Time for RubyCats, meowww!
RubyCats
Who we are
Izabela: Mostly known for being a cook, cleaning lady, Lego architect and a companion to all sorts of crazy activities, like camping trips based in the middle of the living room and ridiculously long scooter/skateboard adventures (on an alien planet). Also known as a scary monster named Monstro or a fellow pirate Larry, on a ship made of cardboard. Summarizing, a Mom (also called Mammoth) of a 3 year old bundle of pure energy, named Zuza. Also a bit of a gamer (indie games in particular). Comic/manga/anime and boardgames fan. Loves to eat - addicted to kimchi, pho and curry. Can’t imagine life without rice, pasta, edamame and tomatoes. Loves to draw & create pixel art after a beautiful day filled with coding. True believer in the World’s true beauty – diversity.
Kinga: long-time-sense-of-life-passion-and-career-path-seeker. Would like to travel the world and get to know and understand as much as possible. And as many people as possible. Deeply in love with and addicted to her two cats Richard and Leon. And with/to cats in general ;) Loves Asian food, especially Indian cuisine. Likes to cook, bake and read, but often has other things to do instead. Conglomerate of opposites /zodiacal Gemini tells everything…/. Tries to survive in a world full of gluten and dairy ;) Does American Tribal Style and a bit of tribal fusion bellydance. Cares about nature. Wants to do things that are meaningful and ethical and help make world a better place. Artistic soul that wants to create. With no IT and any technical edu/experience/skills decided to get into programming. Taught kids Scratch / ScratchJr, Blockly with Wonder robots, HTML+CSS. Hopes to start working as a programmer in a near future. Now or never. Interested in hard and soft. Dreams about “making something that works and is useful” like some machine built and programmed by herself. And about having a house with a garden away from the city.
The beginning
Iza & Kinga/ RubyCats
We met three times during Ruby workshops and events. After the 3rd time decided to apply to RGSoC together. Cats are one of our shared interesteds, so the name for our team came to us by itself ;)
So here are the real (Ruby)cats:
Izabela’s cats:
Tosio & Manio
Best listeners ever. All over the place pukers. Warm and cozy hot water bottles => Crazy Tosio & Grandpa Manio. My best friends.
Kinga’s cats:
Rysio & Leon
Richard and Leon are both sheltered foundlings. Leon came to us as a kitten half a year after Richard. Richard became his friend and mummy ;). They’re both extremely sweet and crazy.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place
Those 3 weeks were a bit of a struggle for us. All the plans got washed away by a huge wave of our knowledge deficiency. But as they say, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. We hope for a better. We try hard to make things better.
What we’ve learned
- Partitioning, dealing with virtual machines on Vbox and VMWare, different Linux distributions and continuous reinstalling and setting up all the good things required or useful for Ruby and Rails
- Git, gitflow, GitHub. Recently commit and their messages good practices
- Using and customize different tools like Sublime Text, Trello, Slack,
- Basics of debugging
- Basics of Rspec
- Expanded out knowledge about validations and callbacks
- Got familiar with some new frontend issues incl. Sass and Slim.
- We’ve realized how much it takes for a newbie to understand what’s going on in the code of a working app, how much it takes to understand its architecture.
- An interesting experience is to observe the daily functioning of software company.
Plans for the remaining two months
- Contribute more - hopefully with expanding knowledge, more contribution will follow.
- Learn to ask for help more often, not feeling stupid and guilty of a Not Knowing crime ;P
- Believe in ourselves more - be happy with little things we do good.
- The knowledge - it’s never as full as we would like it to be, we will try not to stress over this.
- Take small steps, don’t try to eat a whole cake at one.
- Keep learning and practicing what we know.
- Smile more often and hug a lot of cats.