Team Sunshine: Sujin Lee & Gyujin Cho (image by Sujin Lee)
안녕하세요(annyeonghaseyo)! We are Sujin and Gyujin from ‘Sunshine’ team in Seoul, S.Korea. We are working for Babel.js, an Open Source JavaScript Transpiler that converts cutting-edge JavaScript into plain old ES5 JavaScript that can run in any browser.
We are full stack JavaScript developers who have common interests in UI development and interactive interfaces. Before jumping into the programming world, we were artists: Gyujin was a designer and Sujin was a musician. We love art, creativity and technology. Based on both sides of programming and art experiences, we say the process of making graphic design or composing a music piece is very similar to computer programming.
Gyujin is a junior frontend engineer at Ridibooks, South Korea’s leading e-reading services company. Staring with ES6, she has used jQuery, Vue.js, React.js, and TypeScript last two years for company product.
Sujin is a graduate student in Seoul National University and she has pursued her passions of music and programming with equal vigor, aiming to make creative work that inspires. Nowadays she is strongly interested in making interactive music applications using machine learning. She leads the Women Who Code Seoul Network and is trying to build a more diverse and inclusive tech community here in Korea. Everywhere she goes she always has a pair of running shoes with her to run.
How we met
Last february, as soon as Sujin came across a news about the opening of the Rails Girls Summer of Code Applications, it just stuck in her mind. Sujin was confident that she could get a great opportunity to contribute to a real Open Source Software project as a member of Open Source ecosystem. After that Sujin searched for a like-minded team mate in Django Girls community in Seoul and Gyujin that’s how we got on the same boat. We asked close senior engineers to be our team coaches and everyone eagerly accepted the request and this is how we formed Team Sunshine to start our open source journey.
What brings us to join RGSoC
It is certain that the numbers for women engineers in the tech industry are already pretty bleak, but the situation is even worse as far as participation in open source projects is concerned. Additionally, we thought there was no room for the entry level of developers in open source projects and we weren’t familiar to open source community until we met RGSoC. Unfortunately, we couldn’t meet any woman open source contributor who works the world’s leading repository of open-source code, in Korea. We were highly motivated by RGSoC’s initiatives to bring more diversity into open source and last RGSoC fellows’s successful stories boosted our confidence. And we couldn’t be more thrilled to think that our code could be running on millions of computers! Yes, RGSoC is definitly worth it.
During our preparation for the RGSoC application, we had to pick candidate two projects. Among other projects, Babel was the best fit for our needs. We had already used ES6 features for mordern web development, experienced React for SPAs and moveover we have a passionate concern for the next generations of ES.
We also read a recent Henry’s writing published in free code camp medium. We were touched by the warmth of his welcome to Babel open source community. He says that “Babel is in a great position to be an educational tool for programmers so they can continue to learn how JavaScript works”. We thought that through contributing to the project, they can learn about Javascript core concepts such as ASTs, compilers, language specification.
Ta-da! What a surprise!
One day in April, we had a video call from Ana and Ramón from the RGSoC team. We felt a little nervous at the beginning of about 5 min, however, it fell from us very quickly because these two warmhearted supervisors made us feel very comfortable. Actually, we didn’t think that we were successful in making them enthusiastic about us so that any of us were expecting to be able to get in.
Two weeks later, Ana and Vaishali requested a second round interview because the selection process had been a bit more demanding than previous editions. It ended up being a surprise call were we learned that we were accepted in RGSoC! 🎉 We were thrilled with the good news and it was a moment we will never forget.
Babel is an open-sourced JavaScript compiler that leader companies like Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify and countless others adopt to ship software for the web. Babel not only allows developers to use the latest syntax in older browsers, but even has its role in shaping the future of the language itself due to its adoption in the community. The SPA frameworks like Angular, React, Vue, Ember also use Babel. It’s downloaded more than 14 million times a month on npm. Isn’t it amazing? ✨
In Bable offical website, there is Babel REPL, a playground for ES6; where user can write ES6 code, check the relevant code in ES5; and also the output.
Repl - Babel website (image by Sujin Lee)
Currently, the Babel core team is going to replace CodeMirror to Ives’CodeSandBox, the new code online editor. An end goal is to show a different view of the output code: AST, output code, or time travel. We have just started to work for integration time travel in REPL and are going to contribute for UI development with help of our mentors and coaches.
Join babel team in GitHub (image by Sujin Lee)
How we work
We are part-time sponsored team and we meet from 6pm to 10pm at PeachTree, a co-working space that supports startups via its networks, spaces, amenities and various programs. The name ‘PeachTree’ comes from the tale of ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’. Just like how Yubi, Gwanwoo and Jangbi pleged their brotherhood under the peach tree. We hope to cooperate in harmony each other in its space under the peach tree.
We have regular meeting with all members. Our team has 6 different time zones; Seoul, Lisbon, NY and more!
Meet shining our supervisor, mentors, and coaches!
Team Sunshine Collage (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)
We are honored to have the opportunity to join open source community and collaboration with the experts. We are pleased to introduce our supervisor, mentors, and coaches!
Supervisor: RGSoC
Ana Sofia Pinho
Ana lives in Coimbra, Portugal. She has been involved with RGSoC as an organizer and supervisor since 2016. She handles the marketing and social media related areas of RGSoC.
As a supervisor Ana is our RGSoC contact for the whole summer. She keeps an eye on the general well-being of the project’s progress and assists in the non-coding aspects of the Rails Girls Summer of Code.
Mentors : Babel.js
Henry Zhu
Henry is a developer in NYC who left his job at Behance this past March to maintain Babel full time with the support by backers on Patreon and Open Collective. He’s interested in living out the parallels of digital communities and faith through open source.
Brian Ng
Brian is a developer and startup advisor living in Houston, Texas. He helps maintain Babel and contributes to other open source projects in his free time.
Logan Smyth
Logan is a Bay Area-based developer who has been involved with Babel for the past 3 years helping with development efforts, overall maintenance efforts, and user support. He is interested in open source, software language design, and writing good code.
Coaches : Local
Byungjune Yoon
Byungjune is a frontend engineer at DANO, a health-care startup. He has a desire to make a better world with technology and loves that open source allows him to do just that. He is also interested in social, political, and gender issues. He worked on voteforkorea.org project, the national voting lottery a.k.a, as an incentive, giving to the people who participated in the national election a chance to win a lottery.
Hyeonsu Lee
Hyeonsu is a frontend engineer at Ridi, an e-book startup. He loves to learn the new things to get out of the comfort zone. He is familiar with JavaScript and React. He is serving in the military at the moment as a software engineer.
Joeun Park
Joeun is a senior backend engineer of wide experience on online games and advertising companies. Currently, she teaches data science and machine learning using python language to students from beginners to experts. Joeun runs a YouTube channel, ‘Today Code’ featuring short, educational videos focusing on data science topics.
Seongjun Kim
Seongjun is a prominent rubyist writing code for world peace, however, he has used java for various type of products in his company. He contributed to make social campaign web platforms, voteaward.com and ansim.me by ruby on rails and tries to raise local ruby community.
Dohyung Ahn
Dohyung is a frontend engineer who has been working on React-Typescript based projects recently. He is in protopie.io now. He has a huge enthusiasm for contributing to open source culture and he is happy to help programmers to not only improving their technical skills, but also products and projects.
What do we want to achieve by the end of the summer?
RGSoC is a shot at life. Again, it is a pleasure to join for Rails Girls Summer of Code program and meet fellow women developers in Open Source Community again. Our primary focus is continuing to learn advanced level of Javascript and growing up to be open source developers! We want to make people recognize the contributions women are making and inspire more women through our lines of code, PRs, and more during RGSoC. If we have a chance, we are willing to give a talk about our open source activities.
Follow #RGSoCSunshine on twitter
We share our team news, daily working report, funny moments, achievements, compliments and more using #RGSoCSunshine on Twitter! 💖
Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows. - Helen Keller
Sunshine is the vital and main source of energy for Life on Earth. So if we focus on the Sunshine - work, process, habit - it will bring us positivity in life and we will never feel frustration and negativity.
Just like our team name, we will always look on the bright side of life with a positive and optimistic energy.
“Stochastic and predictable. Dreamer and doer. Paradox of certainty.”
The above nine words describe me succinctly. I am a third year undergraduate studying computer science at IIIT Delhi. I am passionate about artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning. An ardent MCU fan, I believe that “with great power comes great responsibility” and for me, being able to code is no less than “great power” because it can be used to solve problems and make people’s lives easier. I am a fan of Tony Stark by the way, because his armoured exoskeleton with a rather very intelligent AI is the stuff my dreams are made of :)
Sharmistha Swasti Gupta
I’m always exploring things I collide with, which is probably the reason for my diverging set of interests. I’m equally passionate about hardware programming, robotics, AI as well as social theories on human technology interaction. I’m a voracious reader, thanks to constant encouragement from my parents and grandfather. I also love to travel, write or indulge myself in a game of chess whenever time permits. I am research oriented and I aim to dive into domains that lie at an intersection of my interests and skill set.
What made us click?
“It was our shared love for rubber bands and capsicums that brought us together.”
Jokes aside (making good jokes is another skill we are not-so-good at), our decision to form a team was rather a quick one, because we were having our mid semester exams at that time and were quite busy. Since we are both robotics buffs, Tessel piqued our interest, and as Shravika and Brihi had already worked on it the previous summer, it seemed the perfect choice. Living in facing rooms in hostel and sharing the same study group in the first year of college meant we were close enough to tolerate each other’s idiosyncrasies :p
Filling the application took a lot of painstaking effort and several sleepless nights. I (Sharmistha) slept for just 3 hours over a span of 51 hours while I (Arushi) was glued to the laptop screen for three days and seldom ventured out of my bed. The effort paid off, and we were beyond words when we got to know we were selected. Everyone around us was thrilled, our inboxes were filled with congratulatory messages and we really could not have asked for more. It was Sharmistha’s birthday the day we had our second ‘interview’ and we got to know the result, which was like an icing on the cake (pun intended). Passionate for contributing to open source, we are extremely excited about our internship with Rails Girls Summer of Code and Tessel, and awaiting the many more opportunities to come.
OUR COACHES
Brihi Joshi and Shravika Mittal (also Team 276 Lines of Code [2017])
They are our batchmates at our institute and our inspiration for taking on Tessel as our project. Brihi also went to the same school as mine (Sharmistha), while Shravika and I (Arushi) studied in the same school since third grade which explains the camaraderie we share. They have wonderfully supported us, and patiently cleared the silliest of our doubts. We even have plans of working together on the Tessel board over a mini hackathon, as and when time permits.
Brihi can generally be seen in the library with her laptop, working, and is usually sleep deprived. She works really hard and is a motivation for a lot of young women techies.
Shravika is more on the quieter side but she’s a diligent worker herself. She has a serene aura around her and it feels great to talk to her.
Ambar Pal
The craziest of the lot, after Sharmistha maybe :P, Ambar is our senior here at our institute and is graduating this year. He is an amazing comic relief under stressful situations. He was of immense help during the application. His hilarious side was heightened during the anxiety that came along with our desperate efforts to submit our application 15 minutes before the first deadline :P He is a great thinker (when he’s not lost) and a programmer, and we hope to seek help from him while approaching a task requiring extensive planning before the actual implementation. He also promised to sing for us in his ‘beautiful’ voice if we got through. We hope he fulfills this responsibility as our coach soon :)
Siddharth Yadav
A caffeine and Netflix addict, Siddharth calls himself a ‘ridiculously ridiculous geeky geek’. He is our batchmate at our institute. He is either seen spending sleepless nights watching TV shows or sleepless nights coding. He’s a GSoCer 2017. He’s one of those people who would get to a problem and somehow always find a fix to it. I (Sharmistha) worked on a project with him wherein we were to build a prototype of a self driving car. Nothing was working till a night before the presentation but Siddharth pulled an all-nighter and somehow got everything in a working condition. It is an absolute inspiration to work with him and since he’s a hardware buff too, we hope to annoy him whenever we get stuck on something.
THE TEAM
We form a great, happy go lucky team and having daily conversations on our Telegram group relieves us of the tiredness after a long day’s work. We sometimes check our phones to see 50 odd messages of pure randomness on the group and it is somehow never annoying.
We worked together during the application process and all the revisions and the reviews were really smooth. Since the commencement of the internship, Brihi and Shravika have been talking to us about Tessel and the resources we should take a look at. They also talk highly of Kelsey, our mentor, who by the way is an absolute delight. We have had meetings with Kelsey and our supervisor Bhumika, and we are really thankful for their support and willingness to teach novices like us. A horribly timed commitment has impeded our full-fledged start into the internship. However, we aim to compensate for the time lost over the subsequent weeks. Finally, a huge shout out to the entire RGSoC team for this wonderful initiative. We are really thrilled to be a part of this extraordinary community. Looking forward to a great summer. Cheers!
The last OSS Project Spotlight of RGSoC 2018! We are really happy to see that you have enjoyed these OSS-project-focused posts and if you feel curious about our previous posts, you can check part 1, part 2 and part 3 here. We will be coming back in the next weeks with more content about this topic. See you soon!
The Beginning: How delayed rewards brought us extra happiness!
After a thorough application process, a long wait and an interview, we thought we might just be able to make it through, and were eagerly waiting for that one “Welcome to RGSoC” email. In time, an email popped up in our feed which, lured us into thinking we emerged victoriously, but Alas! When the first round of scholars was announced, we were heart-broken that we didn’t make the cut. However, the same email also stated that we were waitlisted candidates, giving us a glimmer of hope. With our fingers crossed, we wished for the best! Almost after another month long wait, we were no less than flabbergasted, when we saw an email from RGSoC, quietly sitting in our inbox, giving us the much awaited news - We were officially in! And we couldn’t contain our excitement thereafter!
This reminds us of the famous quote from the Harry Potter series,
“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.” ― Luna Lovegood, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”
And hence began our official journey with RGSoC, and while currently working on our first task, all we wish for and would work towards is making an impact, and let our work speak for ourselves. We are reminded of a few lines, which we truly resonate with:
“Lives of great men, all remind us, That we can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind, us, Footprints, on the sands of time” — H.W. Longfellow
Footprints, is what we wish to leave behind. :D
Team Sectumsempra - Rupal (left) and Avneet (right) (source: Avneet's phone camera - Moto G4 Plus)
The scholars
Avneet
“A student currently at the fag end of her final year, majoring in Computer Science, about to graduate in August 2018. I am interested in the fields of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, computational biology and wish to work towards the integration of healthcare and artificial intelligence someday. Learning through experimentation, till I figure things out, whether it is a subject, or few lines of code, is what I like to do, and I guess, we would be doing that a lot this summer.”
Rupal
“I am a junior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Computational Biology. This is what my profile speaks, how I want to describe myself as is: A curious maniac, who has (mysteriously) learned the art of keeping herself stimulated and keeping up with whatever I do. A programmer, a reader, an extraordinarily passionate bathroom dancer, and a diehard Brooklyn Nine Nine fan, I am a keen knowledge seeking individual whose patience and grit accelerates her ability to articulate difficult concepts and texts smoothly. I’d describe myself as a strong woman who has the courage to voice her opinions, someone who is never hesitant to take actions. I’m one of those people who are if in a conference room and the projector stops working, I’m not the sort to simply call IT and wait. I’ll just (gracefully) crawl under the table and check that everything is properly plugged in.
I am also a sports enthusiast, with basketball being one of my favourite sports. A book in hand, headphones and a decent internet connection is all I need when in melancholy. Quora comes to the rescue when the critic in me tends to rise.
Elevating Medical Sciences using computers and technology is my passion, and it will be my future. I want to become a Computer Scientist and be known for my talent, and not because I’m a woman. I want people to understand that I am more than what they can see.”
I have had this habit of imagining things in my head, things that I aspire to do and achieve, but the results are not always the way I expected them to be. But then, I take a deep breath and reflect back, and am reminded of the famous quote from the Harry Potter series
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” ― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
But this is just a way to pacify myself and keep dreaming with a head held high. :D
Our Team
We are grateful to all coaches and mentors for helping us during the application process.
We are delighted to have them as our mentors for the project, and hope that under their able guidance, we can have a steep learning curve.
Our Coaches
We are grateful to them for agreeing to coach us, guide us, and help us grow and learn, as we embark upon this journey. Again, we are extremely thankful to him for all the mentoring at the time of applications.
Louis Jenkins: He is a recent Computer Science graduate from Bloomsburg interests and experience in the low-level areas such as compilers, operating systems, and the design and implementation of high-performance data structures.
Engin Kayraklioglu: He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree on High Performance Computing at High Performance Computing Laboratory
Sarthak Munshi: He is currently, working at HackerRank. Most of his work is open-sourced and can be found on his github profile.
Ian Berpolacci: He is Currently an PhD student at University of Arizona (started 2016), researching HPC by way of compilers and programming languages.
Andrea Francesco Iuorio: He is a MSc. student in Computer Science and mainly works on programming languages development and cryptography.
Kushal Singh: He is currently working as a platform engineer at Direct-I, India, and has previously been part of Google Summer Of Code.
Lydia Duncan: She is currently a Software Engineer at Cray Inc. and is passionate about programming languages and education
Our supervisor
Nada Ashraf :
Nada Ashraf has been a past participant in Rails Girls Summer of Code, and we are excited to have her on board as our supervisor.
Our Project
We would be working on Chapel this summer, which is a parallel programming language. Our primary objective is to work on the Sorting module and writing a parallelised and efficient version of Radix Sort. Also, we would be working on all other interesting tasks, which comes our way, which would help us to learn a lot overtime.
Our goals for the summer
Tinker, Code and Learn! Way to Go girls!
Grow as we learn, and be proficient in Chapel and grasp the concepts of parallel programming. The idea is to make our foundation strong. We want to work towards strengthening our ability to comprehend code and contributing significantly to the project we are working on, so that we can be driven towards continuing our endeavours towards open source even after these 3 months are over.
Make it a point to ensure that each and every contribution to our project matter.
Learn to collaborate and work as a team, utilising each others capabilities and strengthening our weak areas.
Learning new tools and technologies, and get a flavour of what it is like to face issues, and try to solve them, while enhancing our skills. To get immune to stressful environment when the bugs just won’t budge.
Effective communication To learn to speak with and take guidance from people who are way better than you in their domains and not getting intimidated by the overawing environment.
End of the BEGINNER’s title
Building a strong network with the professionals we are going to be working with. And learn a thing or two from them too.
Being a part of RGSoC community and establishing strong bonds with our coaches, mentors, supervisors, other teams as well.
We are thankful to J.K. Rowling , the creator of Harry Potter series, for giving us these profound quotes applicable to our real-lives, ones which can live by and cherish forever. This is from where we also got inspiration for our team name, ‘Sectumsempra’.
“I’ve always wanted to use that spell.” ― Minerva McGonagall, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The first month of RGSoC: the Kick-off calls! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho)
The Summer of Code has started and with it, the excitement of a new phase in our lives, paired up with a significant amount of team calls, status updates on the RGSoC Teams App, blog posts, documentation, git and — finally — the first pull requests! Here’s a quick recap of what has happened in the first month of RGSoC, if you don’t follow us on Twitter and Facebook yet.
Moments of RGSoC's first weeks. (image by Ana Sofia Pinho, tweets by Paavini Nanda, Team DelSquared, Team PopCorn, StellaMaris Njage, Sabine van der Eijk)
Kicking-off RGSoC
Every year we invite students, organizers, coaches, mentors and supervisors to celebrate the kick-off wherever they are. They are free to organize an event or just meet with their coaches in their working space — and this means that sometimes they get surprised, like team Popcorn.
This year we also wanted to make something different, so on the first day of RGSoC invited everyone who is participating on the program for a couple of global kick-off calls. It was great to get to know a bit more of everyone. After the initial intros, the conversation moved to very interesting topics, for instance, the moment we found out we loved to code and the advice we would like to give ourselves if we just started coding now. These kick-off calls are a thing to repeat!
Team meetings and calls. (image by Ana Sofia Pinho, tweets by Sujin Lee, Steff Del Rey, Ramón Huidobro, Atibhi Agrawal)
Team meetups and calls
RGSoC Teams are composed by the two students, their coaches (remote or local), their mentors (the OSS project maintainers) and their supervisor (who provides non-technical support). It’s important to start the summer of code with a team call and/or meetup where everyone on the team meets for the first time, discusses the features they will be working during the next few months, how they are going to plan the work and feedback sessions with the coaches and mentors, what they want to accomplish during RGSoC and what their plans are after the summer ends. This might not be very easy for some teams — like the ones that have members in 5 timezones — but it is well worth it and we love to see the pictures they take! :D
Don't forget your status updates! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho, tweets by RailsGirlsSoC, AnybodyCanCode, Sujin Lee, Laura Gaetano and Gregor Martynus)
Status Updates
RGSoC is a self-guided program and as such, we want our teams to decide on their own workflow; however we’ve learned from experience that doing regular status updates helps supervisors, coaches, mentors and organizers to follow up on the teams’ progress and see if they need their help. It also makes the students more accountable and helps them work at their own pace. In a way it is also a journal of their days at RGSoC, their achievements, how exciting it was to make their first PRs, the times where they just spent a full day researching to find a solution for that bug… It’s a bit of their story, right? If you’re curious, you can check out these updates here.
Let's code! (image by Ana Sofia Pinho, tweets by Rachael Kiteme, Nico, Julia Nguyen and Georgina Hodgkinson)
Hands on code and the first PRs
After setting up their projects locally, getting acquainted with the codebase, and reading some documentation, it’s time to dive into the code — in their first couple of weeks, students usually pick small tasks and issues to work on with the help of their coaches and mentor. One of the most thrilling moments of RGSoC is when our students publish their first pull request: It’s a great feeling of accomplishment and for many it marks the beginning of their contributions to Open Source Software.
It’s great to see the weeks go by and our students getting more and more familiar with new programming languages and their OSS Projects. We are all cheering for them! And talking about cheering, we would like to give a huge shout out to the coaches, mentors and supervisors who have been volunteering their time to support our students: Thank You!
Last but not least: Thanks to our donors and sponsors who have made RGSoC 2018 possible <3
