Hello! From Team Hackbrighters

Posted on July 26, 2016 by Patricia and Melissa

Who are we?

We are Patricia Arbona and Melissa Fabros, and we are based in the Bay Area of California. Patricia had lived her entire life in the Midwestern part of the United States, primarily in Ohio and Chicago. She attended the University of Chicago for college, and studied Latin American history in addition to Spanish and Portuguese. Afterwards, she had a career at a major educational publishing company, where she was an editor and translator (Spanish-English/English-Spanish) for Spanish High School textbooks. She believes passion for foreign languages translates well to programming, because she views programming as learning a new type of foreign language. She moved out to the Bay Area earlier this year, to attend Hackbright Academy, a fellowship for women who wish to transition to software development. It was at Hackbright where she met her dear friend, Melissa!

Thanks for the intro, Patricia! Melissa comes to programming from the world of non-profits and higher education. Her interests in programming started in middle school where she was one of the first girls to join the computer club. However, she majored in English and American Literature in college. She loved the way literature “codes” the human brain to build worlds and emotions in the imagination. She is a PhD candidate in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She maintained her coding interests by making small web page projects. A friend once told her that reading good code is like reading good writing, which piqued her curiosity. Since that conversation, she went from teaching at the University of California, Merced to taking part-time coding classes, completing a Google Summer of Code internship, graduating from Hackbright Academy, and starting the Rails Girls Summer of Code fellowship.

Together, we’re working on the Lektor project, a Python-based content management system. The project uses the Python programming language to build static web pages that also have a dedicated administration interface. The build system is in Python, admin UI is written in React.js, and the static pages use Markdown.

Our project mentor is Armin Ronacher. Our local coaches are Ramil Nobleza, Gavin Crooks, Samantha Trieu, and Seema Ullal

Below is our team:

What have we achieved so far?

We merged a pull request that helps users install the Linux dependencies needed to run Lektor. We’ve tasked ourselves with giving some love the Lektor’s admin UI. The first thing we did was to set up our workstations at Github’s office in San Francisco.

Everyone at GitHub has been extremely supportive and welcoming us for our summer fellowship. Octocat has been especially helpful in giving moral support:

We also had our Kick-Off party with our sagely mentors. At the Kick-Off party, Melissa and Ramil caught a Zubat!

To accomplish our task, we’ve reviewed our Javascript fundamentals, particularly solidifying our knowledge of scopes, closures and javascript objects. We found Nodeschool and the Node community really helpful and welcoming as we dived into Javascript! NPM's mascot Haggis, a wombat, was giving us moral support at Node School

We researched how developers test React.js components by interviewing every front-end developer we walked into. This is us, for most of our journey learning JavaScript and exploring the vast possibilities of front-end testing:

What tips do we want to share about our journey?

Transitioning from another career (We’re both humanities majors previously deeply involved in Education) is really hard. Be nice to yourself while you’re learning because learning to code is a marathon, not a sprint. Some days you won’t be able to wrap your mind around a new or difficult concept.

Transitioning careers is difficult. It’s moving into the unknown, and some people won’t understand why you’d pursue something new. People who are close to you will question you about your choices–they may see your decisions as rash and drastic. Others may doubt you. But if you invest time in yourself to learn, to meet people, and to establish new roots (whether in a new town or a new profession), the concepts and people who seemed mysterious start to make more sense.

You have to believe in yourself and find friends and colleagues that will help hold you up during hard times.

What will we do next for the project?

• We’ll make a pull request for an update to the community page’s Code of Conduct.
• We’ll write test coverage for Lektor’s Admin UI page.
• We are in the process of learning React, so we can contribute updating the UI’s components.

Time for RubyCats, meowww!

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Iza & Kinga

RubyCats

Who we are

Izabela: Mostly known for being a cook, cleaning lady, Lego architect and a companion to all sorts of crazy activities, like camping trips based in the middle of the living room and ridiculously long scooter/skateboard adventures (on an alien planet). Also known as a scary monster named Monstro or a fellow pirate Larry, on a ship made of cardboard. Summarizing, a Mom (also called Mammoth) of a 3 year old bundle of pure energy, named Zuza. Also a bit of a gamer (indie games in particular). Comic/manga/anime and boardgames fan. Loves to eat - addicted to kimchi, pho and curry. Can’t imagine life without rice, pasta, edamame and tomatoes. Loves to draw & create pixel art after a beautiful day filled with coding. True believer in the World’s true beauty – diversity.

Kinga: long-time-sense-of-life-passion-and-career-path-seeker. Would like to travel the world and get to know and understand as much as possible. And as many people as possible. Deeply in love with and addicted to her two cats Richard and Leon. And with/to cats in general ;) Loves Asian food, especially Indian cuisine. Likes to cook, bake and read, but often has other things to do instead. Conglomerate of opposites /zodiacal Gemini tells everything…/. Tries to survive in a world full of gluten and dairy ;) Does American Tribal Style and a bit of tribal fusion bellydance. Cares about nature. Wants to do things that are meaningful and ethical and help make world a better place. Artistic soul that wants to create. With no IT and any technical edu/experience/skills decided to get into programming. Taught kids Scratch / ScratchJr, Blockly with Wonder robots, HTML+CSS. Hopes to start working as a programmer in a near future. Now or never. Interested in hard and soft. Dreams about “making something that works and is useful” like some machine built and programmed by herself. And about having a house with a garden away from the city.

The beginning

Iza & Kinga/ RubyCats

We met three times during Ruby workshops and events. After the 3rd time decided to apply to RGSoC together. Cats are one of our shared interesteds, so the name for our team came to us by itself ;)

So here are the real (Ruby)cats:

Izabela’s cats:

Tosio & Manio

Best listeners ever. All over the place pukers. Warm and cozy hot water bottles => Crazy Tosio & Grandpa Manio. My best friends.

Kinga’s cats:

Rysio & Leon

Richard and Leon are both sheltered foundlings. Leon came to us as a kitten half a year after Richard. Richard became his friend and mummy ;). They’re both extremely sweet and crazy.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place

Those 3 weeks were a bit of a struggle for us. All the plans got washed away by a huge wave of our knowledge deficiency. But as they say, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. We hope for a better. We try hard to make things better.

What we’ve learned

• Partitioning, dealing with virtual machines on Vbox and VMWare, different Linux distributions and continuous reinstalling and setting up all the good things required or useful for Ruby and Rails
• Git, gitflow, GitHub. Recently commit and their messages good practices
• Using and customize different tools like Sublime Text, Trello, Slack,
• Basics of debugging
• Basics of Rspec
• Expanded out knowledge about validations and callbacks
• Got familiar with some new frontend issues incl. Sass and Slim.
• We’ve realized how much it takes for a newbie to understand what’s going on in the code of a working app, how much it takes to understand its architecture.
• An interesting experience is to observe the daily functioning of software company.

Plans for the remaining two months

• Contribute more - hopefully with expanding knowledge, more contribution will follow.
• Learn to ask for help more often, not feeling stupid and guilty of a Not Knowing crime ;P
• Believe in ourselves more - be happy with little things we do good.
• The knowledge - it’s never as full as we would like it to be, we will try not to stress over this.
• Take small steps, don’t try to eat a whole cake at one.
• Keep learning and practicing what we know.
• Smile more often and hug a lot of cats.

We are Loaded to Code

Posted on July 21, 2016 by Marie & Thea

Loading (Image: Team Wikimedia Commons)

So at its core the LoadToCode team consists of two components: Thea & Marie. They found each other in Berlin on their way to learn programming. What a lucky coincidence! Now they are one of 20 teams all over the world that are participating in this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code. Of course, Thea & Marie are not the only components that are needed to make this summer as code- & joyful as possible…

…so the Rails Girls Summer of Code has started!

Say Hello to Berliner Team LoadToCode

Big Team Laugh (Image: Team LoadToCode)

So our Rails Girls Summer of Code has started, we got welcomed by our hosting company SoundCloud and got an introduction to the company + a goodie bag! Day by day, we get treated very well, coffee and food only adds to the good feeling! So on the picture you see glorious & very smart Duana, patient & clever Remy and last but not least encouraging Ruby hero Sergio!

Here we are! LoadToCode = Thea + Marie

Psssst: Here we are, sitting at our desks, looking very serious and trying to understand Rails, Git & LEAP. I mean, this picture is an exception, we normally don’t look that funny.

Component “Marie”: Finishing her Masters in Interdisciplinary Latin American Studies and was researching about the user experience of period tracking apps from a social perspective. She became curious for programming after a Rails Girls beginner’s workshop in 2015. She is a fan of digital rights like encrypted communication and dared to dive more into coding. She is more than happy to combine many interests during the RGSoC.

Component “Thea”: She holds a bachelor degree in economic computer science and gained some work experience in that field. However she always wanted to deepen her programming knowledge. She then started to get involved with Ruby/Rails via the RubiesOnDaCloud study group in Summer 2015. Now with the RGSoC she is ready to put more effort in the project “to learn programming”!

Team Picture of Thea & Marie (Image: Team LoadToCode)

Hippie-Hackathon | What happened so far

So we got invited to a whole week of a hackathon (we call it Hippie-Hackathon), full of LEAP-knowledge, Q&A with Leap-Coders & last but not least socializing via campfires and advanced mime guessing. So how would YOU describe Quantum, SHA 512 or propietary software?

(Image: Team LoadToCode)

This does not only look code- & joyful on the photos, it really was. A little campfire is highly recommendable for the teams who are having a winter of code or the teams that live in Germany!

What we learned

• Overview of LEAP Architecture: Learning about Bitmask, Soledad, Pixelated! It is complex, but not impossible to understand, we recommend to start using these services. They care for your security and privacy!
• Web Applications with Rails, creating a blog webapp with Rails
• Git & Github

What comes next:

So in order to get more structure and keep track of our tasks, what we have done and we’re we heading to, we created a Kanban board.

Kanban Board: Goals, ongoing tasks and Backlog :) (Image: Team LoadToCode)

At the end of our 3rd week we’re gonna improve our presentational skills and give an overview of the LEAP project to our coaches at SoundCloud. 20 minutes of presentation and 10 minutes Q&A, so we hope to be prepared enough for the tricky questions.

At the end some dog content! \o/ Here you see our favourite Colleague, adorable mate and patient listener!

CTO of SoundCloud (Images: Team LoadToCode)

“For you, a thousand times over.”

Posted on July 20, 2016 by Taneea S Agrawaal and Vrinda Malhotra

The Twitches in their element! (Image Credits: Humans of IIITD)

Yeah, that’s not quite how the Twitches came into being. It was a heatstroke that led to us meeting. If you have ever seen a Bollywood movie, you will relate. On a scorching July morning, our protagonists/narrators met at a college orientation, that both of them would not end up joining. Vrinda was feeling too hot and was lost on the campus when she asked Taneea’s Mom for directions.

T: I hated you on sight.
V: I don’t even remember seeing you. But I remember asking your Mom for directions. She is so sweet.
T: (Rolls her eyes) Oh, she remembers seeing me.

Just to give you a little introduction, T stands for Taneea:

“I am an Indian student pursuing Bachelors of Technology (B.Tech) at IIIT-Delhi. I have a myriad of interests, coding being just one of them. A hacker, a programmer, and a hardcore Berlin Artparasites fan, I am an outdoorsy person who likes to solve problems in real life (including the ones where almost everyone on Earth spells my name wrong). I am a hopeless romantic and a geek, but an unlikely one. A day spent with my laptop, and an interesting problem to solve, having delicious food (with copious amount of exercise, of course!) only to get into bed with a hot cup of coffee in hand is my idea of bliss. I hope to touch lives and make a difference to the world through my work and expression. I want to be an engineer, a problem solver, and all things awesome!”

And V stands for Vrinda:

“I am a Computer Science Engineering student at IIIT-Delhi. The best way to describe myself would be that I am a problem solver. For me, coding is a way to solve problems. I live for the rush that you get when your code finally does what you want it to do- or more often than not, something similar. I am also an avid reader and a language enthusiast (coding as well as natural languages). I can speak, English, Hindi, German and some Punjabi. Few things are important to me in life, programming being just one of them, and reading, and good food. Good food is paramount. So is Harry Potter - I am a fangirl @TheChirpyBitch. Also, I love TV- comedy shows, sci-fi thrillers, detective shows. My current obsessions include Orphan Black, Veep and everything Marvel.”

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”

Our not-so-pleasant encounter was soon followed by life in adjacent rooms of our campus dorms. What came next was a similar taste in music, a shared love of reading, writing and a common craving for caffeine in the wee hours of the night and mimicking iconic Bollywood scenes, like here:

Team Twitches, in their element, pretty much! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)

We first started working as a team at the end of our freshman year- for a course assignment. We quickly realized that we worked well together, filling the gaps for each other. From then on, there was no looking back. We were elected as the coordinators for our college’s Literary Society in our sophomore year, and that really tested us. We clashed a lot but at the end of the day, we would find a way to make both our ideas work. We have been roommates for a year and loved every minute of it.

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Our decision to apply to RGSoC this year was extremely delayed. It wasn’t until February that we’d made this decision. And after that decision was made, the next biggest challenge was to find our coaches. 3 days, an infinite number of messages to people asking them to coach us, and a ban from Meetup.com later, we had four amazing and capable coaches willing to take on the task of coaching us throughout the summer. That’s when, to represent our twin-like nature and preserve our love for fiction and fantasy, we came up with the name “Twitches”.

Team Twitches' customized logo! (Image Credits: A dear friend of the Twitches' : Varnit Jain)

As part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code, we are contributing to OpenFarm, which is a free and open database for farming and gardening knowledge, that according to one of our mentors, Rory Aronson, also is a potential API for Farmbot.

We were first attracted to OpenFarm because of the plethora of opportunities that it provides to programmers and non-programmers alike. The learning curve is huge. It also has great potential in India where two-thirds of the population are farmers. Right now, we are getting accustomed to the code base by solving issues. It is so satisfying when your PR gets merged! Next, we would like to add our own features to the website.

Two PRs Merged on the same day! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)

To get selected as a sponsored team for RGSoC’16 was probably (read: definitely) one of the best days of our lives. It gave us an opportunity to grow not only as programmers, but also to grow as an integral part of the community of women developers contributing to open source across the globe. The first week of the program brought with it celebration, excitement, nervousness, and even frustration. Between uninstalling Linux, getting notified by a bot that we hadn’t updated our log (and having a mini heart attack because of it) and sending our first PR- it was truly a roller-coaster ride.

Team Twitches with their supervisor Ramon! (Images: Team Twitches)

The RGSoC team even put us all on the ‘Thank You’ board, and the students got our very own Slack channel for community bonding!

Team Twitches on the Thank You Board! (Image Credits: Ana! (RGSoC Organizing Team))

Key Learnings

• Never write ‘Yes, do as I say’ if Linux asks you.
• When submitting a PR: Hound: 17 violations found Us: We would like to be excluded from this narrative.
• Don’t forget to write the daily logs- or the bot will remind you.
• Try solving a problem yourself before asking for help. Most of the time, you can solve it- it’s just lack of confidence that is stopping you.
• Never judge an issue by its cover.
• Never fear or hesitate to ask for help. It can come from the most unlikeliest of places.

Like always, Albus Dumbledore has exactly the right words:

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”

Team kindr3d – Saying Hi!

Posted on July 19, 2016 by kindr3d

[Content Note: many animated gifs]

Hello World!

We are Elvina and Micaela of team kindr3d (<3 Octavia E. Butler). We first met on the Rails Girls Frankfurt event last year and became bffs instantly (over cake and pizza).

Half a year later we decided to apply for RGSoC so we can move to the same city and code together. We also share similar views and values on the industry, startup culture, diversity and feminism.

Now we are based in Frankfurt and dwell in the office of Namics (unlimited fruit and coffee supply!), where our coaches (Max, Nino and Vincent) happen to be working as well. All of this under caring supervision of Max.

This summer we are working on Discourse (under watchful beard of our mentor Robin) and learning to be jacks of all trades (or full-stack developers as they call them on linkedin). By the end of the summer we hope to visualise a bunch of data and have fun. The learning curve for the project is rather steep, but we have faith and help on our side. Before we have fun with svgs and colourful graphs (and charts) we have to figure a lot of stuff out.

Total recall of our summer so far

It has been more than 2 weeks already!!1111 It feels like ages and we’ve learnt so much and so little at the same time. Since we start from the opposite sides of web development (front- vs back-end) we are trying to create a curriculum, that fits everybody’s levels and needs.

So we went deeper into Rails. And then started working on Ember.js.

We inject ourselves with some juicy database and SQL knowledge.

We also had some deep conversation with our coaches on how software development works, what leadership is and what team works is all about.

All this information was at times overwhelming.

Sometimes development is hard. Sometimes you have to wait for virtual box to download (while installing Discourse).

Any advice?

• Keep calm and assertive. Know when to chill and relax.

• Fake it till you make it (most of the times).

• Concerning previous point: Everyone suffers from Imposter Syndrome. Talk it out and you will feel better 👊

• You are not alone 👽

• Coffee saves lives ☕

• Always remember where you parked your bike 🚲

What’s next

• Learn some data vis theory and what information is the most useful for discourse users

• Get some fake data and turn it into graphs

• Structure some great and informative sql requests

• Render resulting charts/graphs and diagrams and not break the rest of discourse at the same time

• Get deeper in rails/js/D3

• Not to get lost and always look on the bright side

• Not to run out out of maritime metaphors for our logs

Thanks!

We feel very lucky to be part of this great community and contribute to such a meaningful project we also happen to like. To everyone else we wish the best of luck and many happy lunch breaks this summer. You folks are great!

See you again in september, Ahoy!