The core RGSoC team was Jen Diamond
and Stephanie Betancourt. We had a lot of friends in
our study group and other people who wanted to contribute as collaborators so we opened
up the project to them as well. Omowale Oniyide
and Josh Loper
joined on as core collaborators from the inception of the project and presented with us
at Rocky Mountain Ruby 2014. We had other contributors throughout the summer including
Rob Wilkinson, Jalil Mohammed, Ashok Modi, Kobi Levy and Eric Mathison.
Feats of Daring - A New Way to Explore The Ruby Standard Library
The Standard Librarians have been creating a new learning tool for the Ruby community over
this summer called Feats of Daring. A user will be able to go to our site and learn
about the Ruby Standard Library in a very similar way as you would go to TryRuby to
learn some Ruby. The user will go through a series of adventures where they will learn
about the top twenty libraries. The libraries are also broken down into chapters so you
can easily browse through and see what is available.
We Built it, From Cali to Texas
When we started on this project all members and collaborators were based in or near
Los Angeles, CA. Midway through we had one member work remotely. The rest of us met
in person from 4:00 - 9:30pm, Monday through Thursday at Pivotal Labs Los Angeles
from July to September.
Solving A Need while Learning Ruby
A good way to learn Ruby is to explore the Ruby Standard Libraries. The libraries
however can be a little dense for people new to programming and Ruby. We decided to
make learning about the libraries a fun experience by creating a tool that breaks
them down by using common, real life experiences and relating those
experiences to the functions of the libraries.
How we did it
From developing user profiles, to building features centered around our user’s experience,
and to creating stories that our users can actually relate to - this was a massive
project. We are grateful for the amazing support we had from our sponsors and coaches
at Pivotal Los Angeles, our mentor Pat Maddox, and our story coach Mike Bonifer.
We had an inception of our project where we broke our ideas down into stories,
identified our users and created wireframes. Pivotal LA coaches worked with us four
nights a week from 6-9:30. We worked with a different Pivot each night so we were able
to see many different teaching styles and methods. Everyone had their own git tricks
and ways to break stuff down so we could understand it. They were also great at standing
back and letting us work on the project ourselves until we had a question or were about
to fall into a giant hole. We did retrospectives and iteration planning meetings to
keep us on a roll with the project. We all know how lucky we were to be able to work
there and are so incredibly grateful to have had that experience. Not only did we make
progress with the project but we learned their Agile/XP ways of working.
Rocky Mountain Ruby 2014
After we finished our proof of concept for Feats of Daring we presented our experiences
with Summer of Code at Rocky Mountain Ruby in Boulder, CO. It is an amazing conference
full of great speakers and discussions. We met a lot of other developers who have
inspired us throughout the years including Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei. For a few of us
it was our first professional conference. It was great to see professional developers
in action gathered from all over the world, sharing their creations and learning
from each other.
Our Mentors
Our amazing mentor Pat Maddox really changed the shape of our
project by suggesting that we use mob programming.
It helped us even the playing field between people with different levels of programming
knowledge, helped stay on the same page and accelerated our learning. He took us on
a field trip to San Diego to meet the pioneer of mob programming,
Woody Zuill, who let us work with his team. We
experienced a well oiled machine of a team working together seamlessly. They
allowed us to join in their mob rotation. Each of us worked on a C# project for the
first time ever and actually made contributions.
Mike Bonifer was our story coach who helped us
define the scope of the stories that we are using to accompany the code as Emerald
moves along in her journey through the Ruby Standard Library. He also came to
San Diego with us to mob and dropped by Pivotal to give us some team building
techniques. Pat, Mike and Woody all really helped shape how we worked together.
Our Coaches
The coaches we had from Pivotal Labs Los Angeles are
some of the greatest teachers we have ever had the opportunity to learn from.
We can’t thank them enough for taking time out of their busy schedules to share
their knowledge with us. Special thanks to Ross Hale for opening up Pivotal LA
and allowing it to become our second home during the summer, and thank you to our
coach Mike McCormick for being our lighthouse throughout this process. He helped us
through various hurdles and was our main advocate. Also thank you to our main coaches
John Ryan, Ryan Moran and Eric Hu. who worked with us tirelessly as we build the project.
Others Pivots who helped us along the way: Mariana Lenetis, Ian Ornstein and Peter Alfvin
who worked with us a few nights, Abby Sturges who helped us with our UX, Nikki Thayer
who helped us with our CSS, Dave Belotti, Zachary Girshman who joined in on our
inception, our Director of happiness Elizabeth Miller.
Thank you to Rails Girls Summer of Code for this amazing opportunity.
We have all individually grown from this experience in so many ways. We hope to coach
a team to work on Feats of Daring next year for RGSoC and pay it forward. Continue
to watch as Feats of Daring grows at our blog
where we will be continuing to post updates on our progress.
###GitHub and Travis CI are major supporters of Rails Girls Summer of Code
The program, in the magnitude we have reached for our second year, would not be
feasible without the lead support from organizing partner, Travis CI, and continuing support from founding sponsor, GitHub.
Over six million people use GitHub to build amazing things together, and no doubt
our students will add to this vibrant development community. GitHub is big on education,
offering Web-based Classes and In-person Training, for people of all experience levels.
GitHub Explore allows you to browse topics like design essentials, CSS preprocessors,
machine learning, and learn a thing or two about topics you’re curious about.
To top it off, the GitHub Guides help to understand the GitHub workflow, from writing
the first ‘hello world’, to mastering issues, to playing with markdown and deploying with GitHub pages.
John Britton and Kate Guarente at GitHub on their support: “We can’t wait to see what the Rails Girls participants build and ship this summer. The entire Open Source community is going to benefit from these women joining and contributing to meaningful projects, and we’re honored to be a part of the program!”
Inherently and always an Open Source company, Travis CI builds their hosted continuous integration service integrated with GitHub, and supports a multitude of programming languages. Followers of the Rails Girls Summer of Code no doubt recall the huge role Travis CI played in getting this program off the ground.
Konstantin Haase at Travis CI on their support:
“Rails Girls Summer of Code is an amazing opportunity for diversifying the open source community. It paves a path from your first Rails Girls workshop to becoming an open source developer. We love to support women and open source at the same time with this project.”
This year’s gold supporters are all returning sponsors. We’re so happy to have their continued support, both financially and for their continued interest in making the program the best it can be!
Recognizing the vital role that open source software plays at Google, Google heavily supports the open source software development community. One of the ways they do this is by running student outreach programs such as Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in. It’s no secret that Rails Girls Summer of Code is loosely based on Google Summer of Code, a global program that offers student developers to write code for various open source software projects. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together over 7,500 successful student participants and over 7,000 mentors from over 100 countries worldwide to produce over 50 million lines of code.
The wonderful people at SoundCloud get real excited about the challenge of bringing all the world’s sounds to the internet. With everyone at SoundCloud being a hacker at heart, they host company We Hack weekends as well as Hacker Time (much like the 20% time concept made famous by Google) for their engineering team. SoundCloud believes that life gets boring if you don’t keep learning - and we couldn’t agree more! We bet that’s why they are the biggest evangelists for our program and offered to be a coaching company no less!
Erik Michaels-Ober and Duana Stanley from SoundCloud on their support:
“SoundCloud is incredibly proud to support the Rails Girls Summer of Code for the second year in a row. We’ve already started to see the impact that sponsoring and coaching Rails Girls can make in these womens’ lives and careers. For us, this is an investment in the future of our industry.”
Last year (back then still under the 37signals flag) Basecamp was on early in the program. Spread out across 26 different cities around the world, Basecamp is a distributed community of designers, programmers, tinkerers, writers, speakers, analysts, … a bit of everything really. 2014 marks their 15th year in business (happy , Basecamp!), yet their goals remain the same - and fit amazingly well to Rails Girls Summer of Code: “Have fun, do exceptional work, build the best product in the business, experiment, pay attention to the details, treat people right, tell the truth, have a positive impact on the world around us, give back, and keep learning.”
Andrea LaRowe from Basecamp on their support:
“Basecamp is the world’s #1 project management tool. For the last ten years, companies have been switching to Basecamp because it’s famously easy to use, reliable, and it has the best customer service in the biz! We’re sponsoring RGSoC because we are excited to help a worldwide community of women “learn by doing” while meaningfully contributing to quality open source projects.”
Our friends from down under at Envato are passionate about the web, and about enabling creators to make a living doing what they love: teaching. Envato is founded on the idea of community and are passionate about putting the community first. Which explains their continued support for Rails Girls Summer of Code.
DigitalOcean offers ‘simple cloud hosting’ - how simple? Well, they claim to be able to deploy an SSD cloud server in 55 seconds. With ‘community’ and ‘love’ making up for two of their core values, there’s no doubt that their support keep learning - love learning
Etel Sverdlov from DigitalOcean on their support: “We love the community that Rails Girls Summer of Code is building with their mentorship initiatives. The best way to learn is by doing, and this gives many students a fantastic opportunity to jump in there and get coding. Can’t wait to see the awesome projects that come out of the program this year!”
EngineYard’s technology is used and loved by thousands of customers. Its team loves exploring new technologies and standards in automation, deployment, cluster management and all aspects of the cloud. What’s more is that EngineYard love Open Source - and so do we! EngineYard sees the communities they work with and for as their lifeblood, and aim to do everything they can to stimulate them and keep them healthy.
Orcas Net is the golden oldie amongst the silver sponsors. Their team began building relational database applications back in the 1970s and became an early leader in using the Internet as a platform for business applications. Through ongoing innovation inhouse and stimulating projects such as Rails Girls Summer of Code, Orcas Net continues to have a finger at the pulse of the Tech world.
Hashrocket builds solutions for the Web, iPhone and iPad, specializing in Ruby on Rails, iOS, and Android development. Their Rocketeers aim to design, build, train, and learn and are always looking for ways to contribute to the development & design community. Exactly the reason why they sponsor a number of meetups and support Open Source projects that bring value to the community. Hashrocket will also help manage our remote helpdesk.
Marian Phelan from Hashrocket on their support: “Hashrocket is thrilled to sponsor Rails Girls Summer of Code this year – we’re always looking for ways to help the Rails community evolve and expand, and Rails Girls is on the forefront of that progress. We’re excited to see all of the great code (and coders) that will come out of this year’s program!”Hashrocket is thrilled to sponsor Rails Girls Summer of Code this year – we’re always looking for ways to help the Rails community evolve and expand, and Rails Girls is on the forefront of that progress. We’re excited to see all of the great code (and coders) that will come out of this year’s program!”
Cognitect design products and services specifically designed for the requirements of the cloud environment. Cognitect is positioned to advance the platform and engage the community to continue improving it for all developers. We build simple tools to solve complex information problems.
Justin Gehtland from Cognitect on their support: “The programming community as a whole benefits from having the most possible participation within it. Ideas are only tested when exposed to new brains. We love programs like RGSoC because they don’t just swell the ranks of programmers, they grow the diversity (and therefore quality) of thought within the community.”
Rails Girls Summer of Code’s Bronze sponsors make up the most numerous contingent in our roll call for 2014. Listing them out doesn’t really do them justice, so here’s a little about each of them.
For social gaming giant Wooga learning and working go hand in hand. They support (their team to attend) meetups and conferences.
Maike Kronenberg and Jesper Richter-Reichhelm from Wooga on their support: “Technology is something that everyone should be able to participate in. There’s an increasing amount of attention paid to diversity within tech companies, particuarly when it comes to engineers. The numbers still aren’t up to scratch. Projects like RailsGirls will change that.”
Honeybadger is exception, uptime, and performance monitoring for Ruby. Built as the honeybadgers needed a better way to track errors in their own projects.
Planio is engineered to make your projects more successful and fun! How? Well, with great project management of course.
Jan Schulz-Hofen from planio on their support: “What you do at Rails Girls Summer of Code is absolutely amazing! Developing in Ruby and being part of such a welcoming and inspiring community has benefited us so much, both as a company and as individual team members here at Planio. Hence, we’re always happy to help and give back as much as we can. It is awesome to see more and more women and girls joining over the years since we started doing Ruby and Rails back in 2006. Thanks Rails Girls for making this happen. Much <3 from your friends at Planio!”
Carbon Five has more than 10 years of experience building great software for startups, non-profit organizations and enterprise companies. And they like to share.
David Hendee and Courtney Hemphill from Carbon Five on their support: “So much of our ability to learn and progress in our craft comes from an inspiring and supportive environment. RGSoC has created a program that brings together all the necessary elements for success and Carbon Five is honored to support that initiative and help it grow.”
With Articulate anyone can create online and mobile courses with great e-learning authoring tools.
Arlyn Asch from Articulate on their support: “We love that Rails Girls Summer of Code is inspiring more women to experience the power of coding and embrace careers in technology. We’re thrilled to support this life-changing program.”
With Shopify you don’t need to have any technical or design experience to easily create a beautiful online store. Yet Shopify supports learning fully.
John Duff from Shopify on their support: “Rails Girls gives Shopify the opportunity to help drive communities we care about forward. We get to help open source projects, which we depend heavily upon, and at the same time help aspiring developers learn and gain experience. It doesn’t get much better than that.”
Chris Lee Tealeaf on their support: “RailsGirls is one of the shining examples of what makes the Ruby and Rails community amazing. Of course, the mission of introducing women to web development is important and critical to the long term health of our young field. But what makes RailsGirls truly amazing is the people involved with it. The organization is filled with smart, passionate and caring do-gooders. This is exactly the type of organization Tealeaf Academy aspires to become. We’re a business, but we’re not a profit-at-all-costs organization. The first and foremost value at Tealeaf Academy is being an organization centered around helping people and being a positive force in the world. RailsGirls has shown us what an organization that values ‘goodness’ first looks like.”
Nugg is Europe’s largest targeting platform with cutting edge real-time technology for audience targeting, efficient brand advertising and data management. Powered by machine learning.
Stephan Ziep, Director Development at nugg.ad on their support: “At nugg.ad we believe it is important and necessary to have more women in IT-related jobs and to close the gender gap in this industry. We are really happy to be part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014, as we believe that putting professional coaches at the side of female beginner students and providing them with a full time scholarship will have a great impact. We are excited to enable students to expand their knowledge and coding skills and look forward to seeing the many great developers and Open Source projects that will arise out of it!”
Site5 believes that our students have a lot to offer the development community and hope to encourage other companies to surround these potential, future web developers with a sense of community and help them gain confidence in their skills.
Justin Mazzi from Site5 on their support: “Site5’s legacy of using and creating Open Source software on a daily basis gives us strong motivation to invest in the future of these projects by supporting programs like Rails Girls Summer of Code, who are expanding the diversity in the Open Source community.”
Zweitag is technology consulting and software development since 2008. Their team of 25 smart arses can’t wait to see a ‘neue welle’ in the tech world.
Did you know that the Deutsche Messe has been around since 1947? Neither did we.
HitFoxGroup is a fast growing incubator with over 200 professionals in Berlin, San Francisco and Seoul. HitFox is committed to grow companies within the fields of Big Data, Advertising & Game Distribution and puts a strong focus on professional and personal growth opportunities.
New Relic knows it: we are all data nerds. A Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps, New Relic cares about learning.
Noelle Daley from New Relic on their support: “New Relic is thrilled to support Rails Girls Summer of Code and the amazing work they do in the community. The Rails Girls mission to increase diversity within Open Source is an imperative cause - one in which New Relic is proud to stand behind. We look forward to seeing the projects that students come up with!”
In 2008, Malwarebytes was founded on the belief that you and everyone have a fundamental right to a malware-free existence. And we couldn’t agree more!
Rebecca Kline from Malwarebytes on their support: “Malwarebytes from founders on down is comprised of people who are self-taught and have the desire to learn. We believe education should be available for all and not come at a hefty price. aaand we love open source! The Rails Girls Project is an awesome opportunity to learn something new and break out of the mold. Have a blast this summer!!”
Keen IO believes that custom analytics shouldn’t be a pain in the backend. That’s why Keen IO’s powerful APIs do the heavy lifting for you. Yay.
Josh Dzielak from Keen IO on their support: “I met Sven Fuchs (Travis-CI) on a developer evangelism trip to Berlin. He told me all about Rails Girls Summer of Code, and the very next day Keen IO became a sponsor! Why wouldn’t we? Rails Girls SoC is an opportunity for Keen to support several movements we’re passionate about: open source advocacy, mentorship, and the empowerment of women and all less-represented groups in technology. Good luck this summer, coders!”
innoQ offers technology consulting, software development, architecture know-how and trainings and is keen to share.
Phillip Ghadir, CTO at InnoQ on their support: “We strongly believe that tech careers begin with curiosity and love for programming. We support Rails Girls Summer of Code because we’d like to help the participants to discover their passion for coding like we did ourselves. In the long run, everybody will benefit from increasing diversity in IT.”
ThoughtWorks is a bunch of passionate technologists. Providing software, pioneering tools and consulting for organizations with ambitious missions. Thoughtworks has provided a welcoming workplace for at least one of our former SoC participants.
Dawanda is no-doubt THE marketplace for unique and handmade items. Not only were they Bronze Sponsors, they also hosted us for our awesome kickoff BBQ,
and made sure we got the program off to a great and memorable start!
Carnes Media is a five strong group of designers, developers, and troublemakers with secret lives as jugglers, archaeologists, dancers, and novelists. Hanging out around Bellingham, Washington, they follow our program closely.
Cloud Control supercharges development with their European Platform as a Service.
Elizabeth Osterloh and Philipp Strube at Cloud Control on their support: “We think this is the perfect way to get more women involved in software development – and we’re proud to be one of the sponsors for such an excellent initiative.”
Paymill makes online payments fast and easy. With a diverse international team, and a passionate drive to bring even more diversity to tech, the wanted to help make Summer of Code of code happen.
Jörg Sutara, Co-Founder PAYMILL on their support: “We believe that developer communities help us in improving our products through their interaction & curiosity. We support Rails Girls Summer of Code as it is an great initiative for awesome people and for the future - we’re wishing everyone a great time and that you’ll never stop being curious!”
Shannon Welling from Groupon on their support: “Groupon is a company built largely with open source software - from rails, ruby, java, node, and others, we rely heavily on open source technologies to innovate in our daily work and encourage our engineers to give back to the OSS community. Community matters to us on an internal, local and global scale. It’s fundamental to our company’s growth, and to the well-being of the world at large, which is why we’re excited to once again sponsor Rails Girls Summer of Code.”
Our bronze sponsors deserve a huge thank you for coming out in number to support Rails Girls Summer of Code.
We salute them for the contributions. Next up, our silver sponsors!
