Travis CI is an open source company, based in beautiful Berlin. They build a hosted continuous integration service which is integrated with GitHub and supports a multitude of programming languages, like Python, Go, PHP, Java, C++… and of course Ruby! And I think it’s fair to say that without Travis, there would not have been a Rails Girls Summer of Code, as they took on lead support and organization.
Anika - from now on referred to as ‘Chief Spread the Word’ of Rails Girls Summer of Code - wrote a cool post on the Travis blog the other day, on how our ‘founders’ went from ‘dream to 19 scholarships in under 3 months’. Which is indeed a huge accomplishment and worthy of a BIG thank you!
Team Inchworms found a suitable way to thank the Travis CI team for their efforts (spoiler alert: they baked a Travis CI cake and there are awesome gifs involved!!)
It’s truly amazing what happened after Sven gave a lightning talk at a Rails Girls Berlin workshop at Wooga in late March. The idea to organize a Summer of Code to get more women in open source spread like wildfire. Sven has been working on getting RGSoC off the ground and the whole Travis team contributed - Konstantin is even a mentor of Team Inchworms, who work on Sinatra.
The story about Travis CI and Rails Girls Summer of Code. How this all started and how magic happens.
This is one of the reasons why we just love them. Read on, dearest friends!
For me coding is freedom. Freedom from the corporate world, from being tied to one city, from an office, from a 9 to 5 lifestyle, and most importantly - freedom TO be creative. This is why I started coding - to be able to live the life I’ve dreamed about without resigning from my professional aspirations while expressing my creativity.
Rails Girls Summer of Code was the best thing that could happen on my way to ultimate nerdiness. I have chosen impress.js , one of the most starred open source projects on GitHub. Impress.js was created by my awesome, dedicated mentor, Bartek. It is a JavasScript framework for building presentations using an HTML5 canvas. That means a lot of JavaScript. As an aspiring front end developer it has been a perfect project for me.
For the last two months I had the opportunity to write some juicy JS code. I was developing new features for impress.js - plugins for automatically generated layouts, substeps and more. And then came the idea to create an application for end users to create presentations. I created a Rails application that generates the code for a presentation based on the user’s choices. The prototype is already working, but my imagination for additional features is endless. Luckily, I still have some time to make it more awesome. You can read about the progress on my blog.
If I could code anything in the world I would bootstrap my lucrative startup. This is not a dream, it’s a plan :).
A big thanks to the people who rescued me from beginner frustration and helped me understand what is going on: Bartek, John, Chris, Mateusz - you saved my passion for coding. Thank you!
A few days ago, we put together a conferece survival kit for you, dearest students.
Now you know almost everything there is to know and we are sure, you’ll return from your adventures safe and sound and unharmed.
But we also have a cherry on top for you (what’s a survival kit without, right? ;)
Here it comes.. say ahhh!
###Rails Girls Summer of Code Slides for you!
A big thank you to Floor, who put them together and a lot of love into them.
They look amazing and include everything you need to have for your talk. Wonderful, right?
Important here is that these slides include slides with our sponsors at the end. If you use your own slide (which you still can, of course!) please mention the platinum sponsors Github, Travis and our gold sponsors Tilde, 37signals, SoundCloud and Google Open Source at the end of your talk on an extra slide, since they are the reason we can have this georgeous Summer of Code! ♥
###Speaker Coaches coach you to speak
Of course, that’s not all! We want to thank these awesome people who have offered to be your speaker coaches.
They will help you review your slides, practise your talk, give feedback and any other magic trick they have up their sleeves for giving a great talk. Some of you already met them, some we still have to connect for the upcoming confs:
★ Tiffany Conroy
★ Juliane Peterson
★ Caroline Drucker
★ Chad Fowler ★
★ Josh Kalderimis
★ Patrik Huesler
★ Tim Lossen
★ Arne Brasseur ★
★ Dirkjan Bussink
★ Paul Klipp ★
Put your hands up for them, because they are just awesome for doing this! And we are very very sure, you’ll now not only survive your conferences, but make them to the best of your summer!
We are Pallavi and Sakshi Team Diasbits from India. The name Diasbits, as we are contributing a bit to diaspora*, the privacy-aware, decentralized social network. Also, Diasbits, came to our mind as assembling bits of diaspora* to enhance its developement.
Sakshi: I had started coding in Ruby a few months before I got to know about RGSoC. The Rails Girls Summer of Code was introduced to me by our coach Arihant. I applied for RGSoC to get in touch with the open source and do wonders.
Pallavi: I heard it from FSMK(Free Software Movement, Karnataka) mailing list. I was always interested in working on web applications and wanted to start with Ruby on Rails.
The Rails Girls Summer of Code encouraged us to get hold of Ruby, Rails, Git workflow, Jekyll.
Already 2 months of the summer of code have come to an end, and we are now in a situation to stand confident and present our work of this entire duration.
So far, we have been able to finish our project on Rails Girls Rails App Generator. We created a Jekyll Bootstrap based website that contains the links to some cool Rails tutorials.
The mid-July to mid-August, was a period of workshops, seminars, meetings, interactions and what not. :) We attended the Rails Girls workshop, Mysore, Rails Girls event, Bangalore, Jaipur Ruby users group meetup, FSMK (Blender sessions, 9 days workshop).
We chose to work for Rails Girls App Generator as it seemed to be easy for the beginners and diaspora* because it gives us immense exposure to open source and to the concept of decentralization of data.
Our happiest moment was when we got selected for RGSoC and we are the only team from India who made through :)
If we could code anything in the worldPallavi: I would love to code a phone book app for my Dad because he writes in his diary and keeps searching for it.
Sakshi: I’d code to make a machine that would insert the whole book into my memory in one sec, so that I don’t have to cram anything during exams :P
