[Edit: We’ve extended the application deadline until March 8th 2017, 18:00 UTC.]
Do you want to spend three months coding on Open Source projects? Then this is for you! February 1st is finally here, and we will be opening our applications later today, at 18:00 UTC. You will have exactly one month to fill out and place your application; applications will close on Wednesday March 1st, 2017 at 18:00 UTC. Here is our application guide.
Before you get started, let’s make sure you’ve got everything ready to go to work on your application; we’ve summarised the steps you need to take before creating an application below.
Who can apply?
We are looking for applicants who are available for 3 months (from July 1st to September 30th) to work full-time on an Open Source project and who are proficient in English. Because of our strong focus on community, we expect applicants to be involved with their programming communities (through meetups, workshops or conferences) and to have one year of continued programming learning experience.
We welcome applications from all people who identify as women and non-binary.
Find a pair
One of the main requirements for applying is having a team mate who lives in the same city as you and with whom you can meet up every day to work. It’s not only important to find a pair; you should also make sure you get along and will be able to work together closely during the summer.
Don’t know how to find a pair? Take a look at our finding your team guide.
Find coaches
Teams are required to have at least two coaches (either local or remote) who can help them on a regular basis. Coaches are developers who will sit down with you and help you understand important concepts or provide help when you get stuck. Local coaches are not a requirement, but we still would recommend trying to find local coaches before you reach out to possible remote coaches.
Still looking for coaches? Take a look at our finding your team guide.
Find a coaching company / workspace
A coaching company provides your team with a place to work from during the summer; you’ll get office space and a team of coaches. Coaching companies are a good asset to have, so if you know any local companies who might be interested in hosting you, try reaching out to them and share our guide for coaching companies.
If finding a coaching company is not possible, working in a co-working space or a university space are also options for good work spaces.
Find a project
We require all teams to apply for RGSoC with a project from our accepted projects list. Each project lists the technologies used and additional requirements in order to apply with that project, such as prior knowledge or coding challenges to solve.
You should pick a project both you and your team mate are interested in working on; don’t hesitate to ask your coaches for assistance when choosing a project: are they familiar with the project? Do they think it would be a good fit?
Apply
Got a team mate, coaches, a place to work from, and a project? Then you’re pretty much ready to create an application; please make sure you’ve read everything in the Application Guide before you do so. For the application, we use our very own Teams app; you will need to log in via GitHub to create an account. In the application guide you will find more detailed application on creating a team a filling out your application.
You will have time until March 1st, 2017 at 18:00 UTC to submit your application. Any applications submitted after that date will not be considered.
If you encounter any problems or have any questions during the application process, we’ve got a handy help page to guide you; if that still doesn’t answer your questions, you can hop into our Student support slack channel to get help.
Good luck with your applications — ready, set, apply!
Team Reactives here and we have had the amazing opportunity to attend the JS and CSS conf Asia 2016! Kicking off with CSS conf, the conferences featured the likes of Chris Lilley “the father of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)” who talked to us about the evolution of CSS4 colors and author Lea Verou who introduced us to the concept of css variables.
Chris Liley on CSS4 colors - Source: Team Reactives
CSS conf was a great learning opportunity about all the neat things that front end developers can accomplish with css by harnessing tools like grid and flex box to create beautifully resizable webpages and their ability to create functional animations using svg. It was really cool that speakers put up QR codes with which we could check out the cool stuff they have created.
Source: Team Reactives
We attended JS conf on the second day and third days. It started right off with a talk by Cheng Zhao from Github who shared with us the community story behind Electron and how it grew from just single user to a tool that helps developers produce new apps everyday, a framework that we used for our RGSoC project! There were plenty of cool talks throughout the day and the two of the most memorable ones featured Kelsey Bresemann from Tessel who showed us a live demonstration of how she communicates with her microcontroller using javascript and Kenneth Auchenberg from Microsoft who shared with us how he and other devTool managers at Microsoft wished to revolutionise the way web developers handled their workflow.
We could not stop looking up at the zodiac mural on the ceiling of Singapore's Capitol Theatre- Source: Team Reactives
On all three days, there were people from Standard Chartered and Hired who came down to talk to attendees about work opportunities outside the main auditorium. Standard Chartered also had their Virtual Headset set up next to their booth for visitors to try on! The two of us go to experience a first person perspective of Manchester United’s locker room before a big game as well being out on the pitch to witness a penalty shootout.
Shwetha on the scene early- Source: Team Reactives
Team XYZ has had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Codemotion conference in Berlin, and these are some of the highlights of our experience.
The venue
Berlin is just a stone’s throw from Prague, so this was not our first time visiting it. We both absolutely love this amazing city!
The conference took place in the KulturBrauerei - a huge complex of former industrial buildings (with cool names such as Maschinenhaus, Flaschenabfüllhalle or Pferdeställe), which are now being used as a venue for all kinds of cultural events. The location has a unique industrial vibe and it really added a zing to the conference.
KulturBrauerei (Image by Team XYZ)
The conference
Codemotion Berlin 2016 offered an array of insightful tech talks on 4 stages (one of them entirely dedicated to Community speakers) over two days. Besides, it provided a chance to meet fellow attendees from all over Europe and beyond. We had the opportunity to make friends and network with visitors from Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and many more countries.
Fred George delivering his keynote on day 1 (Image by Team XYZ)
The talks
There were so many interesting talks, but there is not enough space to talk about all of them.
So we selected just some of them that we found interesting:
Women Techmaker Berlin - Andrea Bezold & Mirjam Körner
Andrea and Mirjam talking about Women Techmaker Berlin (Image by Team XYZ)
Andrea and Mirjam talked about the Women Techmaker group in Berlin and presented their community activities. They both took part in the bi-weekly Android course and built their own real Android apps, which they then showcased. Pretty impressive!
Understanding Angular 2 - Shmuela Jacobs
Shmuela during her Angular 2 talk (Image by Team XYZ)
Shmuela explained the core concepts of Angular 2 in a clear, easy-to-follow way. Besides, she also briefly introduced her shiny new project ngGirls, which aims to teach women coding through Angular 2. Way to go!
Knowledge is Power: Getting out of trouble by understanding Git - Steve Smith
Steve unravelling the secrets of Git (Image by Team XYZ)
Steve spoke about what is happening under the hood while we use Git. Since we both went through our fair share of struggle and frustration over seemingly confusing Git behaviour during our Summer of Code experience, we found this talk very helpful and reassuring, as Steve managed to summarize the concepts of Git in a very clear and logical way. We still learn something new about Git every day :)
Costs of the Cult of Expertise - Jessica Rose
Jessica speaking about recognizing and rewarding talent (Image by Team XYZ)
In her keynote on day two, Jessica presented us with some serious food for thought: What does it really mean to be an expert? Is the emphasize on expertise really the way to go in hiring? Where do recruiters often go wrong? Why is it important to reward the talent? And how about yourself - do you feel rewarded in what you do? If not, do you really want to stay where you are? The recording of Jessica’s talk (just like most of the others) is available for you to listen.
What did AlphaGo do to beat the strongest human Go player? - Tobias Pfeiffer
Tobias explaining the rules of Go (Image by Team XYZ)
The AlphaGo team has recently made headlines by beating the human Go champion Lee Sedol - an accomplishment which experts deemed unlikely to happen at this time, if not downright impossible at all. Tobias first introduced us to the concept of the game of Go and what makes it so unpredictable, and followed by explaining the algorithms which made the impossible come true.
Thank you
Thank you for our community tickets, Codemotion! Attending the conference has been a truly enriching and inspiring experience. And of course, thank you, Rails Girls Summer of Code, for making this possible.
What’s next?
Stay tuned for our upcoming report about dotCSS and dotJS in Paris!
RGSoC 2017 OSS Project Submissions (in ALL languages) are open! (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)
When we said After RGSoC is before RGSoC we really meant it! Just 2 months after RGSoC 2016 is finished we’re ready to announce that Open Source Projects Submissions are OPEN for RGSoC 2017.
You have until January 31st, 2017 to apply in the RGSoC Teams App.
Even though our name has the word “Rails” in it, our Summer of Code accepts ALL programming languages. So, whether your project is in Python, Javascript, Elixir, Go, Django, Ruby, Java, NodeJS, or PHP — you can still apply!
The project submission page on the Teams App (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)
If you would like to know more about submitting a project or being a mentor during our summer of code, please take a look at our “Becoming a Project Mentor” guide. You can also send us an email to contact@rgsoc.org if you have specific questions.
You may have noticed that this year you will have two full months to submit your project; this will give everyone more time to think things through and will hopefully help us reach as many project maintainers as possible.
Sharing is caring making tech more inclusive
Call to Action: Please share this tweet or facebook post with your friends! Thank you!
Team Twitches, Team Ruby's Secret and Team LoadToCode go GOTOber (Image: Team Twitches)
So GOTO Berlin meant two days of conference in Berlin on November 14th & 15th, and it is all about learning, networking and meeting developers. But it was not just another conference. Not only Team LoadToCode from Berlin was attending, but also Team Team Twitches from New Delhi/India and Team Ruby’s Secret from Cairo/Egypt \o/!
Happiness was in the air when Mayar from team Ruby’s secret and Taneea and Vrinda from team Twitches were informed that they won the diversity grant tickets, having already vowed that team Ruby’s secret will always be united, Nada decided to launch a crowd funding campaign to travel to Berlin and in just 4 days the total expenses were raised. For Nada going to GOTO wasn’t just meant to but with a little bit of persistence and the support of the amazing community of RGSoC and GOTO, Ruby’s secret were reunited.
Nada was endlessly grateful for the support: Thank you <3 <3
All the teams on GOTOber stage with Carina C. Zona (Image: Team LoadtoCode)
Spending time with the extraordinary Carina Zona led to very inspiring conversations you can find out more about her here. Seeing her on stage for the final keynote on Tuesday was definitely one of the highlights. It was about engaging in a critical approach towards algorithms and the unintended effects they might have on users.
Nada shared her thoughts on the talk in a tweet
Sal Freudenberg has given a very personal talk about autism, raising awareness of neurodiversity within all the different people and colleagues, especially in tech environments & companies.
Podcasting for #RGSoC
Tobi interviewing Vrinda about her Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 experience (Image: Team LoadToCode)
So we ran into Tobi again, after meeting him at RubyConfPt as a speaker! He joined our second podcasting episode and did a spontaneous interview with Vrinda. Tobi is a coach at RubyCorns, a weekly study group of the Rails Girls Berlin chapter and took part in previous RGSoCs!
With Women Who Code Berlin director
Meeting the director of Women Who Code Berlin Aleksandra (Image: Team Twitches)
We also met Aleksandra, who is one of the directors of Women Who Code Berlin, that are organizing really cool events for women who are coding or who are interested in doing so! We got invited to join the meet up later that week!
Company Stalls At The Conference
Along with the attendees of the conference, there were company stalls that were showcasing their work at GOTO Berlin. Some companies like Thoughtworks and eBay were present. The stall tables were usually laden with give-away stickers or pens or cards that were strategically placed to invite the attendees to visit the stall. What was next was that the people manning the stall would tell you about their company or product and encourage you to use it or visit their site. Some companies were especially helpful for students in giving away internships.
It was the first time Team Twitches was traveling abroad. While we’d expected that the trip to Berlin wouldn’t be easy to forget, we didn’t realize that we would have so much fun! Berlin was a sure highlight, but nothing tops the conference, and the diverse set of people we got to meet. We heard inspiring stories, made new friends and realized that mansplaining happens more often than you’d think (thanks to Carina C. Zona).
Overall, pretty productive couple of days, eh?
What we learned
Be mindful when it comes to unintended effects of algorithms
Meeting other RGSoC teams is one of the best parts of #RGSoC
At conferences watch out for possible internship or job opportunities
Podcasting is great fun!
And NOW: start you own podcasting episode for #RGSoC
KulturBrauerei (Image by Team XYZ)
Fred George delivering his keynote on day 1 (Image by Team XYZ)
Andrea and Mirjam talking about Women Techmaker Berlin (Image by Team XYZ)
Shmuela during her Angular 2 talk (Image by Team XYZ)
Steve unravelling the secrets of Git (Image by Team XYZ)
Jessica speaking about recognizing and rewarding talent (Image by Team XYZ)
Tobias explaining the rules of Go (Image by Team XYZ)
RGSoC 2017 OSS Project Submissions (in ALL languages) are open! (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)
Team Twitches, Team Ruby's Secret and Team LoadToCode go GOTOber (Image: Team Twitches)
All the teams on GOTOber stage with Carina C. Zona (Image: Team LoadtoCode)
Nada shared her thoughts on the talk in a tweet
Tobi interviewing Vrinda about her Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 experience (Image: Team LoadToCode)
Meeting the director of Women Who Code Berlin Aleksandra (Image: Team Twitches)