Many of you get to attend a conference as part of your Summer of Code. Else you might also go to local meetups or user goups. For all of these, we highly encourage you to share your story in a lightning talk and spread the Rails Girls word. A lightning talk (usually about 5 minutes long) is a perfect way to show people you’re there, share your knowledge, inspire others with your story and get in touch with many wonderful and interesting people.
Talking to a large group of people, especially those more experienced than you, might feel like a large hurdle to cross. This is completely normal, even the most seasoned speakers still carry that feeling with them when they go on stage. Remember that everyone has to start somewhere, and lightning talks are the best ‘somewhere’. There is even a conference dedicated to lightning talks!
“But what am I supposed to talk about? I only just started!”
Well, the talk could be about your project and your contribution, how you found out about the project, why you decided to take on this task, the overall Rails Girls movement (there are still so many women out there who wanna learn coding and seldom have the chance to do so), the motivations to learn coding and sometimes change your complete life path along with it, … The options are endless!
It doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re talking tech or social. Lightning talks are designed to be a kind of “have a sneak peak at this little thingy” chat.
Alright, let’s talk!
There’s a massive amount of tips & tricks out there how you can prepare for a talk. We gathered those in “How to go to a conference”. There you can also find helpful nuggets on how to prepare your talk. They’re especially useful when that flutter says ‘hi’ again.
In addition to those:
Try out your slides at home or within your team. Get familiar with different projector types, speaker notes (they can come in handy) and timers so you know how much time you have left to convince the crowd of your amazing project!
Try and put as little text as possible on your slides and have them support your chat in a visual way. We are all visual people and like nice pictures of you (two) coding, or a screenshot of your commit bar on GitHub ;)
We will prepare a slide deck with some factoids and numbers about Rails Girls Summer of Code. Shoot us a mail if you'd like to have that as a template!
Sweet, now I only need a time and a place
To get you talk on the agenda, contact the conference organizers about the possibilities. We could also get you in contact with them - just ask us!
Alternatively: many conferences have a CfP (Call for Papers) where you can submit your talk proposal. It should have a choosing where you say how long your talk’s supposed to be. If it hasn’t got a separate checkbox for this, you can also add questions to your description or write an email to the organizers.
A lightning talk is a great way to get some stage experience. And it’s over before you know it - promised ;)
If you know more great tips, please add them in the comments!
Photo Credits (from left to right and upper to lower row)
Get your twitter clients ready and join the rafflemania!
Like last year, a number of exciting conferences have offered free (team) tickets for you - the Rails Girls Summer of Code students. We heard wonderful stories from our students last year about how they made new friends, valuable connections, learned heaps and had tons of fun.
So we couldn’t help but do it again! By now, we have 26 tickets to 13 amazing conferences and we’re still adding more.
Since some of them already take place mid-program, we decided to do an early raffle-out now, followed by a second one later this summer. So, IF you end up empty-handed, don’t worry, you will get another shot! ;)
How to get your hands on those awesome tickets
We need you to tweet which conferences (find out their twitter handles on their websites) you’d like to attend - ordered by 1st choice, 2nd choice etc. - be sure to mention @Railsgirlssoc, so that we can see your tweet and take it into the raffle.
These are two examples, how this could look like:
###Hey @Railsgirlssoc We would love to attend @arrrrcamp, @eurucamp and @rulu.
(and alternatively add #wishfulthinking #LOL).
###My Conf Wishlist for this summer: @SteelCityRuby and @frozenrails via @Railsgirlssoc.
By sending the tweet you automatically take part in the competition. Make sure you send your tweet by Monday July 28 12:00 (AM) CEST. We’ll announce the winners shortly after.
You can choose from any of the below mentioned conferences. Please keep in mind, that these tickets don’t include travel costs or accomodation, so better chose a conference near you or one where you could afford a travel to.
What to do at the conference?
First of all, we want you to be amazed and inspired. A conference is one of the best places to learn heaps of stuff and talk to wonderful people.
Secondly, amaze the other attendees! We strongly recommend you to give a lightning talk and share the love of programming and your Summer of Code story. This is an important step to help us spread the word to even more seasoned programmers about the great opportunities of Rails Girls. Many conferences have slots for lightning talks, we can help you get in touch with the organizers. In a next post we’ll give you some tips & tricks on how to ace a 5 minute talk like that.
We recently announced how a bunch of awesome Tealeaf students and alumni will help this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code participants get the answers-they-need. Today we are excited to share that Hashrocket will also be joining our helpdesk team on Campfire. Committing to 10 hours per week for the entire span of the program, at least one Hashrocketeer will hang out in our support room between 14:00 and 22:00 UTC - every day!
Joshua - Josh - Davey from Hashrocket on their involvement:
“Rails Girls Summer of Code is something we’ve been following, and we are really happy to be a part of the program this year. We’re excited to help the students learn more about Rails and see the cool projects that come out of the program.”
And that’s not all. Hashrocket supports Rails Girls Summer of Code as a Silver sponsor AND offered to be a Coaching Company. Hashrocket builds solutions for the Web, iPhone and iPad, and specializes in Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android development. Again, It’s great to have them help us out!
Please join us!
We are always looking for more people to join the helpdesk.
In case you are interested, please register via our Teams application and specify your role as “Helping as a remote coach (helpdesk)”. Then sign in to our Campfire chat room, and you’re good to go!
The Remote Helpdesk was part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code concept right from the beginning. Coaches who are not assigned to a team (or just want to help even more) check in on the Helpdesk chat room to assist students with … any question they might have, should their local coaches not be immediately available.
Because both the students and remote coaches were located all around the globe, at least someone would be online at any time. And it did work reasonably well last year. But we think that’s not good enough. Our Remote Helpdesk wasn’t structured very well, and sometimes coaches weren’t actually available. On top of that we used IRC which isn’t accessible enough to newcomers.
Building a better Remote Helpdesk with Tealeaf Academy
So we decided to up the remote helpdesk to another level. We’ll be using Campfire this year, which is not only more accessible and nicer to look at, we can also paste screenshots more easily.
Apart from the tooling we are also very excited to announce that Tealeaf will be managing the Remote Helpdesk this year, and a number of Tealeaf students will be joining and give support on Campfire. The Tealeaf Academy offers Ruby on Rails Online Bootcamps and excels in teaching programming remotely.
We are thrilled to have some of the Tealeaf junior join our helpdesk because we ourselves learned the most when explaining things to someone who is only slightly less advanced. And they are dying to help create useful contributions to Open Source, so we think this idea fits the Rails Girls Summer of Code concepts very well.
You can find the list of our Remote Coaches here on our Teams application.
Please join us!
We are always looking for more people to join the helpdesk.
In case you are interested, please register via our Teams application and specify your role as “Helping as a remote coach (helpdesk)”. Then sign in to our Campfire chat room, and you’re good to go!
Last year a number of conferences offered (team) tickets to Rails Girls Summer of Code students. A few of them even supported the students with their travel costs and accommodation. We heard great stories from our students how they made new friends, valuable connections, learned heaps and had tons of fun.
This year around again 15 Ruby conference organizers offer tickets to their events. As RedDotRuby and Rulu take place before the official program we decided to raffle out these tickets to our alumni of last year (we will send you an email about this shortly, #youknowwhoyouare).
Attending a conference is the best way to meet the Ruby community - and for offering free tickets the above conferences desrve a big THANK YOU!
Are you an organizer of a Rails/Ruby related conference and would you like to give our students a similar (unforgettable) experience? Let me know: floor@railsgirls.com.
