Goodbye from RubyCats (Image Credit: Izabela Komorek @izuroxx)
It has been an amazing journey!
We are still shocked how emotional and draining the whole experience was. But mostly it was a dream come true.
We haven’t accomplished what we set out to do. But we are happy of the things we did and what we’ve learned.
We don’t know what the future will bring. We will try our best to learn more and hope for the best. We will continue our path, even if it’s rocky.
Few words from each of us:
Iza:
The end of RGSoC was very hard for me. RGSoC was a time I felt I was living the life the way I want to live it. Now I’m trying to pick myself up and collect the pieces of my life’s puzzle. Not sure what the picture looks like, but I’m determined to put the pieces together.
Kinga:
The end of RGSoC was like waking up from a beautiful dream into life as usual. I’d like this dream to last forever.
It’s like in Fort Minor song Where did you go:
Where’d you go?
I miss you so,
Seems like it’s been forever,
That you’ve been gone.
Please come back home…
I hope I’ll become a professional developer one day (soon!) and then this dream will be back. For now I got back to teaching kids about programming, which I really like. But without being a programmer I won’t be fulfilled.
And now like in a song Oxalá by my beloved Madredeus:
Oxalá meu futuro aconteça (I hope my future will happen)
I still have a lot to learn and do. Mission not accomplished and not aborted. Mission in progress. Some Teams App code still needs to be completed / included into a PR.
Where did you go RGSoC? (Image Credit: Kinga Kalinowska-Materniak @Kalinowska_K)
RGSoC is over (Image Credit: Kinga Kalinowska-Materniak @Kalinowska_K)
THANK YOU
We would like to thank our Coaches, Supervisor and Mentors for giving us so much. Giving us their precious time and hearts, words of comfort and wisdom, sometimes sharing some of their strength in moments of weakness. They gave us emotional support, tools and knowledge that is priceless. They are the real Heroes and we shall name them all:
Coaches: Monika Burdzy, Basia Kłosowska, Magdalena Malinowska, Tomasz Warkocki, Piotr Zientara.
Mentors: Carsten Zimmermann and Ramón Huidobro.
Last but not least the best Supervisor - Rafał Cieślak.
Thank you Code Quest for giving us a warm and comfortable environment and amazing coaching support. We have to acknowledge your company has a strong, smart and cool team. It was a pleasure to meet all of you. We wish you all the best and let coding stay your passion.
Thank you Team Joda for a chance to meet you (Dayana, you are the master of humor and positive energy). Hopefully we will meet again soon.
Thank you RGSoC for this wonderful and unique experience, love, support and a chance to take part in Euruko 2016 in Sofia & first Codemotion Conference in Warsaw.
BTW you can watch our Euruko Lightning Talk here.
Team Rookies flew to Copenhagen to participate in ‘GotoConf Copenhagen’. It was a huge and lively conference with a beautiful blue color. Tehetena had a personal issue to solve, so we decide that I (HyeSoo) go there on behalf of the team and I shared interesting topics, what I have seen and how was the conference with her. It was a really amazing time to listen interesting talks about speakers’ experiences and cutting-edge technologies. It also gave me a chance to meet several inspiring and friendly people from different backgrounds.
It is an entrance of the GotoConf Copenhagen. I felt full of bule passions towards technologies and people. It was very exciting time.(Image: HyeSoo)
Wonderful & Interesting talks
On 3rd of October, there were 6 tracks about Effective Deliver, Languages, Deep Learning Analytics, IoT and Robotics, Android and Solutions and Case Studies1. All the tracks had interesting topics and helped me to broaden the horizon to see and hear about not only IT topics of my interest but also new fields of IT beyond my interest.
In the morning, I joined the ‘Exploring RxJava 2 for Android’ talk in Android track and
‘Interoperability between R and other languages’ talk in Languages track. I learned that to explore the data, we can use ‘R’ language and we can mix with other languages such as C, C++, F# etc to improve the performance. Depending on how to use R with other languages, it can improve execution speed or memory management and so on.
In the afternoon I participated in talks about ‘Kotlin’, ‘Phoenix a web framework for the new web’ in Language track and ‘Exploring StackOverflow Data’ in Deep Learning Analytics.
It was interesting to get to know about the functional way of writing code with Kotlin. Kotlin is a statically-typed programming language that runs on the JVM and it also can be complied into JavaScript. It was useful to learn what functional programming features Kotlin has such as immutable data structure, higher order function etc.
In ‘Exploring StackOverflow Data’ talk, I learned playing with data can start from a good question and to explore the data, we can use R, and to visualize the data and compile into JavaScript, we can use ‘F#’. It was also interesting to see which programming languages people like to use for their side project or hobby project during the weekend.
On the second day, there were 5 tracks about Microservices, Tactics for better Teams, Web Frontend, Disruptive Technologies – Case Studies and Solutions and Case Studies2.
In the morning, I listened the talks about ‘A Quick Introduction to Angular 2’ and ‘Elm: Friendly Functional Programming for the web’.
I learned what are the new features in Angular2 and how we can use it in the project. There was another talk about the functional programming. It was about Elm. Elm does not have runtime exceptions and it has a library of interesting name called ‘Maybe’ which represents value that may or may not exist. It gives clear messages about error or what does not match the syntax. I was happy to know new language for the web.
In the afternoon, I was in talks about ‘The Return of Stream I/O’ and ‘Progressive Web app – the Return of the Web’. With progressive web app, we can expect from native apps to the mobile browser experience, using standards-based technologies. It has some of the core tenets such as Services Workers, App Shell and Installability & App Manifest. It was an interesting technology to help programmers who want to launch app in both the web and mobile.
Team Rookies had a happy time in GotoCopenhagen Conference with wonderful talks and inspiring developers(Image: HyeSoo)
Inspiring & friendly people from different backgrounds
There were chances to meet friendly participants in the GotoConf Copenhagen. During a lunch time, I met one engineer from a company that makes an application for visually handicapped people. The application has sounds and tough features to help them find the information in the application. He has used ‘Typescript’ to make it work both in the web and mobile for them. We also talked about ‘high level concepts of the programming languages’. I have been wondering why many people said that programmers might be able to adapt the other language easily, if they know one language deeply. He explained that ‘high level concepts of the programming languages’ (for example inheritance, abstraction etc) embrace the common concepts of the languages, so it can help programmers to understand and use other languages easier beyond the different syntax from different languages.
I met another engineer from Unity. She has been building the Backend in the company. She came to the conference to learn Microservices for her work. ‘Microservices’ seems a buzzword these days. It is a self contained process that provides a unique business capabilities. With Microservices, it takes the capabilities and put them into the separate processes and it focuses on a single business capability. I had a chance to hear how she started to work on Backend after her graduation from her university. She had done internship and she used Python for her work and she has been using Python for the Backend, since then. It was a good time to talk with her to hear her work & how to grow up as a Backend developer and learn what is ‘Microservice’ which was a new term for me.
I met one girl who joined the conference with a diversity grant. She is a student like me and she also had Rails Girls experiences in Vienna. We talked about the Rails Girls communities in each countries and went to listen talk together. During the break, we had a chance to talk one of the conference speakers, Evelina Gabasova. She told us how she started to give a talk in the conference and how she has worked in the Data Science field. Her passion and curiosity inspired me to get interested in playing with data and visualizing data.
It was a really great time to listen invaluable talks and meet all the inspiring developers. While I listened how they explored their fields and how they improve their work and the world, I felt full of their passion and enthusiasm towards making world a better place, sharing their experiences.
It was a precious and amazing time in Copenhagen.
I am happy to have a chance to share the conference experience with Rails Girls Summer of code communities.
There were wonderful and interesting 6 tracks on the first day and 5 tracks on the second day.(Image: HyeSoo)
@RailsGirlsSoC, @GOTOcph
Thank you so much all these wonderful opportunities. It was truly amazing! :D
For further information on Goto Copenhagen Conference, please visit Goto Copenhagen.
<3
Time to clear our board. (Image Credit: Geisa Santos)
Thinking how to start this post remind us how difficult was to start anything. Some can say that you only have to make the first step, but it’s not so easy and isn’t fits to everything. Sometimes, well, the most of the time, when everyone label you in a category, every single day, it’s hard to believe you can do a first step.
During RGSoC we’re surrounded by inspiring and amazing people from everywhere. Everyday there was not one or two but a lot persons cheering us up. We shared thoughts and feelings with the others fantastic girls.
The credits it was expected to the final but we really want to thanks Ines Coelho, Brena Monteiro and Ana Sofia: thanks to believe in us and helped this amazing experience become reality. <3
Speakerinnen and our own voice
Geisa:
The first time I invited Emma to get along with me to the applications of Rails Girls Summer of Code, I told her about Speakerinnen and Ruby Monstas. I don’t remember when or who told me about them, the Rails Girls from Berlin, but definitely was because Rails Girls Salvador. I’d already used their resources to study Ruby. So when we received the news it was shocking: we couldn’t believe it.
We pushed ourselves so much to work and study for hours, even in the weekend. We were so worried to disappoint Ana Sofia and our team (mentors and Ines) that we made some sprints in the first week. Only after talking with them we realized that we forget the most important thing: learning having fun. RGSoC is not about work.
Sharing ideas and choosing issues at daily meeting. (Image Credit: Geisa Santos)
We could talk here about impostor syndrome but we want to tell you about how/when we started to believe in ourselves. Hearing our own voice. RGSoC is a journey about of knowledge, a journey of self discover and the better part is you don’t have to walk alone. There are a lot of people supporting you in every step. That is most important achievement we get from it: we can do whatever we want to because we are capable of. You don’t have to be 100% or an expert from the beginning, in fact you always will be learning.
So we allowed ourselves to learn and get rid of the labels society imposes on us.
Wow! So many new topics we learned and still learning.
We discovered anothers things we’d loved to work with Speakerinnen project: testing, Security, BDD, how to create gems, Postgres and others.
From now on, Geisa is researching about UX and Design Thinking to collaborate with Speakerinnen’s team. Also she started to study more about Security for applications and Javascript. This year Geisa is organizing the 4th edition of Rails Girls Salvador with others mates.
Emma is improving her skills in Web Design and also returned to tattoo again. And just to refresh: after RGSoC we will continue to contributing with Speakerinnen. :)
Geisa is working remotely for about six years, so she wants to find a remote job in Tech and Emma want both (remote or not).
One of great works from Emma. (Image Credit: See more from at her Instagram)
Roll the credits!
We are afraid of forgetting someone, so we prefer to thanks everyone at the orga team <3 (OMGGGGG! You all are amazing!), everyone that dedicated their time helping us on the Help channel and outside that. A huge thanks for Ines Coelho, our incredible supervisor, and for Coach Brena Monteiro: thank you so much for your patient, help and for be there for us full time. <33333
Teamates from all around the world: it was a pleasure! We wish everyone can achieve news goals.
And the bits goes on…
Geisa:
Last week I was at my first Python Brazil. Something I was planning a year ago.
It was amazing. Going back to beginning of our conversation about beliefs and journeys, I want to share with you one more thing.
Some people asks me why initiatives for diversity are so important. I can name some many whys but I will tell you just two: support and representation. Communities like PyLadies and Rails Girls Summer of Code are so welcoming, supportive, cheers you up, empathic, inclusive. If you be part of a minority and you find a group like yourself, a place you can share your worries, you can cry, you can search for help, you’ll be embraced. You can handle obstacles and any other harm that you have to deal being a girl (or a ‘different’ person) in tech (or other place men think you’re not allowed to be) with more strength and energy. This is what it means to be a PyLady for a year to me. One of this amazing persons that is always cheering for you, engaging the community is Paula Grangeiro. This year she received the Dorneles Tremea Award, an important award for her work and support, not only for PyLadies Brazilian community but for the whole Brazilian Python community. YAYYY!
PyLadies organizers from Brazil with Paula Grangeiro (in the center, between me and Jessica Temporal, who have injured her foot) at Python Brasil 2016. (Image Credit: Python Brazil organization)
Doesn’t matter that programming language you prefer or if are in Tech, Science, Arts…I wish you find more people like Paula, like Anika, Ines, Ana Sofia, Brena, Emma, Laura. I wish you find a community like a have in Brazil with the PyLadies, I wish could find more representation and inspiring people. I wish you can become this person for someone or for your community.
And I wish more submissions for Brazil next year. Because I will be there for you, as a Coach cheering you up and helping you improve yourself.
Apparently quite a lot. We wanted to tell you how in one summer we became better developers and hopefully better humans as well.
so many memories already!
We feel so lucky to have spent those three months learning, communicating and building things. We suddenly became part of a bigger community of people who care about each other and are ready to give their time to help beginners. It is very humbling and empowering to feel surrounded by amazing people. But at the same time we became aware of giving back our gratitude to the this community. Also we learned the value of beginners. Our enthusiasm and drive are valuable and and needed in the world where innovation is the king.
beating negativity and self doubt - Source: giphy
We’ve also got to work at a big tech agency and look into the life of “real devs” from the inside (spoiler, there is a lot of free food).
Discourse achievement
We spent a lot of time carefully picking our project for the summer. Having worked on Discourse, with a whole feature just by ourselves was challenging, to say the least. Yet it also allowed us a great deal of creative freedom. Our mentor Robin was so supportive that most times he would encourage us to step out of the road for a while and dig into learning things which were less related to our project just so we would figure out the answers by ourselves.
so many winding roads - Source: giphy
Building a dashboard for the statistics of a forum is not a simple task and we found ourselves jumping from databases, rails api to d3 to ember, sass and templating engines and trying to make sense out of the connexion between all these elements was probably what took us the most time.
waaaaait! - Source: giphy
Yet for the first time we were working on the big well organised project, where all perks of best practices were apparent. And it has disciplined us quite a bit.
Because of the visual nature of our project, it was important to have a design in mind, so we tackled a bit of user experience and came up with a visual solution (still very much in progress though). It was a lot of fun brainstorming with paper and scissors.
A week of conferences
Conference “season” felt a bit like field trip for us. We’ve got to be roommates for a while and experience Berlin’s vibrant tech scene while on the project and met many more people involved in the open source community. Everyone was lovely and supportive of us. And we had resources and time to objectively look at our skills and achievements.
Photo by Fiona Castiñeira
We visited two conferences in one week, it was quite an overwhelming experience. But Yay! to learning, meeting tech superstars and a warm Berlin September. The most surreal experience was learning Rust from people who made Rust and were very happy sharing and teaching us.
Without this program we probably would not have gained the confidence to keep on learning and building serious careers in tech. It was really enlightening for both of us to find each other’s support as two women passionate about coding. And then because of rgsoc find more people like us out there. (shoutout to Rails Girls, Techettes, RGSoC, Rubymonstas…).
Stepping out of isolation and learning together while seeing other people’s works inspire us played a big role in our road to empowerment. Let’s never stop learning from each other, folks!
Photo by Veronica Jonsson
Right now we are both looking for ways to establish ourselves in tech professionally so we can keep learning and getting better. We had time to learn how to learn, and started building our careers about life-long self-improvement and kindness to others. As far as open source goes, we are totally part of the cult now and hope to continue contributing.
We are no longer living in the same city, but the summer experience keeps us together, we have great things ahead, like a Beyond Tellerrand Berlin Conference in November!
Many Thanks
We are lucky-lucky women who have been surrounded by wonderful people all this summer long. We send love to our patient and supportive supervisor Max and most zen mentor Robin. Thanks to the coaches for sticking with us and showing us more than we expected to find. But most of all we send love to the community of people who spend their time to make other people’s day brighter. We love you Rails Girls! Keep on being awesome!
Overall, we’re very proud of the fact that our team was able to set up and configure integration testing. According to Martin Fowler’s pyramid of testing, integration testing is the hardest and most expensive type of test to write. We tried tackling this because we wanted the challenge of learning the codebase at all levels of the stack. Dealing with deprecated dependencies and un-updated modules to work with PyTest and to configure Travis CI was no small feat! Our team jumped up and high-fived each other the day our build successfully passed Travis CI. We soon discovered that green is a beautiful color. We realize how valuable testing is within a codebase. Good testing helps ensure robust code and provides a form of documentation to guide future developers.
Green is truly beautiful in the world of testing. (Image Credit: Team Hackbrighters)
Moreover, we ramped up to a new code base quickly. To get a handle on what the code was doing, we had to dive deep into modern Javascript. This meant learning new ES6 syntax and React in addition to learning some new Python concepts.
Whiteboarding Lektor’s React components and widgets. (Image Credit: Patricia Arbona)
We’re really proud of how scrappy we were about finding resources and people to help us learn. We took advantage of all opportunities available to us and seriously leveraged our network. This included reaching out to our coaches, past managers, the Lektor community, and welcoming Slack communities such as WeAllJs.
Team Hackbrighters Singing Karaoke with their Project Mentor. (Image Credit: Doria Keung)
What did you end up learning that you didn’t expect to?
We learned how powerful lower-level languages are. For example, throughout our fellowship, we have learned a lot of UNIX commands, like top, ps, kill, sed, chmod, chown and make. We learned how to use pushd and popd in order to navigate directories more efficiently.
We thought we had a solid understanding of git, but we soon realized how challenging git can be! Our team received first-hand experience rebasing, squashing, amending, refloging, reverting, stashing, and much more. Our team definitely feels more confident with git incantations, which will serve us well going into our next software development jobs.
Lastly, we learned about public speaking when we organized a panel to talk about participating in Open Source at Hackbright with Katrina Owen and Carol Smith. Katrina Owen, Developer Advocate at Github, is co-author of 99 Bottles of OOP, and author of Exercism.io. Carol Smith is currently the Education Partnership Manager at Github, and previously was the Google Summer of Code Program Manager.
Chandrika Achar, Patricia Arbona, Carol Smith, Wendy Saccuzzo, Melissa Fabros, Ximena Cervantes (Image Credit: Matt Amituanai)
We were flattered to speak alongside Katrina and Carol! Neither of us have had an opportunity like this before. It was a lovely opportunity to share our knowledge and experience with students.
How do you think you’ll apply your summer of code and Lektor experiences to future projects?
We really felt welcomed by the Rails Girls Community! We’d definitely keep an eye out on how to support the organization and its alumna. Team Hackbrighters and Laura taking a break with Mona Lisa Octocat. (Image Credit: Michael Schärfer)
It took us at least six weeks to feel comfortable in the Lektor codebase with a lot of help. We took on writing and setting up the most difficult tests to establish a base for other developers so that they can move the codebase forward safely. For Lektor, we introduced end-to-end integration and front-end testing. We now have a real appreciation about how hard tests are to set up and about the need to build features with the idea that features should be testable.
We had a lot of fun building out our new feature with its associated test. In other future projects, we’d probably try to build our knowledge of a codebase more incrementally by picking smaller issues and features. We also learned how to ask informed questions of other developers when asking for help.
What other open-source projects are you interested in contributing to?
In addition to keeping an eye on Lektor, we felt confident enough to start exploring other open source projects.
Melissa is exploring learning Ruby and Rails, so she could contribute to Github Classroom and Project Jupyter.
Melissa holding one of the many dogs of GitHub. (Image Credit:Patricia Arbona)
Roll the Credits!
We want to say “Aloha”, which means “goodbye” and “hello”. Although we have to say goodbye for now, we hope that Rails Girls Summer of Code is just the beginning of our journey as developers.
Overall we’re grateful for the opportunity to grow as software developers under the mentorship of the Rails Girls organization and to receive the goodwill of Github’s community and of the San Francisco developer community at large. So many people shared their time, wisdom, and kindness. We’re thankful to have met all of them.
Team Hackbrighter’s final send-off party with Coach Gavin and Coach Seema. (Image Credit: Leo Miranda)
Here are our shoutouts in no particular order:
Goodbye from RubyCats
Where did you go RGSoC?
RGSoC is over
Live, learn, code! 
so many memories already!
beating negativity and self doubt - Source: giphy
so many winding roads - Source: giphy
waaaaait! - Source: giphy
Photo by Fiona Castiñeira
happy learners at the first RustBridge
Photo by Veronica Jonsson
- Source: giphy
