XYZ team sailing off

Posted on October 1, 2016 by Veronika and Daria

Trees are changing colours of their leaves, kids have started school again and coffee chains are once again selling pumpkin flavoured coffee. That’s a clear sign that the summer is now officially over, and so is our Rails Girls Summer of Code experience.

What have we done

We feel like we have made a significant progress during our Rails Girls Summer of Code. Here’s the list of features we have written and other ways we have contributed to the KeystoneJS project:

• Wrote max characters option for the Text field
• Came up with min characters option for the Text field
• Implemented smooth scrolling after updating an item in Admin
• Wrote complexity option for the Password field
• Added max characters option for the Password field
• Reviewed and edited existing documentation, moving it back to the main repo
• Added missing documentation for numberArray, dateArray and geoPoint fields
• Documented the features we had written
• Wrote twitter field type
• Wrote a user guide for creating a blog with KeystoneJS
• Designed and coded the list visualization for the Admin

What have we learned

We have become much more comfortable working with git. We both had some limited experience with it already, but contributing to an open source project is a whole different use case, so we gained some priceless insights and learned many useful commands (and practiced using them every day).

We are also a lot more confident about JavaScript; there were lots of lines of code that we have explored, analyzed, copy-pasted and, of course, also written from scratch.

Beside plain JavaScript and Node.js, we have also learned about ReactJS, Redux and Mongoose, by means of coaching sessions, reading documentation, working through online tutorials and self study.

Last but not least, we have exercised our patience, perseverance and determination when we were overcoming difficult and frustrating moments.

What are our plans

Daria will now go back to her freelancing activities, but she will try to work on more challenging projects with the aim to transition into JavaScript frontend development.

Veronika had left her customer service job just before starting the Summer of Code, so now she is on a lookout for a new job, or possibly an internship opportunity. Hopefully she will find something soon and will continue on her path to becoming a better programmer.

Thank you

We would like to use this opportunity to extend our warmest thanks to all the people who supported us.

• Our coaches: Jano and Josef, you are the best coaches we could have! We are immensely grateful for all your help.
• Our mentors: Max and Jed, it has been a real pleasure working with you! It is inspiring to see how deep your knowledge and expertise is, and we hope one day we can get at least half way where you are.
• Our supervisor: Sofia, thanks for all your support, for sharing your own RGSoC experience with us, and for being always there when we needed you.
• RGSoC Organizers: Thank you for selecting us to be part of the programme and giving us this incredible opportunity!
• RGSoC Sponsors: Thank you for making it possible for us to ditch everything else for three months and dive full-time into learning!
• Our friends and community: Thank you for bearing with us and supporting us while we were engaged in our RGSoC project. Women in Tech Prague, we value your support and feedback, and we can’t wait to get back to our organizer duties and reconnect with all of you!