Introducing Team Tessie
Hello! We are Shelly and Pilar, and together we make up the student part of Team Tessie. We will be spending the summer working with the wonderful people from Hood.ie.
Why “Team Tessie”, what does it mean?
When we first met up to discuss applying for Summer of Code, we did so in the cat cafe (Cafe Neko) here in Vienna. As a result, we named ourself “Team Neko” but discovered a couple of weeks thereafter that there was already a gaming blog with that name so we were once more back to the drawing board! We spoke about our shared love of sea monsters. Not only did we both fondly remember Tessie from Earthbound, but we both had similar memories of stories of Kelpies. We weighed up calling ourselves either “Team Kelpie”, or else “Team Tessie” and decided on the latter when we realised it might not be the best idea to name ourselves after the evil one!
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
Shelly: I started learning programming languages by myself in an effort to kickstart a career change. I was learning alone which gets a bit difficult after a while. My partner travelled to San Francisco for the very last GoGaRuCo and met @cczona there. From ever so far away, and with the magic of twitter, Carina put myself and Floor Drees in touch. I heard of Summer of Code through Floor, who also introduced me to Pilar as a prospective team mate. Summer of code struck me as such a fantastic (and supportive!) programme so I knew there and then that I wanted to do what I could to get to take part in it.
Pilar: I had been studying genetics at the University of Vienna when out of the blue my brother invited me to go with him at a local developer conference, DevFest. Floor Drees gave a lightning talk about RGSoC there. At this conference I was just completely captivated by how inviting, open and friendly the people working in tech are. At a later conference, Kod.io, Anika Lindtner gave a talk on RGSoC where a member of the audience, Mirjam Zenz, mentioned she was organizing a Rails Girls event in St. Pölten. I just had to go! So I applied, got accepted and had a magical time. RGSoC was brought up, yet again, and it already sounded amazing but this was like a sign, RGSoC wouldn’t stop chasing me so I decided to pursue it myself.
What project are you working on?
We will be working with the lovely folks of Hoodie. We are beginning with building an app, first using JS, HTML, and CSS. We will then make the same thing using Hoodie. This is to give us a deeper understanding of Hoodie’s capabilities, as well as show us how much easier things are with Hoodie! After this, we will be diving into pouchdb, and then onward deeper and deeper into Hoodie. We are both really excited to get into all of this!
What are you most looking forward to this summer?
Shelly: It’s hard to pinpoint one thing! I am really excited about working on Hoodie, both in terms of the project itself as well as working with the hoodie folk. I’m quite a fan of how welcoming, friendly, and interesting they all are! It’s going to be great to do all of this with Pilar, I’m really lucky to have her as a teammate! We clicked right away and have so much in common so I know this summer will be a great one! I’m also looking forward to getting to know the other teams. Hurrah for new international friends!
Pilar: I am extremely excited about getting to know the feel of what it’s like to work in tech, but above that to work with this amazing group of people. Everyone is so enthusiastic, supportive and helpful, I can’t get over how lucky I am to be working with such a great team. I also happen to have the best partner in the program. We get along so well and have so much in common that working together is not only going to be easy, but loads of fun as well. I feels as though the RGSoC teams and organizers are one big family, so I’m definitely looking forward to meeting all the awesome people involved with RGSoC this year.
Our team twitter account is @teamtessie. Do follow us to keep updated on our progress, not to mention bonus goat gifs!