And not just the weather. Girls Code MK was on fire with their Bahmni project.
Lots of learning, fun and motivation for the future
Quantitative measures of our project
Girls Code MK Infographic (Drawn by Georgina Hodgkinson)
Summary
We have had a great time. We have learnt so much. A 90 day - 3 month sprint to focus has helped us learn far more than if we spent the time doing a course or boot camp. Having a real project, with real problems changes how you learn. It has also gone faster than what we thought. We will now refer to life before and after RGSoC!
Highlights
As our infographic shows the quantitative measures of our RGSoc. The qualitative measures have been far greater. We have laughed, we have struggled with problems, we have found out what we are capable of, we have learnt about ourselves as much as code, we have achieved more than we thought we could. We have tasted success of a project that met its objective and we are proud to demo and show others. Our confidence of learning code, talking about technical projects and discussing what problems we are having and also being more comfortable in saying that we don’t know but know how to find out.
Setting up and improving our working environment
We spent time at the beginning of the project setting up how we would work and our working environment. We put our schedules together and worked out the best times for us to meet, work together and zoom or google hangout with our coaches, mentors and supervisors.
At times we needed to refine and change and open communication was our key to a successful team.
Richard Branson “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!” So if you are doubting you are good enough. If you get the opportunity say YES and learn how to do it, you won’t regret it!
If you get the chance to apply for RGSoC do it. You won’t regret it.
To learn it takes patience, support and space to grow. We have had all 3 of these during RGSoC.
We all learn at a different pace, in different ways but we all have something to offer and we learn more when we share with each other. RGSoC has a great community and alumni.
Life after RGSoC
Georgina has gained in confidence to learn more in the field of software engineering, give more talks and continue to inspire other women and girls into software engineering. The next steps for Georgina, is to attend the React.js conference in Verona in October, look at attending the Node.js conference. Georgina is on the technical path of the toastmaster course to gain more skills in talking in public and to larger audiences. Georgina will also create and pitch her MVP app and present for investment and funding in 2019.
Eva will continue to divide her time between coding and GirlsCode MK including organising Django Girls MK, CryptoParty MK and Ada Lovelace Wikipedia-edit-a-thon. GirlsCode MK has also been accepted to a local accelerator starting October - so that we can make it even better and bigger in the future! With her new-gained coding skills, Eva has already landed a couple of projects that she will take on after RGSoC. And, of course, there’s Bahmni!
We are both going to do a demo of our project at Thought Works office in London and will be streamed to their Berlin office on 2 November.
Friends Made
Other teams of RGSoC on slack, coaches, mentors and organisers of RGSoC, we have your links on social media and hope to continue to follow you.
Last post would not be complete without …
THANK YOUS
Thank you to
Supervisor:
Ramon who met us weekly, checking in and making sure our welfare was good. He was always positive, we loved his support and smiles on a Monday morning - far better than any coffee!
Mentors:
Ivo - for his unfailing guidance, the right balance of learning but also guiding so we didn’t become overwhelmed. His weekly meetings, feedback on our code and management of the project. His dedication to writing stories and providing us with information even during his wedding season! Congratulations to his friends that got married over summer.
Wolf - for such a warm introduction and getting us started with the Bahmni project especially giving up your lunch times.
Coaches:
Neil - for all his knowledge and his fabulous git workshop
Kalan - for his guidance especially on testing
PJ and Rob for helping during girls code sessions.
RGSoC Organisers : for setting up RGSoC meetups, organising tickets for conferences, all the admin work that goes into organising these summers. You Rock!!
Ana Sofia
Anna
Vaishali
Bahmni Project specific - Thoughtworks: For their patience and time for letting us help out on their project that they have a keen interest in.
Angshu
Konrad
Sruti
Thank you to our family for their unwavering support and putting up with our mood swings when code wasn’t working or we couldn’t work things out!
Girls Code MK Door Poster (Drawn by Eva's wife - Valerie Benguiat)
You can continue to follow our journey after RGSoC here:
Let's celebrate RGSoC 2018 all over the world! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)
It’s September 19th and we are less than two weeks away for RGSoC to be over — this is probably the countdown we are least fond of. However, as we approach September 30th, we realize how many good things came up from the summer like the community support and the amazing growth of our students. We couldn’t be more proud of them! And we also couldn’t be more thankful of everyone’s dedication to our students and RGSoC.
So let’s celebrate all of this! Let’s celebrate us getting together and making tech and OSS more inclusive for everyone! Let’s celebrate making dreams come true! Wherever we are, let’s organize an event — it can be big or small — and invite our friends. We created a list on this repo, so that you can add your even info or check for information about any events in your location.
Another important thing: let’s keep in touch! When you publish your posts on social media about the events or even messages that you want to share about the summer of code, please add the hashtag #RGSoC so that we can all see it.
Berlin Event at ThoughtWorks
Who is welcome?: everyone is welcome! Supporters, sponsors, past and current participants, mentors, coaches! What: An evening with food, soft drinks, and time to chat. When: Saturday, 29th of September 2018, 6–9pm CEST. Where: Thoughtworks Berlin (Zimmerstr. 23, near Checkpoint Charlie). The venue is wheelchair-accessible. Drinks/Food: This will be a no-alcohol event, there will be vegetarian food and several non-alcoholic drinks. Please let us know about any food allergies or dietary restrictions in advance, so we can cater to you.
RSVP
If you’d like to attend, please RSVP here by Wednesday, September 26th with a comment (and let us know if you are bringing a +1 +2 +3…). If you don’t have a GitHub account, or don’t feel comfortable sharing this information publicly, you can RSVP by email: laura@travis-ci.org.
Code of Conduct
This event is organized under the Berlin Code of Conduct, please read it carefully and only attend if you agree and abide by this. We will enforce the CoC.
Welcoming underrepresented minorities to tech and Open Source is more than learning to code, it is also introducing people to a community, preferably into a group of people who can welcome them safely. Bringing someone who wouldn’t be able to go to a conference because they live on the other side of the world or don’t have money to attend the event, is doing exactly that. And bit by bit, we are transforming our community into the community we want to be part of.
We are profoundly grateful for all of the conference organizers who are as committed as we are to make tech more diverse and inclusive. A huge THANK YOU to the conferences who gave away free tickets and made our students’ dreams come true, especially to those that have been supporting us through the years.
And you know what? There are discounts for you too! Check the RGSoC Promo codes of the conferences below.
We will be coming back soon with more conferences! ;)
Date: Nov 14-16, 2018 Location: Bangalore, India Twitter: @AnitaBorg_India
GHCI would like to invite our community who is interested in connecting with the best organizations in technology in India, by simply submitting your resume to the GHCI 18 Resume Database.
Note: even if you can't attend the Grace Hopper Celebration India (GHCI) 18 Career Fair career fair you can still submit your resume.
Starting a new adventure with RgSoC and Living Style Guide from coding newbies to professional front-end developers in 11 months.
Preparing ourselves before the summer begins (image by Diana Vilé)
Better Together
November 2017, we started as complete coding newbies, with as little coding knowledge as HTML can be. JavaScript, the word alone, felt like a entire new universe. We can’t even believe how much we have learned in the past 8 months! Coming from a non technical background and being able to code in so little time has been quite a journey. Yet, it made us realize we have definitely unknown abilities and a real passion for programming.
We started with a selected group of 20.000 out of 200.000 applications in Europe, Africa and Middle East region. Earning a full Google Scholarship for Front End Web Developer at Udacity was the fruit of this three months of dedication, hard work, discipline, cooperation with peers coders and taking actively part in a huge social community, in order to stand out and win our spot in the top 2.000 students (out of 20.000). We are now about to finish the last part: React.
RgSoC Coaches & Supervisor
During the Google Scholarship, we met several times in real life and decided to apply for RgSoc to be able to keep practicing our coding skills in summer. As we were new in the dev community, we reached out to our Udacity community managers who introduced us to Amanda Cavallaro. She helped us find our first two current RgSoc-coaches:
Coach 1: Tobias (React developer)
Tobias is a React developer and mentor who believes in helping juniors grow. He is based in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Coach 2: Tetiana (Ruby developer)
Tetiana is a Ruby in Rails expert and team leader (she has always wanted to be part of RGSoC!). She is based in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Skyping with Tobias and Tetiana, gave us the confidence they would have our backs! They not only seem very nice and accessible, but moreover have the attitude and experience needed to guide us through the summer.
Coach 3: Cristina (full stack developer)
The third RgSoc-coach to join, we met during a recently peer lab, that Violeta organized for Woman Who Code. We really liked her spirits and clarity so just a week before starting the SoC we invited her to be part of it. She is based in Barcelona, Spain.
Coach 4: Bright (React mobile developer)
Bright was introduced to us by Sujin from Team Sunshine when we needed help solving our project’s issues. He is very experienced with JavaScript and will be helping us during the summer too! He is based in Berlin, Germany.
*Coach 5: Tetiana is a Ruby developer and we needed some extra hands on JavaScript, so she introduced as to Bogdan! He is a JavaScript developer based in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He will be helping us close the issues before the summer ends.
We consider ourselves very lucky! As not only do we have gathered a great team of mentors, but also an interesting supervisor Lucas Pinto who has even organized Ruby conferences!
Living Style Guide
The Open Source project we have been selected for is Living Style Guide, which helps developers to create front-end style guides easily with SaSS and Markdown. The project has been created by Nico Hagenburger (Designer and programmer) with the help of Jen Geacone-Cruz (Content director). Right now it needs to be rewritten to and tested in Vanilla Javascript, which will be our main tasks, beside improving the documentation.
Summer and future Goals
We are looking forward to connect with the RgSoc-community, make our first ever contribution to open source (yay!!), hone our skills and learn many more. We are here to prove ourselves that we can do this! And hope to be ready to find a tech job when the summer is over.
Our summer will be successful, if we achieve the following:
July: plan, learn as much as we can, start contributing to Living Style Guide, connect with the RgSoc-community
August: keep working hard and make the best out of the summer!
September: finish as much as we can of the Javascript version & test of Living Style Guide
October: finish the last issues for LivingStyleGuide, PIMD project and hopefully start a new tech job as jr. front end web developers in Barcelona.
Finishing school was a little terrifying for us. The world seemed to be telling you that “you are now on your own”. And then you remember that unemployment in your country stands at 40%. Despite all that we were determined to stand out from the crowd and find our way up, only to realize that the only code one could write comfortably was “Hello World” but in different programming languages, that’s when it dawned on us that we had been carrying the name “Developer” on our back and not ready for the job market.
In this harsh world, something quick had to be done. We might have been a little late but we wanted to make a change in our lives. So we made a decision, a decision to concentrate on one programming language, putting all efforts on it. Talk of reading books, attending conferences on the same, helping others get started, hanging out around people with whom we shared the same interests and made them our mentors.
Programming languages (Photo credit: Google)
Thanks to Rails Girls Nairobi started by StellaMaris Njage,
Ceciliah Mbugua, Stella Ireri and Rachael Kiteme because this accelerated our development journey. It is here that our love for code grew. The discipline and commitment to code daily began. “It is also here that my Open Source Project contribution journey started” , Did we say that it is also here that we heard of the amazing Rails Girls Summer of Code program? Of course imposter syndrome tried to pull us back, but we had vowed to ourselves that we had to aim for the best that we could possibly be and this was a perfect opportunity. Nothing could stop us.
We made it! 🎉🎉🎉🎉
Tik Tok, The clock was ticking and July was fast approaching, and only two days to the commencement of the internship Stella lost her Laptop . That was really sad, but this didn’t stop us from getting started. What are friends for? Stella Ireri helped her with one. Yeah, she got set lucky enough to have our kick off call on time together and our new tech journey with RGSoC began!
So far the journey has been incredible. Everyday we learn, we solve challenges but most importantly we are having fun. Many thanks to our coaches, mentors and supervisors for making our journey smooth and enjoyable. We have no regrets being here because we are growing drastically each day as tech ladies and career wise. We are more than ready work with the community till the end of the summer and beyond. I can’t wait to see what I will have grown into. Am grateful to RGSoC community so far.
MEET THE TEAM
Team Akaringular: Stella and Rachael (Photo credit: Berry Mboya)
Rachael
Rachael is a Ruby on Rails developer with interest in javascript, .net and css. She has a passion for design (yeah!) She makes very nice logos, designs t-shirts and stickers. Fun fact: She enjoys hiking, gaming and anything that gets her adrenaline high. Twitter @rachaelkiteme
Stella
Stella is a backend Ruby on Rails developer. She loves solving problems and communities. In fact she is a very active member of Nairuby and co-organizer of Rails Girls Nairobi. Fun Fact: She loves travelling a lot. A place with a large water body or one with many trees, or any beautiful place provided by mother nature is her ideal destination and a perfect place to relax. Twitter: @stlmaris
How we met
Bsc. Mathematics and Computer Science at Maseno University brought us together. We shared four walls for fours years. We immediately clicked and have been good friends since then. Fast forward… after campus, Rails Girls Nairobi re-united us.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
EBWiki means EndBiasWiki. This is a open source project aimed at racial bias, the frequency with which it occurs and how bias affect proceedings when it comes to law enforcement. It is devoted to providing victims, their families and their communities the tools to end the abuse and indiscriminate killing by the police of African Americans and other people of color.
