we decided to be a team 💃🏼 💃🏼 Fortunately, there were three teams from our institute in RGSoC 2016, which gave us some initial boost to apply.
It was January 18th, when we were casually scrolling through the list of selected orgs in RGSoC 2017, that we came across Tessel which was at the top of the list. The category tags included JavaScript, Hardware and Command Line Interface — things that both of us were extremely enthusiastic about. Within no time we found ourselves scrolling through its website and joining their slack channel. After putting up a tiny introduction, we were pinged by the project mentor, Kelsey who suggested that we do a video call!
It was a cold January morning on the 20th, when we had our first video call with her. She was so supportive, introducing us to some contribution starters in Tessel, along with the work culture in an Open Source project. It made us more determined to apply, now that we knew Tessel was what we wanted to work on. 🙇🏽♀️
Us during Application! (Credits: giphy.com)
It was February 2017 (cracks knuckles) and the application for RGSoC was in full swing. We were still devoid of coaches, which we were in dire need of. We first came across Dana in the RGSoC Google Group, who was kind enough to agree to coach us — all the way from Hong Kong! 🎉 🙌🏼
On 3rd February, we got in touch with Jigyasa on twitter. She messaged us saying that she would be willing to coach our team during RGSoC 2017. We got in touch with another coach of ours, Umair through Jigyasa.
Us searching for Coaches! (Credits : giphy.com)
The whole of February went in looking for coaches for which we even approached some teams in our University which were past RGSoC scholars 🙆🏽 During this search we got in contact with two of our seniors at our University — Sanchit and Divam. They guided us through the entire application process including reviewing it a several number of times and suggesting what all points to add, what to delete, sharpening the language etc 😎
We met Diksha at a Women Who Code, Delhi meetup. We got to know that she has an expertise in IoT. She willingly agreed to be our guide.
After a long wait, came May 1st, “The” day. It was 6 AM in the morning, when both of us are usually sleeping like logs. And one of us just got up randomly to check our mails, and there it was, “Congratulations…”. At the end of June, we got a mail from the RGSoC Organizing Team that Vaishali would be our Supervisor during the summer. We are glad to work with her for the summer. After a long long wait, we’ve finally geared up to generate the best out of our 3 months here with RGSoC, looking forward to create memories of a lifetime! 🎉 🤗
Shravika: Perfectionist is just the word for her 💆🏽 . One year back, she had no experience in programming or anything related to tech for that matter. Not a day goes by now when she isn’t found grilling herself in front of the screen, coding. Music works as a stress buster for her. She is the happiest capturing random moments on her camera.
Brihi: Music is what she thrives on. She tries to add a little spunk and creativity in whatever she does. During her free time she would be found scrolling through memes 💁🏽 , trying out new tech and frameworks or composing a tune. She loves anything that’s caffeine or chocolate. She aims to incorporate more Music in Tech later in her career!
The mentor
Kelsey: Kelsey is the team’s mentor. She has been at Tessel since its beginning and is a member of the Tessel Project Steering Committee. She is also a neural engineer, a cartographer, a lover of the woods, and an adventurer. Adding to this, Kelsey is a founder of hc3.io.
The coaches
Dana: Dana is a consultant specializing in healthcare compliance technology. She is located in Hong Kong, and has been actively involved in various programs promoting women in technology.
Jigyasa: Jigyasa is an Open Source Enthusiast. She has been awarded the Red Hat Women in Open Source 2017 award. Adding to her list of achievements, she is a GSoC scholar. She is also the director of Women Who Code Delhi.
Umair: Umair is a full-stack developer with extensive Android and Web projects under his hat. He’s passionate about building scalable products from scratch. In his free time, he likes to contribute to open source.
Sanchit: Sanchit is a budding researcher who aims to help the humanity progress forward by doing cutting-edge research in Computer Science. He has recently completed his undergrad from IIIT-Delhi, and loves to play chess in his free time.
Divam: Divam is a Senior at IIIT Delhi, majoring in Computer Science. His interests lie in Data Science, more specifically Deep Learning. He is extremely fluent in Python and JavaScript and is always up for helping others.
Diksha: Diksha Deo is a technology coach, speaker and entrepreneur. She is the owner of IoT solution provider company called Incubsence. Her endless curiosity and enthusiasm to learn and how everything works makes Diksha a “pro” in uniting digital and physical worlds.
The Supervisor
Vaishali: Vaishali is an Open Source enthusiast and works as a Linux Kernel Engineer. She also conducts various Linux based workshops such as “Getting started with the Linux Kernel Hacking” to introduce new programmers to it.
What we want to achieve by the end of Summer
Learn as much as we can: JavaScript, Rust, Git, any new tech, all about microcontrollers, their protocols — basically any and everything that RGSoC and Tessel would be able to offer us.
Work and contribute to the community. Scale the Tessel project, add features to it, make projects that can help the community in some way using Tessel.
Bond with the community. We’ve heard from our seniors and read blogs, and have always been awed by the fact that teams from different parts of the world bond together. We are so excited to meet and talk to our fellow teams, know more about them, their culture and their work!
Congratulations on being selected to participate in Rails Girls Summer of Code!
Now that you’re doing Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC), you’re going to be executing on plans you originally made. Doing things is always harder than coming up with the plan, because doing things requires effort, organization, communication and more.
‘Doing’ successfully is how you can come out of RGSoC with a great experience.
This blog post is intended to be a practical guide to help you with the ‘doing’ part guide of RGSoC so that you can have a successful three months!
Tip 1: Manage your role well — that’s the dual role of teacher and student
RGSoC is a self-guided program and a crucial part of your success relies on you managing the dual the roles of “teacher” and “student” well.
Just like a teacher will set homework, the student completes it, the teacher assesses it and the loop continues—you also need to set your own “homework”, complete, assess and repeat. If you’ve just come from university or a workplace where someone manages you by giving you work and assessing you, this dual role may require adjusting to.
Don’t wait for someone to give you work — set it yourself.
So…how do you manage this dual role successfully?
It’s easy—be the teacher first.
This means putting effort and thought into how you will:
* Set “homework”. Will you tag in issues? Will you follow a set guide?
* Organize your schedule so you can complete your work, daily logs and anything outstanding (Suggestion: Use a Trello board to set out your to do list or “homework”).
* Set up communications. What’s the best way to give updates to your mentor, coaches and supervisor?
* Decide how to assess your work. How will you get feedback on your code? Will you send through a pull request?
When you’ve completed tasks under the role of the teacher, the role of student should just fit into one part—completing the work.
Tip 2: Set clear goals and figure out how RGSoC fits in with your broader life plans
Finding a job in web development is one of the common goals students going through RGSoC have. That’s a career goal and success in achieving this goal depends on interviews, finding suitable employers and more. RGSoC is not a guaranteed pathway to a job (just like university isn’t a guaranteed pathway). However, with RGSoC, you could view the work produced as being part of a portfolio to demonstrate your coding ability to potential employers.
RGSoC can be seen as a stepping-stone in the career goal of finding a job. The goal then, in RGSoC, is to come out with a high-quality portfolio of work.
Before being accepted into RGSoC, I was a user of Discourse (open source forum software) and coming into RGSoC, I wanted to work on a particular feature of Discourse. My goal was to complete work so an advertising plugin could be used. The broader goal was to get ads served on my Discourse forum and the goal in RGSoC was to complete the plugin to enable this.
In fact, I remember saying to my pair “If we don’t create a functioning plugin that serves ads, I would not consider my summer to be successful”.
It’s often harder to answer a question like “What would make my summer successful?” because there are many things that could contribute to making your summer successful. Instead, a more focused question would be “What one thing, if not achieved, would make me consider my experience in RGSoC unsuccessful?”
Clarify this, check to see if it’s a realistic goal—then make clear plans to work towards achieving your goal.
Tip 3: Over-communicate
Let’s say you’ve been working hard on fixing up an issue that has taken 2 weeks. You’ve done your daily logs and are proud that you and your pair have finally conquered this issue. You also have multiple forked repositories. To you, everything’s going fine. You’re making progress.
Let’s imagine now that you’re a coach. Your team hasn’t contacted you in a fortnight. You see a whole bunch of forked repositories but it’s difficult to know which one is relevant. You’ve volunteered to help, and want to help, but don’t know how to because no one has contacted you or updated you. You feel isolated and unwanted.
RGSoC is where you want to over-communicate. Extended periods of silence can be open to any type of interpretation and what’s clear to you may seem vague to others. People can’t read your mind; they forget things and can get distracted.
Communication is something to prioritize straightaway, even before doing work. Try using Slack as a single communication channel so you can talk to your coaches, mentor and supervisor in one place. Use Github issues and pull requests to discuss code. Tagging people in and asking clear questions while noting down a time you need a response by will help your coaches understand exactly what you need and avoid confusion (Thank you to Jo Cranford for this tip!).
Many people are supporting you and invested in your success in this program. Giving them regular updates and clear communication is courteous and shows them the respect that they deserve.
Tip 4: Take feedback, as it is — feedback on your work
Open source software is software that anyone can examine and is peer-reviewed.
What does that mean for you?
It means you’re likely to get feedback on your work. From people you know and from strangers. The feedback might be positive, it might be negative and it could be something in between or off the spectrum — regardless, it will be public.
The Internet also has a habit of creating online disinhibition, so feedback may come across in quite a direct or curt way. Just make sure that you distinguish between real feedback that is designed to help you improve your code versus bad behavior disguised under the guise of “feedback”.
Getting feedback publicly is quite a daunting thing if you are a private individual. That’s the nature of open source and the Internet.
In this way, RGSoC does prepare you for “real life” as a developer because you are:
Collaborating with other developers on a real project,
Coding, and
Getting your work reviewed, albeit very publicly, before it’s merged to the codebase.
You can make the best out of this situation by making sure you review your work before it is publicly available and learn from feedback to improve your code.
In Summary…
There’s not one particular learning skill that I took from RGSoC, but rather, a successful RGSoC comes from a combination of:
Managing your dual role of teacher and student well,
Setting goals,
Over-communicating, and
Taking on board any feedback to improve your code.
In reality, things never go to plan perfectly. When I was doing RGSoC and in my observations as a supervisor, there were times when some of the above points could have been improved further. Don’t be too hard on yourself, if you can get the four actions above right most of the time, then you’ll be ok!
Lastly, what you get from RGSoC is an opportunity to contribute to open source with support. What you make of that opportunity now and beyond is up to you.
Vi Nguyen is a former RGSoC student (2015) and supervisor & sponsor (2016 & 2017) of Rails Girls Summer of Code.
