“Happy coding story from Team Rookies”
Team Rookies and Hoodie project with RGSoC
Hei, we are Tehetena and HyeSoo from team Rookies. We named our team ‘Rookies’ because we wanted to keep our beginner’s mind throughout the RGSoC journey. We live in [Helsinki, Finland]. We are studying Information technology, and we love to learn new technologies. We learned about RG last year and we are happy to be part of RGSoC 2016. We chose Hoodie project as our RGSoC project. Hoodie is a framework for frontend web applications that abstracts away the backend. Simply, Hoodie is a no-Backend technology! Hoodie is entirely written in JavaScript. It has been an amazing experience, since we have started working on the Hoodie desktop application project. For the project, we have been working on UI/UX part of the application and learning how to use Git, Node, localStorage and API to implement functionalities. Gregor is our project mentor. Esko, Omid and Musse are our coaches, and Pilar is our project supervisor.
This is a greeting from us :D Click here to check our videovideo greeting.
We’re team Rookies!!!
You can check out more stories about team Rookies’ activities from our blog.
Tehetena: I am a second year student at metropolia UAS majoring in Mobile solutions. I have attended couples of meetings organized by the Rail Girls community in finland. All the meetings have helped me meet new people and learn from their priceless knowledge. Our team even ended up having a volunteer coach we met at the those events. I would not dare to call myself a very sociable person before, but now I have developed my skills of communication. I am sometimes scared to ask questions or explain things in my head the way I wanted, but during this summer I can say that I have completely avoided all those bad behaviours and became more confident and happy. I have studied different programming languages at school. This summer I actually get to test and teach myself way more than I have even expected.
HyeSoo: I study Information Technology student focusing on Mobile Solution. I worked at an online retail company as a web designer in South Korea. While I was working as a web designer, I wanted to learn how to build an application using the images I had designed. Soon after, I was able to come to Finland to study IT. I met many friends from all over the world and was able to learn many new technologies and IT concepts while working on hands-on practices. This year, I worked on several school projects such as making Android chat app, Android RSS reader app, media sharing application and IOS indoor positioning app as part of my mobile solution curriculum. It was fun to learn how to come up with creative ideas as a team. While I was working on the school project, I realized my interest lies in making an interactive, creative fun web application and mobile application.
Thanks to the Rails Girls coach’s invitation, I was able to join Helsinki Rails Girls meetup last year at the first time. In 2015, I attended the Rails Girls workshop. It was an exciting chance to meet like-minded people, to share and expand our knowledge and experience. I also met one of our coaches from the RG Helsinki meetup.
It has been an amazing summer with working on Hoodie desktop application with mentors and coaches. I have been learning not only the programming, but also the passion and wisdom from them. The supports from RGSOC community, mentors and coaches encouraged me to move on the next step of the project. In this summer, I would like to learn more and grow as a person while contributing to the project.
What we’ve achieved so far
When we started the project, we had low self confidence. Even though we have taken classes on different programming languages, when it comes to working with it we always thought that we did not have all the knowledge it took to complete the task. Now we have understood that every working experience is a great opportunity to teach ourselves new things every day.
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The very first lesson we learned was Git. We have done several school projects that we have managed to save and clone project repositories on Git, but after we have started working on the hoodie desktop application, there have been many challenges. At first, we did not know how to propose issues, pull request, fetch from remote, rebase and so on, and we were confused with the concept between local and remote. With our mentor Gregor’s help and many trials & errors, we now have better understanding of how the Github actually works and how it is used in our project and also when many contributors are working on the same project.
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Other than using Github, we have also learned a lot on UI building and how to implement functionalities on the application, using HTML, CSS and Javascript. We learned how to use event listener, event target, .map, .forEach and localStorage. Especially, using localStorage and making API were very interesting. We followed the tutorials which were made by Gregor. It was very helpful and easy to follow. After practicing the code with tutorials, we had a call to solve the problems together and had a Q&A session. We have a call almost every day. It has been really helpful and given us deeper insight on how coding can be applied in the application and how we can use it in the desktop application with Electron framework. This is our repository of Hoodie desktop application.
Supports from a mentor and coaches
Sometimes there were some problems which took longer time to solve, but our skilled coaches: Omid, Esko and Musse and mentor Gregor taught us different ways to solve them, and most of the times the new approaches were even easier and clearer to understand. The mentors and coaches’ guidance helped us experiment on different coding practices we came across online.
Our next journey and our hope
When UI is ready with several Usability tests, we are going to add functionalities to the Hoodie desktop application. As a final step, we are going to wrap the UI and functionalities with Electron framework.
We are hoping to make a useful Hoodie desktop application for the users. Without RGSoC, it could be quite difficult to dive into real world of IT. While writing this post, we realized once again that many great people helped us come this far. One day, we hope that we can also be that person who helps others to open up more opportunities and broaden their horizons. Thank you for providing us this wonderful chance to be part of RGSoC. RGSoC made this summer very special to us. Happy Summer & happy coding! ;D
You can access more detailed information on our project plan in our organization.