We are team Highway to Rails. We chose the name because of the ACDC song “Highway to Hell”. When you replace the word “hell” with “rails”, it really sounds like we’re doing something incredibly exciting, which, of course, we are!
“Don’t need reason, don’t need rhyme
Ain’t nothing I would rather do
Going down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too
I’m on the highway to RAILS.”
We heard about RGSoC first and foremost on twitter, but we’re also members of a weekly Rails Girls project group in Berlin, so news quickly spread. We applied because we’re both at a sort of turning point in our lives: we want to change career paths, we’re interested in coding and technology, and it sounds like fun.
Unfortunately we weren’t accepted to the summer of code. However, we had already found a place to work (tables in the IT department at Absolventa) and a couple coaches (Carsten and Felix, developers at Absolventa). Luckily, the company was as sad about us not getting in as we were, and were nice enough to create two internship positions for us. So now we’re summer of code volunteer students, working full time on a project called event_girl that Absolventa will hopefully use when it’s done.
Event_girl is the brainchild of the Absolventa IT department. Since they’re sponsoring us, it makes sense to work on something they have knowledge about/is useful to them. But don’t worry, it’s still open source! (painfully so… our commit history at this point is insane). Event_girl is a way for an individual person or company to keep track of a bunch of tasks happening in the background of a system, set restrictions such as date/time/frequency, and check to make sure various tasks are being fulfilled, or (and this is the hard part) aren’t being fulfilled.
We’ve started our our app from scratch, and so far we’ve laid the foundations with twitter bootstrap, a couple models/view/controllers, set the restrictions, nested our resources, and done some testing with Rspec. This week we started looking into Action Mailers and our app actually sent us an email!
Happiest moments:
Tam’s happiest moment so far isn’t anything specific, but rather, a kind of ritual. Carsten writes various things for us to do on index cards, and then when we finish them, we rip them up and put them in a glass. It’s a great feeling to look at that index card, know we’ve done the somewhat confusing thing written on it successfully, and then rip it up and put it away. At the end of the summer we’re going to throw them in the air and dance around in the ensuing mess (and then clean it all up).
Susanne’s happiest moment so far was when Absolventa said they’d sponsor both of us as RGSoC volunteers! She also enjoys the feeling of finally being able to (kind of) understand what the model-view-controller is all about.
If you could code anything:
Tam loves audio and making podcasts, and has a mini dream of making an app where users can upload field sounds they record directly onto a corresponding map. Things like this already kind of exist, but not to the extent she’s looking for.
Susanne still wants to program an app where people around the globe can add favourite bakeries onto a map. They could add specifications like “sells dark bread”, “sells pretzels”, “sells gluten free bread” and so on. (Susanne is German, so whenever she travels she really missed German bread.)
Because it’s weekend, we have a very special hug for you - a mix between a crocodile hug and a dragonball-power-spell. We figure, everybody can use one of these once in a while (especially while coding!;)
Hugging here are: Organizer
Anika, Mentor
Andy and Organizer
Floor
Soo, what’s been going on this week?
The Conference call! Did you pick your favorite ones yet? You have until monday 12:00 pm to tweet us your whishlist (no, we are not Santa, but we’re trying really hard to ;) )
Team Hackety Hack is preparing a screencast, Team Species+ got visits from McGuyver and Indiana Jones,
Diasbits know more about Jekyll than-you-do and New Rosies are offering you a sneak peek at their newly created Rack framework (which they’ll release on GitHub soon-ish).
Do you love this as much as we do? The video is proving once again that we have nothing to prove: Women can be geeks, too! Make sure to check it out! Maybe some of you want to submit your own crazy picture to http://geekgirlvideo.tumblr.com/ (and represent Rails Girls Summer of Code!).
At Rails Girls Summer of Code you work hard and learn new stuff every day, for
3 months, a summer full of love and code.
To make this an even more complete experience for you we’d like you to join a
nice conference. Enjoy the great vibe, learn a few new things from the talks, chat with fantastic people and get to know the lovely community!
For this we have been offered no less than 55 free tickets at fantastic
conferences on 3 different continents for you. On top of that some conferences
even include free flights and hotel, too. And all of them are very worth
visiting!
Everyone who has applied for Rails Girls Summer of Code as a student can apply for this, no matter if your application has been selected.
We are Laura and Nicole, a.k.a. Team Rails Grrls. We started our Summer of Code in Mid-June at the Soundcloud HQ office in Berlin.
After the first few weeks of getting more familiar with Ruby, Rails and programming concepts in general, last week we couldn’t wait to get started with our first project, the Rails Apps Learners Directory. So far, we’ve set up an authentication system through GitHub and added a rating feature (without using a gem!).
Why ‘Rails Grrls’? What does the name mean?
It’s a reference to the Riot Grrrl punk rock movement that started in the early 90’s. Feminism isn’t dead and we want to spread the word that feminists rule.
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
We both heard about the SoC at the RailsGirls Anniversary Workshop on May 4th this year.
Laura: I want to apply my coding skills to projects for social justice - coding websites and other tech things that need doing. My background is in nonprofits working with queer and gender non-conforming youth, and I want to be able to go back to those movements with more skills to offer.
Nicole: I applied because I want to become a software developer and think the project will give me a good foundation to get started with.
What are you working on?
The first project is to build a crowdsourced directory of Rails-learning resources within RailsApps. The open source community will be able to post, rate and categorize the resources.
The second project will be to build our own programming language using Rubinius and document the process as a tutorial for others.
What is your happiest moment so far?
Everytime we fix something we get an adrenaline rush (and do a high-five). And sometimes we get cookies from our coaches…
If you could code anything in the world, what would it be?
Nicole: I would use my skills to contribute something meaningful to this world. Sounds cheesy, I know, but it’s the truth.
Laura: I would code an app that would swallow Facebook and Google and make them less evil. Kidding, kind of :P
