Shwetha from Team Reactives here and I was excited to experience FOSSASIA at Singapore Science Centre!
At the entrance - Source: Team Reactives
I was tempted to spend all day at the science centre’s famous VR gallery with a full fledged flight simulator where you’ll be able to flap and take off just like a bird but was glad I stopped by the Microsoft Mission to Mars workshop by James Lee where I got to learn how to build my very own conversationally intelligent personal chatbot using Microsoft LUIS AI.
I later attended several talks on computer vision and machine learning, one that stood out to me was the talk on machine learning in medical imaging by 15 year old Gaeun Kim of Stanford Canary Center for Cancer Early Detection who presented on the MeVisLab software that can be used to improve the accuracy of cancer diagnosis. She also shared her journey from open source project contributor to working in a professional laboratory all while she’s still in highschool.
My favorite part of the conference was a workshop on building your own pokemon world on web-based virtual reality by Santosh Viswanatham. As a long-time pokemon fan and recent VR enthusiast, I was amazed to see how accesible developing for VR had become.
Last week, on International Women’s Day, we closed our applications for 2017. Since then, we’ve been absolutely speechless at the amount of interest we received from applicants worldwide. ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY APPLICATIONS! Yes, you’ve read that correctly — this year, 190 teams (meaning 380 applicants!) applied to our 3-month scholarship program from all over the world.
This year is our fifth year running the program, and the numbers speak for themselves: since 2016, the number of applications has doubled, and it’s quadrupled since 2015. That’s what they call exponential growth!
With great interest comes greater responsibility (and more support): in the last couple of months, a small part of our team (mostly just two to three people) responded to a ton of support requests. As every year, most activity happened in the last few days before the deadline, and here are some numbers: 100 support requests on helpscout, 9 requests through Facebook, and way too many to count through twitter — mostly asking to be RT’ed or connected to coaches or the community. Our Google Groups community was also pretty active, with 103 topics posted from different people connecting to form teams and help out applicants. But the most activity happened in slack — our #application-support channel was already buzzing since January 4th (a month before we officially opened up applications), and it was the most active channel of communication to ask questions in: we received roughly 140 requests regarding the application process and our program.
Last minute and all over the world
And, because the best time to submit an application is right before the deadline, the last application to come in before the deadline was submitted at 17:59:45 UTC (that is, 15 seconds before our 18:00:00 UTC deadline). Hats off to that team living on the edge!
As always, the applications are scattered across the world, on every continent, with some potential new countries such as Nepal or Albania joining the ranks of countries RGSoC applicants are located in. To get a better idea of all the possible locations of RGSoC teams, take a look at the map below!
Our 2017 applications (Image: Google Maps/Anika Lindtner)
We need you
We’ve just finished putting together our selection committee for the year and for the next few weeks we’ll be busy rating all the applications we received. Until then, we need your help! With the funds we’ve collected so far, we can “only” fund 6 teams to participate in RGSoC this year. Our goal for 2017 is to fund at least twice as many, so if you’re as passionate about our mission to bring more diversity into Open Source as we are: reach out to your community, to your friends, and to your company; ask them to donate, support, or sponsor our program, so that we can support at least 12 teams of amazing people!
I had the privilege to attend RubyConf held in Melbourne last month as a part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code program. The Venue was set at the Melbourne Convention Hall and it was a great opportunity to meet so many interesting people in the Ruby community. Also a good learning experience.
photo: RubyConf Australia
Following are some of my personal favorite talks:
Shana Moore: So you want to become a software engineer
This talk was about her career-changing journey to become a developer. It was very inspiring to learn about the approaches she followed in her coding challenges and her technical interviews. She emphasizes on how hard work and passion always pays off. And encouraging more people to get into technology. It was awesome meeting this amazing gal!
Tim Riley: Reinvesting in Ruby
It was interesting to learn about the challenges being faced by the ruby over other new functional languages like elixir and how can it be improved in the future — Dry ruby is the collection of next generation ruby libraries. How it helps you write clear, flexible, and more maintainable Ruby code. Each dry-Rb gem fulfills a common task, and together they make a powerful platform for any kind of Ruby application.
Marcos: Actors in Ruby!
Ruby has its own limitations when it comes to dealing with the concurrency over Erlang or Elixir. This talk was about how making it better using an Actor model. It was great.
Aja Hammerly: DataCenter Fires and other Minor Disasters
photo: RubyConf Australia
She mentioned: “If nothing bad happens, you don’t have a good story to tell”. She shared her experience working with the Google data center. She talked about the mistakes she made, which helped her understand the importance of automation. How having a team with different background added to the learning and could save a day in many aspects. It was a impressive one.
Apart from all these amazing talks, I enjoyed delicious food, unlimited coffee which was served all day. It was another grateful event. Thanks to all the people who made it possible. And many thanks to the RGSOC committee for sponsoring the tickets.
All sponsored and volunteering RGSoC teams from 2013-2015. (Collage: Anika Lindtner)
Can you believe it? This is the 5th year of RGSoC! We are so happy to be reaching a quite noble age for grassroots initiatives and projects in Open Source! 5 years!
You can now celebrate with us and share the love and donate.
Since our beginning in 2013 we have been fighting for getting more women* into the Open Source community by giving out scholarships that we finance through crowdfunding and sponsorships.
We believe our mission of enabling women* to pursue a career in tech and help to foster diversity in tech is as simple as it is radical. We believe that fostering diversity is now more important than ever and want to take a stand: We are not going anywhere. We are staying. For the next summer, the next four years - and the next five.
But we can only do it together with you.
Let’s fight together for continuing our amazing success of enabling women* all over the world to dive into the world of Open Source and making the community more inclusive, diverse, and newcomer-friendly.
#5YearsofRGSoC
Today we our anniversary funding campaign begins and throughout the next month we’ll celebrate our #5yearsofRGSoC with fun facts, statistics and things you didn’t know about your favorite summer scholarship program. With the campaign we hope to fund as many scholarships as we can - We’ve been able to fund more and more teams since 2013 (starting at 10, going up to 16 in the last years).
🎂🎈🎉✊🏾💻🚀👧🏾👧🏿👧🏼👧🏻👧🏽✨🎈🎂
Last year the applications for RGSoC have almost doubled (95!) and this year we expect no less! Since 2013 all we got over 600+ applications from all over the world. Thanks to our successful funding campaigns every year we could offer 145 scholarships to these wonderful women* in the pictures above.
The Early Bird Supports Diversity
In the last few weeks, we’ve been reaching out to companies and are happy to announce that these early bird sponsors have helped to build a solid ground for our road of RGSoC 2017. Most of you will know that fundraising year after year stays extremely hard work - budgets change, companies get aquired or sold, intern goals shift or life happens.
This is why we are extremely happy to not only welcome some of our most faithful partners and sponsors (yes, you, GitHub, Travis CI and innoQ) again on board this year but also some news companies (OHAI Nokia and Heroku) as well as our two earliest earlybird sponsors examsuccess, agilebloom.
Together with the fantastic sponsors Launchschool, Ableton, OpenSuse, Apcera, articulate and Honeybadger all you amazing early birds you show to us and the world that you care. About our program, our mission and diversity in tech! Thank you for that. We are so proud to be changing the world and our communities together with you step by step.
To everyone out there who wants to take a stand with us, who wants to support us and our work, please join us in funding as many scholarships as we can and enabling as many women* to change their lives. Here is to our first 5 years and many more to come!
Let’s get this 5 Year Anniversary Campaign started! 🎂
* we welcome all people as applicants who identify as women or non-binary
The eighth edition of RubyConf India was held in Kochi, India from 28th - 29th January, 2017. It was a 2-day affair packed with speaker and lightning talks amongst networking sessions. We were invited as student scholars — all thanks to the amazing RGSoC team! Onto the highlights from our visit!
The stunning view from Le Meridien! (Photo: Team Twitches)
The Venue
The conference was held in God’s own country — Kerala, which is named that because it is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places in the entire world. The palm trees and flowing rivers are some of the many elements that add to the beauty of the place, and the venue for the conference, Le Meridien, was nestled between the city and the backwaters. We were lucky enough to get a room facing them. We could swear it seemed as if there were diamonds in the lake, it glittered so at night! Check out the view:
Kochi in the rain is even more beautiful! (Photo: Team Twitches)
The starry night and the starry lake! (Photo: Team Twitches)
Pre-conference events:
There was plenty lined up for before the conference. To start with, Red Panthers, quite possibly the most active Ruby community in all of India, had organized a pre-conference meetup for all attendees.
The meetup started like any other meetup would (read the projector stopped working, the laptop wouldn’t connect, and there was a HUGE delay), with a talk with a an interesting title — Philosophical Tools for Software Engineering by Praseed Pai. It was an interactive session as well as an enlightening one. This talk was followed by one more on effective ways to build chatbots.
And this is us at the pre-conference meetup! (Photo: Team Twitches)
After the talks were over, a networking session for all attendees of the meetup and conference was arranged.
Meeting Matz (A YAYYYY Moment) (Photo: Team Twitches)
1st day of the conference:
The conference kicked off with a keynote by the Ruby creator himself — Yukihiro Matsumoto (popularly known as Matz), where he stressed upon the importance of a community for programmers. The day went by with more enlightening sessions by a variety of speakers from India and abroad. With each new speaker came a new perspective, a new technique, a new way to code. We were so filled with information, we thought our brains would explode!
As the day neared an end, the time to present came closer.
Our Talk titled "What Does A Programmer Look Like?" (Photo: Team Twitches)
Our Talk
Our lightening talk was called ‘What does a programmer look like?’ Since we couldn’t speak for more than 5 minutes, we had decided to make the talk an impactful one, highlighting the our experience in the Rails Summer of Code, and the most important of all — the need for diversity in tech.
We also introduced the Rails Girls New Delhi chapter that we’d initiated in our city, and we received an appreciative applause from the audience. It was a truly nerve-wracking experience, but we loved every minute of it!
An enlightening talk on the 2nd day! (Photo: Team Twitches)
2nd day of the conference:
The second day was even better than the first. We heard talks about chatbots, skating and sometimes going slow to achieve success. We also golfed and had a blast talking to new people.
The diverse set of people we met:
We can’t even begin to describe the number of people we interacted with at the conference! From other student scholars, to people who lived half a world away, we met everyone! And keeping aside the great amount of laughter and fun, the amount of meaningful conversations we had really helped us gain perspective, and made us aware of the different kinds of thought processes, and the different kinds of problems and solutions that people need!
It was a lesson in Inclusivity and Holistic Approaches 101. We were also pleased to meet one of our remote coaches for the summer, Kashyap, who was instrumental in keeping us focused on the goal.
Rails Girls New Delhi! (Image: Team Twitches/Rails Girls New Delhi)
Thank You
Thank you RubyConf India for giving us the student scholarship and a chance to share our experiences! Thank you, Rails Girls Summer of Code for giving us an experience we could talk about!
