Saumya, an ECE undergrad from IIIT- Delhi and Katyayani, a CSE undergrad from IIIT- Delhi are the learners from Team Victorious Secret. They’ve been teammates since their first semester and have been friends for most of the bumpy ride that college can be. They are always up for a challenge and are truly grateful to RGSoC for giving them the opportunity to learn, work and code together.
Katyayani and Saumya
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Saumya
She loves reading the news on her phone as much as millennials (me :P) love texting. When she’s scrolling down on her phone, she’s not checking the idle newsfeed of an idle fellow human, but actually trying to understand the economic crisis in Greece.
She uses every minute of her rare free time to learn languages. French, Spanish, and even Esperanto, she’s tried her hand at all of them. She is currently learning Japanese.
She has an incessant love for mangoes which is often on full display every time she picks a flavour- be it for ice cream or birthday cake or milkshakes!
You probably don’t want to be riding a bicycle with Saumya on Delhi roads. That situation has two dangerous elements- Delhi roads and Saumya on a bike!
If you want someone to apply your eyeliner and Saumya is the only one around, just go without the eyeliner. Trust me on this!
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Katyayani
Her Facebook feed is just a series of makeup tutorials, which she plans on trying one day. But till then, the makeup ninja continues to train diligently. I wonder if she has ever missed any Met Daan makeup tutorial.
Sometimes, she reads her horoscope. Need I say more? :p
She cannot function without GPS. She even needs someone to tell her the directions to a place that she is visiting the tenth time.
Scary movies don’t scare her. At all.
She listens to the most unheard-of music on the entire planet. Randomly plug her earphones, and you’ll be listening to some music in a language you don’t understand. She doesn’t either.
The Guides
We have 8 wonderfully helpful coaches who have happily agreed to help us in this journey. Tega Brain, a core contributor to p5.js, will help us navigate the massive codebase and give overall direction to our endeavours. Chaitanya Kumar and Sarthak Ahuja graduated from our college last year, and Divyanshu Talwar is our batchmate. We met Sachin Jani and Nitish Goel on Quora (yes, that happens :P), while we met Prabhanshu Attri and Dominic Ehrenberg on Twitter. Our coaches will play an instrumental role in our learning, helping us every step of the way. So, a big thank you to our brilliant coaches for volunteering to help us.
Our mentors- Lauren McCarthy and Cassie Tarakajian- have been very warm in welcoming us to the Processing Foundation. Cassie will be overseeing our efforts on the p5.js eb Editor codebase and we hope to learn a lot from the community.
Pilar Huidobro is our supervisor, and it helps a lot that she also did RGSoC in 2015. We hope to learn from her personal experiences and her journey.
We are incredibly lucky to have such an amazing support system to see us through this journey. With their invaluable inputs, we hope to put our best foot forward.
The Project
This summer we will be working on the p5.js web editor, an active project of the Processing Foundation. The most important reason for choosing the Processing Foundation is the fact that we both identify with the core principles of the organization. Processing aims to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators and beginners. We also believe that coding should not be limited to people pursuing degrees in Computer Science. Everyone should have the opportunity to learn how to code. The Processing Foundation is making noble efforts in that direction and we wish to further this cause by becoming active contributors to our chosen project.
Plans for RGSoC’17
Becoming proficient React developers.
Contributing to the faster release of the p5.js web editor.
Building a network of brilliant open source enthusiasts, who we can learn from and look up to.
We are Saskia and Chris working together on re-frame from Berlin. It still feels a bit unreal that our summer of code has finally started this week!
image drawn by Chris Sun
about us!
Chris is nomadic, originally from California, and Saskia lives in Berlin.
Saskia: fueled by movement, connection and music. huge curiosity for life. exploring learning sharing. will finish my studies this summer!
Chris: likes riding bicycles and motorcycles, climbing mountains, currently wondering how they somehow ended up stranded in the flattest part of Germany. Strengths: drinking a liter of tea and a liter of coffee per day without dying, aggressively subtweeting people who disrespect front-end engineering. Weaknesses: difficulty taking things seriously, can’t resist purchasing every interesting art supply and cute sketchbook they set their eyes on.
Sometime last year, we’d both seen the same tweet about RGSoC from our mutual friend and notable clojurian Arne:
screenshot taken by Chris Sun
Saskia: RGSoC and re-frame had been on the back of my head for a while already, as I remember having seen that tweet. I thought I wouldn’t be able to participate, as I had a job that I wanted to continue over the summer. To my surprise and luck, my job ended one day before the applications opened. From there, everything seemed to fall into place. We didn’t know each other, but a friend pointed me (Saskia) to this tweet that Chris had posted:
screenshot taken by Saskia Lindner
Chris and I got connected, I went to the ClojureD conference here in Berlin where I got the chance to talk to many people from the community and we found six coaches who were willing to support us for this project.
Chris: I’d left San Francisco the summer before to take a break from coding, so of course I went to Berlin and got involved with the programming communities there :P That’s how I met the wonderful ClojureBridge folks! After I left Germany we kept in touch through twitter, which is how I heard about RGSoC and also how I was introduced to Saskia. I was surprised that there was actually a clojure project included in RGSoC, and thought I’d apply on the miniscule chance it’d work out. And now, somehow, we’re among the rare humans on this planet who are paid to write clojure(script)!
The first time we met in person was last month! We immediately got along super well and went climbing at the boulderhalle (because of course), ate tasty vegetarian food, and talked about life. We’ll complement each other well because Saskia has more experience with clojure and Chris has experience with browsers and javascript, and we’ll meet in the middle with clojurescript!
companies, coaches, mentors, & supervisor
We spend our work week at two different companies in the heart of Berlin nearby many of our favorite places. We feel very lucky to have the opportunity to work in such a great and beautiful environment where we can get some fresh air walking along the ‘Landwehrkanal’ or sitting on the balcony overlooking the roofs of the city.
Most days we’re at NextJournal, which actually uses Clojurescript and re-frame for their front-end, so we have opportunities to exchange ideas and ask upcoming questions! We also visit bitcrowd, which frequently also hosts Clojure and Ruby community events in their office with a beautiful rooftop balcony.
picture taken by Saskia Lindner
We have so many awesome coaches experienced with different parts of clojure and clojurescript development! They are spread out all over, so sometimes we’ll meet in co-working spaces, other times at our host companies, and some of our coaches even invited us to their homes. It’ll be really nice to get some air and feel some sun (or not, haha Berlin) when we step out to have 2:1’s with our coaches. And Chris is super excited to have an excuse to ride their bike around the city more. We’ll introduce all the coaches next time!
Our re-frame project mentor is Daniel Compton! It’s pretty gnarly scheduling calls with Berlin and New Zealand being on opposite sides of the planet, but this is another skill we’re learning: remote team organisation.
And then we have our friend and RGSoC liaison/supervisor, Arne!
best summer ever!
So many exciting things are ahead of us, we can’t wait!
picture taken by Saskia Lindner
In two weeks, there will be another Clojure conference here in Berlin where we will get to meet a lot of people from the global community.
our goals
We both want to improve our ability to understand large codebases and to contribute to complex existing projects, practice communicating with maintainers and project leaders, gain more experience with the Clojure tooling systems, write better tests, and have a more intuitive grasp of idiomatic Clojure. We are also really curious to learn more about how ClojureScript works underneath the hood for a deeper understanding. Because that isn’t enough work already we also decided to keep a developer diary once we realised that we both had goals to improve our technical writing, and we’re challenging each other to write one post per week. You can follow along on our learnings there!
Hi, we’re Emma and Kara, the members of Pivotal, London! We’re working on Babel the JavaScript language compiler, with the help of our incredible mentor Henry Zhu, our supportive supervisor Ines, and our amazing hosts Pivotal. We’re so lucky to be in this position, and we cannot thank Rails Girls Summer of Code enough!!
Image Credit: Giphy
so fabulous
Image Credit: Giphy
We met through Founders and Coders, and we were joined together by fate ❤️ Hahah no, not really, we were paired together during one of the paired programming sessions on Object Oriented Programming, and since then, we’ve always be involved in coding and being involved in the women in technology scene. We are deeply and passionately involved in codebar and a huge number of other coding meetups and coding classes in and around London - if you ever want to know about which ones to attend if you’re in London, we’ve got tonnes to recommend! :)
Emma is currently doing her MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship at UCL, and Kara was working as a developer at Ticketmaster before joining Rails Girls Summer of Code. Both of us have been involved in smaller team projects through Founders and Coders, but this is the first time we have been heavily involved in Open Source projects.
One of the best things about working somewhere like Pivotal is the incredibly open and friendly environment (as well as the amazingggg breakfasts 😍 😍), and despite having only been here two days, we have already learnt a tonne about Babel and compilers in general. We’re really lucky to have so many coaches, who are truly interested and passionate about promoting women in technology, and women in open source. We’ve had two informative and engaging lunch and learns with them (and we’ve haven’t even been here two full days!), where we’ve explored working in a technology company, and the scope of future technology teams.
And now… we’re pleased to introduce you to our coaches!!
Image Credit: Giphy
drum roll, please
Firstly, we have Denise Yu, who has acted as our primary lead coach at Pivotal, and who we hope to be one day ❤️ As well as Denise, we are privilleged and incredibly humbled to have a huge and overwhelming number of additional coaches. This is just proof of how kind and thoughtful Pivotal is; we could not have asked for more opportunities, and we are both overwhelmed by the amount of support we are receiving. We have coaching support and guidance from Jonathan Sharpe, Josh Hill, Derik Evangelista, Winifred Bridgewater, Maria Ntalla and Thomas Godkin! We are so lucky to have the support from these Pivots, and we cannot wait to work with them for the next three months.
Image Credit: Personal Photo
😍 Our incredible Pivotal team 😍
We had an AMAZING first day, and met so many developers from different parts of Pivotal. We had an unbelievable afternoon, where we got to speak to Henry and Ines, and really understand more about the incredible Rails Girls community, and where the future of team Pivotal lay.
Image Credit: Giphy
This is how we felt after our first day. INVINCIBLE. WE CAN DO THIS. THIS IS AMAZZZZIIINNNNGGGGGGGG!!!!!! WE’RE GOING TO LEARN SO MUCH 🦄 🦄 🎊 🎊 🎉 🎉
As well as being involved with an awesome team, we’ve embarked on an even more challenging and ambitious project thanks to Pivotal… PING PONG.
Image Credit: Giphy
Because we rarely give up in the face of a challenge, we’re planning on making a projection graph over the summer to pinpoint our ping pong growth (which we all know is the more complicated element of learning to code). Some may say it’s - in fact - the most crucial element to learn…
Our goals are
Help and contribute to Babel, and be involved in as many aspects of the project as possible
This year we got 190 applications, which is twice more than last year (can you imagine our surprised faces?!). The applications came from 21 different countries, some of them new to RGSoC: Albania, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka.
With happiness came lots of work selecting the teams who would be best fitting for the program. 19 people with different backgrounds rated the applications for almost two months; it was a real challenge, as there were many really good applications. Two countries did especially great job this year: four teams from Germany and four teams from India made it to our TOP-10! Well done!
Besides that, we were really happy to see that some students who applied last year have submitted applications again and been selected!
RGSoC Teams 2017 (Image: Maria Ronacher)
Selecting the teams means also selecting the projects which will participate in the Summer of Code. We are very proud to say that this year we have a very diverse technology stack! Time to think about a RGSoC rebranding! :D
Project technologies 2017 (Image: Maria Ronacher)
The saddest part of the selection process is saying ‘no’ to some of the teams. As much as we want more diversity in tech, our budget is not big enough to fund all the teams that apply to RGSoC. We want to encourage all students who haven’t been selected this year to continue their path in programming and Open Source. While RGSoC is a great opportunity to learn and contribute, there are other ways to do it. One of them would be to contribute to the project you chose when applied to RGSoC (or any other project submitted to RGSoC 2017); most mentors would be happy to help you make your first steps in Open Source. That said, please be assured that you are very welcome to apply to RGSoC 2018.
But let’s not make you wait any longer. Here are the 20 teams of RGSoC 2017.
Sponsored Teams
200 OK (Ipshita and Prachi)
Location: New Delhi, India Project: coala
276linesofCode (Shravika and Brihi)
Location: New Delhi, India Project: Tessel
Alexa (Alexandra and Aleksandra)
Location: Moscow, Russia Project: JoopeA Club
Berlin Diamonds (Kaja and Jen)
Location: Berlin, Germany Project: Discourse
Clojurians (Chris and Saskia)
Location: Berlin, Germany Project: re-frame
Code Bears (Neta and Rete)
Location: Berlin, Germany Project: diaspora*
Code Hoppers (Roselyne and Cynthia)
Location: Nairobi, Kenya Project: OpenFarm
Codeaholics (Jona and Xheni)
Location: Tirana, Albania Project: Nextcloud
IfPairElseUnknown (Sophie and Jenny)
Location: Melbourne, Australia Project: if me - mental health communication app
NK42 (Marie and Ines)
Location: Berlin, Germany Project: Foodsaving and Foodsharing
Pivotal London (Kara and Emma)
Location: London, United Kingdom Project: Babel
RailsGyn (Amanda and Juliana)
Location: Goiânia, Brazil Project: RGSoC: The Teams App
Serv0101 (Rakhi and Neha)
Location: Bangalore, India Project: Servo
Team Fusion (Janakshi and Kalpani)
Location: Kegalle, Sri Lanka Project: OpenDF
Team Impact Devs (Jessica and Vanessa)
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands Project: WorldBrain - Verifying the Internet with Science
Victorious Secret (Saumya and Katyayani)
Location: New Delhi, India Project: The Processing Foundation
Volunteer Teams
Banshee Bandits (Lillian and Shelby)
Location: New York, United States Project: PublicLab.org
Bundledore (Anagha and Amrita)
Location: Kollam, India Project: AFDC League Management System
Gemini (Ramya and Akarsha)
Location: New Delhi, India Project: Susi AI Server
prodyoGEEKY (Protichi and Nikita)
Location: Delhi, India Project: OpenLMIS: vaccine and medicine logistics for low- and middle-income countries
We are looking forward to the Summer of Code with these great teams! Stay tuned — you’ll have the possibility to learn more about each team when they introduce themselves on our blog in a few weeks.
In 2013, we kicked off the first edition of RGSoC: What an adventure it’s been since then! 2017 marks our 5th birthday (time flies!), and with a little bit of your last-minute help and support, we have 4 days left on our campaign and with your help can reach our funding goal — let’s celebrate this moment by taking some time together to look back and see where it all started. #5YearsOfRGSoC
The very beginning
Back in the day, we started the program kind of low-key, and the very small organiser team at the time managed to “just make things happen” by joining forces with members of the local Berlin community — one example among the many is Becci, who provided us with awesome illustrations for our website and even designed a team building game for the 2013 teams. Without too many frills (and with a lot of cat gifs), RGSoC managed to raise roughly $80,000 to support women entering Open Source. Because of the grassroots nature of the program, registration at the time was open until June 7th, meaning roughly a month before the summer of code started! Pretty wild, considering our deadline for registration in 2017 was March 8th.
Blast from the past! Our 2013 logo (Image: RGSoC)
Our participants in 2013 (19, for a total of 10 teams) were spread out across the globe and some were working remotely with each other; we had teams in Poland, the USA, Colombia, Germany, and more!
Location of selected teams in 2013. (Image: Laura Gaetano/RGSoC)
One of the special highlights of 2013 was the amazing support we got from the community, validating our work right away. The (now sadly defunct) boxer shorts company “Unerdwear” even did a pre-launch of their unisex limited edition Rails Girls boxers, and all profits were donated to RGSoC. <3
More volunteers, better support
2014 was the year we got a little more organised. We introduced a Code of Conduct and our Trust Committee, to help us handle Code of Conduct breaches; that year, we also introduced supervisors from the beginning of the summer (instead of halfway-through as we did in 2013), to help better support all of our teams, sponsored and volunteering. While our application rate stayed roughly the same, we were able to collect more funds for our teams and had participants in new locations (such as Peru and Australia).
The organisers team also grew a lot throughout the preparation phase of the 2014 edition — so many people from the Berlin tech scene and beyond started helping out, working on the Teams App, offering to supervise, coach, and write posts on our blog. You can find a few of them here <3 — with their messages about RGSoC and the soundtrack of their summer!
90% of our participants stay in tech
In our third year (2015), we started to focus a little bit more on our website and appearance to the outside. With the help of Claudi (our volunteer designer with superpowers!) we reworked our landing page, giving it a cleaner look — that’s the very same version we have today! We also surveyed our 2013 and 2014 participants, and found out some amazing facts: Our program empowered them in such a way that out of the surveyed participants, 90% of them found jobs in the tech industry, 55% were still contributing to Open Source software regularly, and 8% had even founded their own company or start-up; this reinforced our belief that RGSoC was changing women’s lives for the better.
Ruby Heroes
In 2016, a lot happened: for the first time, the amount of applicants doubled from the previous year, showing an extremely high interest worldwide to participate in the program. As we did the previous year, we surveyed our past participants to find out where they were at and from the survey results and found out that 75% of the 36 participants who answered the survey were still contributing to Open Source Software and that roughly 95% were either studying, working, or doing an internship in a tech field.
In spring, Anika, Sara and I flew to Kansas City to receive a Ruby Hero Award on the stage of RailsConf on behalf of Rails Girls Summer of Code — for the program’s work in making the Ruby community a better place. You can read more about this, about the context and our feelings about collecting this award in this blog post.
All selected participants, 2013–2016. (Image: Laura Gaetano)
That year, we went on to accept 40 participants overall (16 sponsored teams and 4 volunteer teams, the same as the previous year). While 4 volunteer teams may seem like a small number, especially in comparison to to our numbers in the past, it’s important to note that volunteer teams get the same support from us as sponsored teams do, so we need to limit the number of participants that our team can handle. And that’s a good thing! That way we can ensure everyone gets treated the same way and gets the same possibilities — which is also why all teams, regardless of whether they are volunteer or sponsored, go through the same application process.
Can’t wait for May
This year, we received 190 team applications — more applications than ever before, more than double the applications of last year, even though our application process has developed into a very extensive and competitive one and is far from the one we had in 2013! With every year, we’ve improved the process a little bit, taking feedback from coaches, mentors, students, and supervisors into account. We’re currently in the middle of our selection process, and can’t wait to get to know our 2017 teams.
Look at the growth in the number of team applications over the years! (Image: Laura Gaetano)
Help us grow
Our team has grown, but it’s still pretty small (3 core organisers, 10 organisers in total) considering all the work that goes into making RGSoC a reality every year. This work is possible only because of long-term commitment from organisers (who are mostly volunteers) and from sponsors, who help fund teams every year. This year, with 380 people applying in total, we’ve set ourselves the goal to fund 12 teams (24 participants) across the globe; and for this, we need your help!
Our donations as of April 10th, 2017! (Source: railsgirlssummerofcode.org)
In the next 4 days, you will still be able to donate to RGSoC to help support teams for this year. We’ve already funded 10 teams with the help of our sponsors and of individual donors — but we know we can do better! If there are any companies you want to reach out to, we’ve prepared a small document for you with a step-by-step to reach out to your contacts. Let’s get the last one and a half team funded!
Map of team locations, 2013–2016. (Image: Anika Lindtner)
RGSoC Teams 2017 (Image: Maria Ronacher)
Project technologies 2017 (Image: Maria Ronacher)
