Goodbye from Team DEIGirls
###Goodbye from team DEIGirls
Summer of 2015 is almost ending and, with it, team DEIGirls adventure comes to an end. For 3 months we have been delving into the world of Ruby, learning Ruby on Rails, Lotus, Git and meta-programming with Ruby. It has been 3 awesome months, full of joy, happiness, laughter and some frustration, as well. We meet incredible people, Ruby community is great! And, most of all, we had lots of fun!
Waiting for someone to join a call with team DEIGirls(Image: Team DEIGirls)
###So, who are we?
Team DEIGirls is composed by Inês and Rosa, two portuguese IT girls interested on programming for the web and learning new technologies.
Initially our team was supported by our coaches Christian Weyer, Pablo Porto and Tiago Mendes-Costa. These amazing guys were with us from day one, helping us and supporting us, we wouldn’t have survived without their help! However, somewhere in the middle of the Summer, more help was needed, and our little team grew with the addition of Benedikt Deicke, Markus Prinz and Ramon Huidobro as coaches. Their help was invaluable! We can not thank our coaches enough for all the help they gave us throughout the Summer!
The project mentors were also always there for us. Luca, the project owner, helped us to design our project plan and to set our route. Trung, our mentor, accompanied us in our journey, guiding us in every turn and not even the time difference (he lives in Australia) prevented him to come to our rescue, when needed!
The last, but not the least, member of our team is our amazing supervisor Alex! Our talks and our weekly catch-up calls are something that we’ll surely miss! We always ended up laughing until our stomachs hurt! (and no, it isn’t from the cookies!)
Team DEIGirls family tree (Image: Team DEIGirls)
Our work
During the Summer, we have been working on the web framework Lotus for Ruby. But, since we were newbies in programming for the web, there were a lot of things to learn before we get out hands into that.
First, we started by learning Ruby, Ruby on Rails, html and css. We also had to learn how to work with Git, for real. We did a lot of online tutorials and earned loads of badges! Then, we did a diary application on Ruby on Rails and a similar one in Lotus, to better understand their differences. Afterwards, we started meta-programming on Ruby. Our main work was to built a mailer gem for Lotus. And we did it!
Some memories from team DEIGirls working on RGSoC (Images: Team DEIGirls)
###Our participation on RGSoC
Participating in the Rails Girls Summer of Code was much more than working on Ruby. It had a human component that is hard to put on words. Ruby community is warm and welcome, and we felt like we belonged to a big and cozy family! We used Slack and Twitter to comunicate with everyone and the daily logs and blog posts on the RGSoC app page allowed us to keep up with the work done by other the teams. We would start our days by catching up on the news and the other teams’ tweets.
It was overwhelming to participate in something like this! There was always someone active on the community. When our work, in Portugal, started, the team from Australia was finishing their day. And when our day ended, the teams from North America were just starting! Even on weekends we would find someone out there, working on their projects! We had regular skype/hangout/team viewer/screen hero calls with our team. Most of them were work related but some of them were just catch-up calls. Our team is great and we had lots of fun!
We also had a chance to participate on a Rails Girls event, to help as coaches and to do a lightning talk about our experience on RGSoC. We were a little scared but it turned out great! After that, we participated on RubyConf PT. We attended great talks and we were able to meet other Rubyists and share our experience of participating on RGSoC. We also had a chance to meet our coach Christian on person, since he was one of the speakers at the conference. We are glad that we had this opportunity to meet one of our team members for real, after spending a big part of the Summer talking with him through a computer!
Most of all, it was an enriching Summer, full of new experiences and challenges, and lots of fun!
Funny moments from Team DEIGirls (Images: Team DEIGirls)
We want to thank everyone who made this Summer possible! The organizers, the sponsors, the people who donated money for the program, the coaches who volunteered to help us and the mentors who brought the projects. You are incredible for allowing us to have this amazing adventure!