As we are both graduates from technical studies, we have first hand experience of how scarce women in technical studies and jobs are. The Rails Girls Summer of Code has given us the perfect opportunity to have some great first hand experience as developers.
We really stand behind the Rails Girls Summer of Code. We have never heard of or experienced a better way to get started as a woman developer. Often we hear from CTOs that they want to employ more women, but none have applied. Obviously, we hope to change that!
We appreciate the opportunity we were given very much. Through the Rails Girls Summer of Code, we not only have had the opportunity to get to know the exciting start-up scene of Berlin a little better, we also see the actual day to day work of a great IT company and their development teams. It is a bit like Christmas. We can ask as many questions as we want and always get amazing help from professional developers.
The support of all the different organizations and generous people have been overwhelming. We have very involved mentors, Anja and Maren, who can tell us all about the Speakerinnen platform. And Erik and Duana from Soundcloud who volunteered to do code reviews with us. Also, we have our great coaches from 6Wunderkinder, such as Chad, Duncan, Nathan, Ryan, Hans, Bruno, Aditya, Stefan, Dennis and many more. A team of at least 20 excellent developers and other supporting co-workers who know it all ;-)
Our supervisor in Sweden, Björn, who is available to us for all matters around the RGSoC. And the RGSoC organizers who are the ones that have been at our side the whole time and held up good spirit and opened up networking possibilities by e.g. handing out tickets to conferences, organizing parties and a boat trip. We are so glad they picked us and thereby allowed us to have this great experience.
As you can see, the Rails Girls get all possible support.
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
We read about the program over the internet. And were both excited from the start. Participating would give us the opportunity to take time explicitly reserved to find out what the magic about developing is all about.
What was your happiest moment?
Writing code that actually contributed to the Speakerinnen project for the first time. Since this project is enabling our fellow women to speak at all kinds of events independent of their origin and their education. The speakerinnen platform supports women and event organizers to get together and network directly and easily.
What was most challenging moment?
Figuring out what tasks would fit best for the RGSoC - ones that were not too difficult, but which are interesting enough to challenge us. In our first few weeks we jumped right in Test Driven Development. This was exciting because it was our first experience with Behaviour Driven Development and it gave us our first steps into the codebase.
If you could code anything in the world, what would it be?
The speakerinnen_liste project is quite amazing, since it enables women to stand up and talk about their interests and competences. I guess we are very lucky to be in a project like this. And we plan to contribute to it, even after our RGSoC is over.
Moi, we are Cathy Nangini and Qian Zhou from Helsinki, Finland. This is our first time with RGSoC and we are quite passionate about our RGSoC journey. We are working on Participate frontend, a democratic participation platform based on LiquidFeedback,
an open source system used for internal decision making and policy creation. The platform is built with Ember.js for the front-end and will use Grape (ruby) for the API backend. Oliver Barnes is our project mentor, Miika Pihjala and Mukesh Thakur are our coaches, and Floor Drees is our project supervisor.
Cathy: I am a data scientist who has studied physics, geo- and bio-physics and uses scientific computing for data analysis. I started learning Rails at the first RG workshop in Helsinki in 2011. I loved the idea of being able to create and build web projects. The workshop gave me confidence and motivated me to dive into Rails further. After I completed Code School’s Rails for Zombies courses (Level 1 and 2), I developed my first simple app called the Happy OMeter. Later on, my friends and I built a social network platform that allows friends to coordinate the transport of gifts and other small personal items when they travel. It expanded my Rails knowledge and understanding of the MVC architecture, but many questions still remain. There is no doubt that RGSoC has furthered my skills. I am now quite addicted to open source and figuring out those features, and it’s great to work with Qian to hash out the never-ending mysteries of code.
Qian: I am a computer sicence student whose sepcilization is Networking and Services. I am eager to learn new programming languages in my free time. At the beginning of 2014, I self-studied Ruby at Codeacademy just for fun. This inspired me to learn Rails for Zombies (Level 1 and 2) by Code School. After that my curiosity about Ruby on Rails became stronger. Around February, I joined an event called SomeJam and cooperated with other team members to create a Rails application called Let’s Do It. It was only two days but I wished it was longer so that I could practice more. One day, I accidentally saw Rails Girls news and I became super excited about it. RGSoC exactly provides an awesome opportunity for me. Naturally, the next thing was to find a pair and some coaches. Rails Girls also gives me the chance to know my pair Cathy and coach Miika.
What have we achieved so far?
Emberjs. We both started from zero background in terms of emberjs. At the beginning, we were confused by its multiple models, routes, controllers and templates. Now we have a better understanding and know how to use them properly.
Knowledge of ember testing. We use Mocha and Chai for our testing, which we had never heard of before RGSoC. Now we use it frequently and know how to write tests and apply the idea of TDD/BDD.
App features. Currently we have implemented features on issues, initiatives, and suggestions, i.e., how to create them, how to list them and how to link them to the proper page, and so on. We are also on the way to creating a dashboard soon.
Knowledge of ember cli. We made our app with ember cli, which gives us command-line capabilities.
Knowledge of emblem. We use emblem as template engine, which is built on handlebars. Emblem is an added learning curve because we are not familiar with handlebars, and it is not always easy to translate template code in handlebars into emblem. Now we are getting used to using emblem.
Becoming Github professionals. We are now quite used to performing various GitHub gymnastics such as rebasing, squashing, resloving conflicts, etc. (but sometimes it still acts mysteriously).
Problem solving and troubleshooting ability. When we have problems, we first Google, Google, Google, then read related ember documents and stackoverflow. Later on, if we still cannot figure it out, we ask for help from the coaches, the campfire helpdesk from RGSoC and the emberjs IRC channel. In terms of troubleshooting, we maninly use Ember Inspector. We can also now understand the error messages better than at the beginning, and we know how to react according to the given error.
Good documentation habits. We use a shared Google document to record important information, tips and tricks about the project such as: GitHub commands, useful material and links, code for implementing some feature, and so on. It’s an accumulated treasure for us.
What tips do we want to share about our Participate journey?
Make keypoint notes when learning something new for things that are used frequently. For example, GitHub commands like rebasing and squashing.
Good to review and read the Ember guide, Mocha and Chai documents and other learning materials over and over again. You’ll always learn new things even if you read the same thing many times.
Be patient and it’s ok to slow down. Sometimes you may get stuck on one feature for three days or more. Don’t be panic that you aren’t making progress. Making the code work is the result, but the process of reading documents, Googling and asking for help to solve the problem is also valuable. You obtain accumulated knowledge while searching for a solution.
Good to explain questions clearly when asking questions. Aside from asking for help from our coaches, we also ask for help from the campfire desk and emberjs channel. It’s good to express your problem in clear way, so helpers could give related suggestions and solutions. Sometimes we use gist to post our specific problem.
What will we do next for the project?
Front-end
- Voting
- Delegation of votes to other users
- Login
Back-end
- Login
- Vote weight processing
And we are always looking for new contributors, so please, join us!
Follow us on twitter or read our blog for the daily details :)
We are Akanksha Agrawal and Sana Khan, Information Technology graduates from College of Engineering Pune. We got introduced to FOSS and Open Source from COEP’s Free Software Users Group (CoFSUG).
Sana: During my sophomore year, MiniDebConf India happened at our college and that got me introduced to Debian Packaging. Met a lot of awesome people in the Debian India community. Learning from them, was able to make contributions to LibreOffice hyphenation packages for Indian Languages. An year ahead, took a few sessions along with other contributors. Love the Debian India Community and would love to make more contributions :) While attending packaging sessions for packaging gem dependencies for Diaspora, I got introduced to Ruby on Rails. Thats how I began to learn Ruby and Rails to package a Diaspora gem dependency into Debian.
Akanksha: Concept of FOSS was introduced to me by our college’s open source group. Attending open source seminars and workshops has always been my passion. I got introduced to Ruby on Rails in the Rails Girls Pune event. Also attended the Rails 4.1 Release Party where I met our coaches Nishant Modak, Vipul Amler and Prathamesh Sonpatki. Got fascinated with the language and Rails and applied for Rails Girls Summer of Code so as to start contributing to open source.
What are we working on
We are working on making a memory visualizer tool for Rubinius. Hence we are called ‘Team Rubinius’.
Heap dump is one of the most important analysis tools for troubleshooting or fixing high memory usage problems by identifying the root cause of memory leaks in Ruby applications. Rubinius provides a heap dump interface which allows for analysis of memory dump of Rubinius. Our project aims at utilizing the information available from the heap dump file and displaying this information in a graphical way through a visualization tool that helps the user explore the memory usage of their application.
Learning so far
Starting with basic concepts of Ruby, we studied the internals of Rubinius such as object structures, how array objects are represented internally, types of objects and their memory layout.
We then went on to read and understand the heap dump code and well as the Gauge Application code. We tried out different example codes to identify memory leaks.
We learned how Garbage Collectors work, what is Mark and Sweep Garbage Collection and how that is different from Generational Garbage Collection.
We also learned about how memory leaks occur. We now know that memory leaks are possible even when you have a garbage collector which does things to avoid leaks whenever possible.
Learned how memory visualizers work. Worked with VisualVM, Jhat and Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT).
And there is still so much to learn.. :)
Progress so far
We started with understanding the format of the Json file generated by the heap dump tool to be able to use it to generate visualization in d3.js.
The Json file had too much information for visualization, so we played around with the heap dump code to generate our own reduced data-sets. One major issue we faced was that the number of objects and their related information was too huge that it would either clutter up the visualization or make the browser slow in rendering it.
With inputs from our mentor we started to work on the diff of two heap dumps. We are now working on displaying the instance view in a histogram based visualization representing what percentage of objects are consuming how much memory.
On August 28th, 2014, after almost two months of full-time coding, we recommended to our students that they take a day off. It was a wonderful opportunity for everyone to get their minds off gems, classes, and variables, to take a breath and recharge. Here’s some of the stuff that happened that day.
In Berlin, the lovely people from Applift wanted to do more than sponsoring RGSoC. So they came up with the crazy idea of doing a houseboat trip, since their CEO had just bought himself one. Of course, we immediately jumped on board (pun intended, ba-dum-tsssssh!) the idea to take out the Berlin teams for a spin around Tegeler See. With the weather being on its best behaviour that day, we enjoyed ourselves with food, drinks, talks and gazing across the water. Initially, we planned to have a lightning talk about depression & burn out and a big group discussion about how to handle stress at work and for everybody to share their coping mechanisms. But we immediately felt so relaxed on the boat, that we decided to really take the day off. Also for us organizers. So we hung around, talked a bit with everyone and shared a very relaxing day, which was so wonderfully planned. A big thanks goes to Sarah, Peter, Linda and Therese from the HitFox Group and Norbert, the skipper, for making this a beautiful day to remember.
Over in Bogotá, Paola from Team ARIA had a little chat with the geese at a farm while her pair, Melipao, hopefully had a day that was just as relaxing - in spite of the weather not looking too promising in Barraquilla, by the Caribbean Sea.
In Vienna, our organizers Floor and Laura gave up on trying to find a house boat to celebrate the day off, and put their baking skills to good use for a cupcake feast instead. Proof below!
Meanwhile in Warsaw, Team Species+’s Magdalena went for a walk in the forest and Karolina spend the whole day reading (we know what you’re thinking, but no: no coding related literature was involved). Apparently, the day off has come just at the right time for them: “Yes, it was really necessary day. Now we feel as if we have more room in our brains…”
And to all the other students: We hope all of you had a wonderful day, too! <3
(Pictures by 