…so the Rails Girls Summer of Code will come to an end!
Two months ago we blogged about our start — about us being loaded to code. Now, having some time passed, which seems to go faster day by day, there is this constant feeling of loading, loading knowledge to code or rather buffering — buffering all the knowledge we received those last months. We not only received great coding teaching but also valuable business knowledge. We reached out to the amazing SoundCloud-People surrounding us and mentioned that we are a little bit lost in our learning freedom and not having a structure set from top-down. We saw the problem, reached out and found solutions — creating our own structure. BOTTOM(S)-UP.
READY, STEADY, PUSH, DONE: Our KANBAN-Board in movement! (Image: Team LoadToCode)
Sharing is caring is <3 is RGSoC!
With this newly created structure of walking the (KANBAN-)board in the morning, we were able to have more awareness on the tasks and reach out to our amazing coaches more effectively. Speaking of it, when RGSoC taught us one thing then it was for sure support and patience. We were lucky and had those qualities in person: Duana, Remy and Sergio. Having the “I’m learning so much!”-attitude, as all of our coaches had, is the best present in the world to us newbies. Newbies, having no clue at all and asking how it works over and over again. Having passionate supporters which are fighting for a world without stupid questions is the most valuable RGSoC experience. Next to the great coaches in the SoundCloud-Office the #helpdesk-rgsoc-channel was always there when we needed it. GIT almost became our friend — ALMOST.
#Helpdesk LOVE (Image: Screenshot of RGSoC-#Helpdesk-Slack by Team LoadToCode)
Failing is coding, too!
Speaking of all those achievements it’s time to also mention failures. We worked on LEAP and we quickly realized that it is bigger and more complex than we could imagine! To make sure that we don’t get lost in LEAP-specific knowledge and tasks we told ourselves to split the day, start the day with plain Ruby-/Rails-learning and end the day with coaching and working on our LEAP-task. We tried but we regularly failed with this goal. We read more than we coded, trying to understand the twitter ruby gem and the twitter requirements. In the end we achieved less than we wanted, know more about twitter than we probably ever gonna need again, but we learned to keep on coding and asking AND were able to find a secure way to put some twitter content on the LEAP Web-App. So after 2,5 months RGSoC the day came we were waiting for so long and we were able to tweet to the world that our PR was merged. The Providers using LEAP will from now on have the possibility to connect their Twitter account within LEAP to easily inform users about releases or bugs.
Twitter Feature within Leap-Web-App (Image: Screenshot of Twitter Feature within LEAP by Team LoadToCode)
Oooooooooooooooooom
Having all about programming was fun, even on our #rgsocdayoff we didn’t stop programming. Instead of programming on our computers we preferred to connect with an IT-monk in Thailand and program on our minds on that special day.
Programming our minds on the #rgsocdayoff (Image: Screenshot of Duana's Tweet by Team LoadToCode)
What’s next?
At the beginning we couldn’t imagine that this Rails Girls Summer of Code would end somehow someday… Now that there are only a few days of it left, we can actually see the end coming /o\ ! However, we know that this Summer of Code is meant to be a start of something bigger and not only a short & intense moment of coding in our lives. So we are preparing ourselves to keep working on code and watch out for internship opportunities. Excitingly, we will be able to share our journey by attending conferences (yes, you’ve read it right, conferenceS(!) ) and hopefully meet many of the RGSoC people in real life! So to help us keep going, meeting more Ruby-enthusiasts and getting more into conference world of code, we are invited to
* RubyConfPt in Braga/Portugal at the end of October and to
* GOTO Berlin in Berlin/Germany in the middle of November.
Please ping us, if you are also attending one of these, we are happy to chat about #RGSoC, the Leap Project, Rails, Ruby and permaculture principles or feminisms!
Learning Ruby on Rails and working on some applications, we thought we became experts, till the very first week of July… Suddenly, we found ourselves sailing on a very small boat, on a deep ocean, stuck in a very bad storm, not having any supplies to survive except hope, perseverance and determination. Day by day, we started to enjoy this adventure between the waves. Together we decided to fight these rough waves, the waves of ignorance. We discovered that we still have a lot to learn.
In our first call with our beloved supervisor Linda, she asked us a question: “what are your expectations after the RGSoC experience?” Our answer was mainly focused on the technical experience that we would gain, but now, after two and a half months we discovered that not only our technical background was enriched but also our non-technical.
We gained so many nice friends. We learned that the most passionate person needs motivation and appreciation from time to time. We also found that it’s important to ask questions but after doing some research. Finally, we decided that we should offer our help whenever we can.
Regarding the technical background, turned out working with gems is much harder than apps, simply because there are not much resources on gems and every gem has it own unique features and codes it’s a bit harder to understand its source code.Minitest:Unit is nightmare for a beginner in testing, simply because we can barely find any documentation for it, on the other side, you can find tons of information on Rspec. We’ve learned it the hard way, but it was worth it as we gained so much knowledge that will help us in the future.
Never in our wildest dreams have we thought that we would be where we are today. Preparing to attend a conference in Braga, Portugal and also giving a talk about our experience in RGSoC. There are lots of preparations for the conference, from visa appointment to booking hotels and flights and doing the trip planning, then the conference experience itself, we are really excited for this opportunity as it is a great chance to learn so much more about Ruby on Rails and meet lots of new people and most importantly Rails Girls organizers and Team LoadtoCode, we’re so happy that we’ll get to meet them finally. We’re very thankful for the opportunity given to us by RGSoC organizers and Rubyconf organizers, we do believe that this will be a life changing experience to both of us.
Our next step? Well, We’re totally looking forward improving our RoR knowledge and if we’re lucky enough we may get an internship to keep learning and gain more experience. Also, we want to share our experience and the knowledge we gained with other girls, we want to see more teams from Egypt get into RGSoC next year, it was a life-changing experience to us, for me “Nada”, I would keep calling it “the Miracle”.
Many new conferences from Europe, America, Africa and Asia Pacific said Yes to our call and granted tickets to our students. Some conferences even offered their help covering travel costs. We could not be more grateful!
Besides just attending a conference of their interest, many teams got the opportunity to give a lightning talk there. For some of them, it will be their first public talk ever. As scary as it might be, this is also a unique experience, and we are happy to help — be it with a practical advice or just words of support. We also believe that lightning talks are a great chance to share RGSoC stories with the world and inspire more women to make the first step towards the career of their dreams.
We are saying a huge Thank you! to all the conference organizers who share our values and team up with us.
Date: September 15-16, 2016 Location: Warsaw, Poland Twitter: @CodemoWarsaw
Interested in attending this conference too? Contact us for getting 20% off promo code.
Date: October 24-25, 2016 Location: Berlin, Germany Twitter: @codemoberlin
Interested in attending this conference too? Contact us for getting 20% off promo code.
Date: November 14-16, 2016 Location: Berlin, Germany Twitter: @gotober
Interested in attending this conference too? Contact us for getting 10% off promo code or getting involved as a conference volunteer.
Date: March 17-19, 2017 Location: Singapore Twitter: @fossasia
Interested in attending this conference too? Contact us for getting 50% off promo code.
As you might guess, the story doesn’t end here. Our students will share their experience attending the conferences over next several months, so stay tuned and follow our blog updates!
This year we have 20 amazing teams: 40 students from all over the world of different age and origin, with different backgrounds and skills. Imagine this: 11 countries on 6 continents (Bummer! Haven’t got any applications from Antarctica this year!); we can’t help enjoying this feeling of the united world.
The students are more than 65% through the program. They have already experienced a lot, really. It’s not just about programming (that, obviously, too!), it’s also about getting along with a team, sharing fun moments and conflict solving, celebrating achievements and coping with frustration. Sometimes it feels like you are facing a problem which shouldn’t have come up on the program, and that you / someone else must be doing something wrong. That’s absolutely ok, we all deal with such issues regularly at work, and the best we can do is to learn and may be share solutions with others.
Yet so much to come. Our students will attend conferences, some of them will give their first talks. Wooo, we are so excited!
Click on the pictures to read students’ stories!
RGSoC Students 2016 (images: Students 2016; collage: Ana Sofia Pinho)
As always, we would like to say big Thank You to all the people who help our students participate in the program: sponsors, donors, coaches, coaching companies, mentors, supervisors, organizers and volunteers. Without you we wouldn’t see these happy faces and wouldn’t read their inspiring stories.
Now that you saw a bit where Echo, RubyCats, LoadToCode, Vegemite and KaUlah work (if you missed it, the blog post is here), it’s time to show you the rest of the coaching companies’ spaces!
Thank you so much for being part of the program! <3
Patricia and Melissa at GitHub! (Image: Patricia and Melissa)
Patricia and Melissa
“Our Coaching Company is Github, located in San Francisco’s South Beach neighborhood, close to San Francisco’s AT&T stadium. The best part about being hosted at a Coaching Company for RGSoC is to be surrounded by fellow software developers. Being immersed in an environment where we’re able to discuss and learn from other developers is priceless to our growth as software engineers. Githubbers have been so warm and welcoming! Githubbers are so willing to lend their expertise. To illustrate, our team gets impromptu seminars from Sam Lambert (https://twitter.com/isamlambert) about distributed systems. We’ve spoken to Ian Olsen about JavaScript and ES6, as well as Lizz Hale about Ruby on Rails. Both Michelle Tilley and Katrina Uychaco have assisted us with learning React. Overall, it’s been a wonderful experience to jumpstart our careers.
As coding apprentices, the technical help and support we’ve gotten has been incredible. The senior engineers also have been really open about how to navigate the culture of the tech industry. They all sympathize with how hard it is to break into industry without a CS background from a fancy school. But they’ve been really helpful with advice about how to meet and introduce yourself to people, as well as point us toward different meetup groups. This is information and insight that you can’t get online or in a classroom. Being explicitly welcomed by a coaching company goes a long way toward feeling welcomed by the industry.”
Dayana and Johanna at ABSOLVENTA! (Image: Dayana and Johanna)
Dayana and Johanna
“You don’t necessarily need a coaching company to learn how to code but if you have one, you get a lot of insights you wouldn’t otherwise: You can experience how those coding skills you learn are applied in every day work life. For us, it is very motivating to see that professional developers work in a similar way as we do (of course much faster ;)
We learn a lot of useful terminology, but most importantly how a day in a programmer’s professional life really looks like: In stand-up-meetings, you overhear and observe a lot which tools, frameworks and programming languages the professionals are using and thus get an idea of the manifold problem solutions there are.
Apart from having this great environment, we of course are very lucky to have such supportive coaches, which are ready to jump in when we are stuck or when we don’t know how to continue.”
Carsten from ABSOLVENTA
“The learning curve is steep at the beginning of the summer: There’s new lingo left and right, a project whose complexity might be intimidating, there’s lots of new people, and the team has to find their own workflow. But as the weeks pass, mysteries dissolve into knowledge and the once foreign codebase has not only lost its scariness, but feels a bit like home. Three months of working on Open Source builds a tremendous amount of developer self-confidence!”
Elvina and Micaela at Namics! (Image: Elvina and Micaela)
Elvina and Micaela
“It wasn’t easy for us, team kindr3d, to find coaches in Frankfurt, but when we did we lucked out big time and scored an entire coaching company. They provide us with safe space and technical support, but also allow us to be close to our coaches, hence we resolve most of the issues directly on the ground, which allows us to be self-sufficient and low-maintenance within RGSoC. We find office environment rather motivating, since we have enough free space, quiet and meeting rooms where we can isolate ourselves and use white boards, projectors etc.
Namics has daily fruit delivery, unlimited coffee and drinks, so there is enough fuel to go through a hard day’s work. But there are also leisure areas, kicker table and sofa, where one can wind down and experience a home-like environment.
We also had a chance to observe real-life team software development (agile style) in progress with its shortcoming and advantages. Seeing a team from the inside gives us confidence, that there is a place in a team for a junior, apprentice, and that fresh perspective and enthusiasm are assets worth rewarding in IT.”
Emma and Geisa at Raul Hacker Club! (Image: Geisa)
Emma and Geisa
“The best part of having a coaching company during RGSoC is to learn directly from professionals who are running projects all the time and share with us mistakes they made so we can learn from that too.
We choose the Raul Hackerspace as our host not only because we’re members, but also because RaulHC is a place that embraces diversity. Since the beginning we knew we wanted to work during RGSoC here. There’s a kitchen, so we can prepare our food and snacks, and the best part is the dazziling view.
*As seniors, coaches are helping us to thrive in this path. Rather than giving us the solutions right away, our coaches are giving us tips and advice, guiding us and enabling us to find the answers by ourselves.
Brena Monteiro is the co-founder of UpriseIT, a software company based in Gov. Valadares in Minas Gerais state. She has large experience in software projects and development with Ruby and Rails. Daniela Feitosa and Aurélio A. Heckert are from Colivre, a cooperative service company that supplies solutions for Internet, development and consultancy in free software. Victor Flores aka User_X, a senior development represents LampiãoSec, a security research group.*
“*
Sherri and Anitha at Elevator Factory! (Image: Sherri and Anitha)
Sherri and Anitha
“The support that we have received in RGSoC and the Coaching Company is invaluable. We have an amazing team that has donated time and resources to help us be successful during RGSOC. Our co-working space was donated by the Elevator Factory, which has allowed us to come in and work together every day. Our coaches, Pamela Vickers and Pete Holiday, have given countless hours of their own time to help us work through any issues that we may be having. Without this support system in place, learning and accomplishing all that we have would be difficult at best. Our skill set along with our confidence continues to grow, and we know that our career goals are definitely within our reach.”
READY, STEADY, PUSH, DONE: Our KANBAN-Board in movement! (Image: Team LoadToCode)
#Helpdesk LOVE (Image: Screenshot of RGSoC-#Helpdesk-Slack by Team LoadToCode)
Twitter Feature within Leap-Web-App (Image: Screenshot of Twitter Feature within LEAP by Team LoadToCode)
Programming our minds on the #rgsocdayoff (Image: Screenshot of Duana's Tweet by Team LoadToCode)
taken by us @RGSoC-dayoff @ Cairo Tower
Patricia and Melissa at GitHub! (Image: Patricia and Melissa)
Dayana and Johanna at ABSOLVENTA! (Image: Dayana and Johanna)
Elvina and Micaela at Namics! (Image: Elvina and Micaela)
Emma and Geisa at Raul Hacker Club! (Image: Geisa)
Sherri and Anitha at Elevator Factory! (Image: Sherri and Anitha)