We are Ashley and Ore of team B’More Stunners!! We first met at our city’s local Rails Meetup and we instantly clicked. After both coaching a Rails Workshop for Women this past February, we decided to take the plunge and apply for the RGSoC fellowship (Ore was very convincing). Through our various connections within the tech community, we were able to assemble a team of awesome coaches to help us this summer!
Top left to right: Beverly, Ashley, Ore, Jamie, Andre, Lynn, Benedikt, Will, Mira (Image: Ashley Jean)
We could not have gotten this far without the support of our beloved coaches, mentors, supervisors, and the community!
Who are we?
Ashley - I was born and raised in New York, but happy to have called Baltimore home for the past six years! Last year, I attended a Rails Workshop where I was introduced to Ruby on Rails. It’s safe to say I quickly became fascinated by the power of code, and I eagerly wanted to learn more. So, for the past year I dedicated myself to learning Ruby in my spare time. Although it has been quite challenging juggling a full time job and learning to program on nights and weekends, I could not be happier. When I am not writing code, I still find myself looking for opportunities to get involved within Baltimore’s tech scene. I avidly attend Baltimore’s Rails and Girls Develop It! meetups. My other interest include, attending my weekly book club with friends, running, and taking naps. Lastly, I enjoy exploring my beautiful city through its eateries, breweries, art galleries, and music venues!
Image: Ashley Jean
Ore - I am a staunch advocate of increasing the visibility of women in the technology sector. Through my work with Women Who Code DC and the Baltimore Women in Tech community, I have a commitment to making the tech sector more inclusive. As a teacher for Code in the Schools, I provide quality computer science instruction to youth in Baltimore City.
Last winter a good friend of mine told me about the Rails Girls Summer of Code fellowship. I was working through ruby koans at the time with my mentor Will Barrett, now an unofficial coach, and he encouraged me to pursue it. The hunt was on.
Baltimore’s Mascot (Image courtesy of Baltimore’s graphic designer, Carlos Vigil (https://dribbble.com/carlosvigil))
Starting off on the right foot
This summer we are working alongside the Bundler team to create a public dashboard that will showcase its metrics. This dashboard will provide programmers with information such as “What is the most popular Ruby version? What is the least and/or most used
Bundler version? etc.” With these metrics, the folks at Bundler will not only be able to analyze this data, but also make precise decisions about future version upgrades. We are super excited to be apart of a project that will have a direct impact to the ruby community. As new developers this opportunity is a dream come true, and couldn’t be a better way to jumpstart our careers.
At the beginning we had a difficult time figuring out exactly where to start.Our coaches and supervisors were incredibly supportive and helped us solidify a plan. With everything going on in our lives, believing in our success and ability to persevere keeps us going through the hard times, and pushed us through the application process.
What we’ve learned
Aspects of Agile Methodology for project planning purposes
How to use a Public API and its request to the server
The relationships between clients and servers, specifically within Bundler/RubyGems
Our coaches are the best human beings on Planet Earth….
What’s next to come
Create a new controller and route with Rubygems repository,
Figure out where/how to display the dashboard
Figure out how to Batch metrics to Librato Analytics API
We are Emma and Geisa from Salvador, a beautiful city in Bahia, Brazil.
We first met at Raul Hackerspace, where we are active members. We both care about diversity and, at RaulHC, we organized some hack nights to promote diversity and now we’re living this amazing experience with other 19 teams around the world. When we received the news that we would be the first team from Brazil participating on the RGSoC, wowww. We just want to say how grateful we are for this great opportunity.
Coach Aurium, Geisa and Emma - (Image: Geisa Santos)
Our team
Emma: I’m a trans girl. I love to learn and to listen to metalcore music. I created the Raul Hacker Club in our city to motivate people to build interesting things and to make a hacker scene here :D. I’m interested in security and, for this reason, I’ve created a security research group with some friends (UserX, Gjr). On my free time, I like to study reverse engineer and cryptography/stenography. When I saw Nomi Marks (sense8) for the first time, I thought “I can be this girl”.
Geisa: I’m a 220v person. I love to learn and I’m curious about everything. I’m an Advertising and Marketing graduated, with a MBA in Systems Information Management. Because I have suffered a lot for being a woman when I started working in the tech market, I support several local initiatives that promote diversify in tech. I co-organize Rails Girls since 2013 and, last year, I started a PyLadies chapter at my city. I also teach web, social media and entrepreneurship, once a year, at a non-profit organization for teens that live in the suburbs.
I love games, books, book clubs and study groups. You may say I’m a serial book clubber.
Online meeting with menthor Maren Heltsche, coaches Daniela Feitosa and Brena Monteiro and supervisor Ines Coelho (Image: Ines Coelho)
Four senior developers are helping us during this summer: Brena Monteiro, Rails Girls organizer from Governador Valadares; from Salvador too, we have Daniela Feitosa, that also co-organizes Rails Girls Salvador; Aurium, an enthusiast of hacker culture, open scource and free software; and User_X, that is a member of LampiãoSec, an infosec study group (the same group that Emma is).
And we want to thank RGSoC organization for giving us an amazing supervisor (which is also a Portuguese-native speaker): Inês Coelho. She participated in the RGSoC 2015 edition.
What are we working on?
When we saw the list of projects available for RGSoC our eyes fell immediately on Speakerinnen. Our only thought was: we need to work with them. Speakerinnen is a platform that provides a list of women who have expertise in a determined field of knowledge, enabling conference organisers from any topic to find and connect with appropriate female speakers. So there are no more excuses like “there’s no women to invite” or “we couldn’t reach a woman with expertise in that filed”.
What have we achieved thus far?
Our first goal was to spread this project in our community, so we translated the platform to Brazilian Portuguese. This is being reviewed and soon we will be to connect more women by engaging the Brazilian community to this cause. We are working on others issues too (Emma already sent another PR to production).
Also we were invited to be in charge of Speakerinnen’s expansion at Brazil in the long term. That is awesome! Ruby Monsters are the most important Ruby group that we know, they rock! And they’re trusting us to take care of their project in our country for long. We are so honored!
A short video filmed by Geisa Santos to show you the stunning view from Raul Hackerspace window, where Perifericas are hosted
Community is all. There are lots of people around the world trying to increase diversity in tech and they will help you learn
Test always. Always.
Before starting code in a project you want to contribute, read all docs, check the "blames", try to understand how they developed it. And run tests.
Don't panic and don’t try to break your laptop when something persists not working as you want or as advised by the guide
ERRORs will be common. Accept it, and will be less painful
Try to get fun. Computing, tech, programming and hacking are amazing
"It's aliveeeee!" is the new Eureka
What will we do next for the project?
Solve the issues we set and the rest of the list :D
Work on design thinking and user experience with the whole team
Create gems (it's a fun and curious part - we love it and want to practice more)
We've been following the others blog posts from our colleagues and we're dying of curiosity to know the origin of their teams' names.
_Is there anyone curious to know the origin of ours name?_
Our team is named after Perifericas, an initiative that aims to introduce to programming and technology teens, elders and youngers from peripheral Salvador. We also develop activities to engage minorities to STEAMED (added Arts, Education and Design to STEM).
Thanks for reading!
If you want to talk with us, check out these channels:
We are Team Vegemite: Ramya Ravindranath and Kylie Gusset from Melbourne, Australia. We are working on Exercism.io, a website that offers crowd-sourced code mentorship where you can practice having thoughtful conversations about code. Katrina Owen is our project mentor, Jo Cranford, Tim Moore, Kevin Yank, Sushma Girish and Keira Hodgkison are our coaches with their employer Culture Amp being our wonderful hosts. Vi is our project supervisor (and member of last year’s Australian Rails Girls Summer Of Code Team Team Koala).
Team Vegemite eating Vegemite!
Ramya
She had lived her entire life in India until she moved to Australia in 2014. Like everyone else in her home country she did not have much options with her career. So she joined an engineering course in Computer Science where she was introduced to the programming for the first time. Afterwards, she started working as a junior Java developer in one of the organizations in Bangalore.
She went to Swinburne University, Melbourne and completed a Masters in IT. She is passionate about programming and thinks anything is possible if you believe in yourself. Her aim is to find a position as a developer in Australia.
Kylie
Kylie has a creative background in Graphic Design, Website Design, Community Radio & Textiles. She previously studied and worked in front end website development when the internet seemed to be powered by “under construction” .gifs. She applied for Rails Girls Summer Of Code after attending several Ruby/Rails Girls events, in order to learn more about Open Source and programming, whilst updating her old school front end web development skills.
What we’ve worked on and learnt in the last month:
Creating issues
Getting the local development environment set up and working.
A new color scheme for Exercism, which is adding onto and improving the current colours.
Research on Exercism, UX and fonts, in order to make further changes.
Website updates of copy.
Learning Git and Ruby.
Solving ruby exercises on Exercism.
Teamwork
Understanding the domain model of Exercism.
Learning Sinatra framework, writing specs with Minitest and learning test driven development approach.
Achievements:
We have submitted 4 pull requests and 4 of them are merged :)
Events:
Our Winter of Code at camp.js with Jed + Sharkie from Thinkmill
Ramya & Kylie have attended a few camps and conferences:
Rails Camp - a camp devoted to Ruby On Rails programmers where the weekend is spent meeting and learning from others in the community.
CultureXDesign - Culture By Design is the conference run by our hosts Culture Amp - we helped them out by filling conference bags and general assistance on the day, which involved speakers on company culture along with an unconference format, where attendees could choose to speak on the topics that mattered the most to them.
CODE - a long running Australian conference company Webdirections has a frontend web development conference that Ramya & I will be attending whilst this piece is being published.
We are Naggita Keziah and Joannah Nanjekye from Kampala, Uganda. We met at a tech meetup dubbed GeekNight kampala at the former thoughtworks kampala offices where Joannah was speaking about the Transition from continous intergration to continous delivery. The chemistry was instant and we decided to team up and apply for the Rails Girls summer of code with a strong desire to start our journey of contributing to open source.Now here we are one of the 20 teams around the globe sponsored for the fellowship.This is our first time in RGSoC and we are so grateful to RGSoC for this grand opportunity.
Our goal for the summer of code is to learn and learn as much as we can, to become better developers with clean code, to write thousands of lines of code for qutebrowser, to pass on what we have learnt and our experiences to the community and to build a bigger network through networking with those in RGSoC.
Keziah: Is a third year undergraduate software engineering student at Makerere University Uganda. Her greatest emphasis is in designing scalable software solutions to solve the common problems in our community through using apropriate technologies.
She has a great interest in Python programming language and Real time Embedded systems. she loves mentoring and inspiring others and she is currently a coach at Django girls, a Tech Kids tutor and a math tutor. She would love to see more women taking up STEM courses at the university.
She started learning python in July 2015 from AI research lab where she was doing her internship. she fell in love with python and she has never looked back. After her internship she joined Django girls Kampala as a participant in September during which she developed flashtrolley an e-commerce site that connects small business owners to their customers. After her cohort of study, she enrolled to become a coach for the next cohort..
Joannah: She earned a degree in Software Engineering from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. She joined Laboremus Uganda as a software engineering trainee from September 2013 to March 2014 after which she joined Fintech Uganda Limited as a programmer till June 2016.
She has primarily been developing software in C# for all her roles in industry but has this passion for ruby and python. She first fell in love with python from her first year in university till she learnt of ruby from ruby Friday events that were held at thoughtworks Kampala. During ruby Fridays she was able to learn ruby programming and after which she was able to teach in one of the days in the next cohort of ruby Fridays. She has worked with ruby frameworks like Ruby on Rails and shoes and Python frameworks like django. She has contributed to many banking applications during her position a programmer at Fintech Uganda Limited.
She is an advocate for agile software development practices and values reliability in software because she believes it’s an attribute that must never be compromised. She has organized several software development events to pass on knowledge. She organized an Hourofcode event to celebrate computer science week in 2015 where she taught university girls how to begin programming in JavaScript. She also taught ruby and Sinatra a light weight ruby web framework for a week in a code camp she and team she was part of organized.
Other than programming she loves planes and very curious about how they work and in September this year, she will be moving to Nairobi to finally join aviation school to purse aeronautical engineering with a bias in Engines and frames a dream she had from childhood.
What we are working on
We are working on qutebrowser, a keyboard driven, vim like browser. The browser is built with python3, PyQt5 and QtWebEnginee and it is 100% open source.
We chose to contribute on qutebrowser because we wanted to do something interesting and loved the idea of browsing the web using commands and shell. The project also presented us a great opportunity of learning new things and exploring python3 and PyQt5 deeper.
The fast pace and sheer amount of information keeps us on our toes, but we have each other, our coaches( Wilson and Augustine ) , our mentor (Florian) and supervisor (Kasia) to keep us on track. Thank you all for your selfless help :)
What have we achieved thus far?
About the project
Browser architecture. We had no idea how a browser archiecture looks like before we joined the summer of code. But now through the different tutorials and udemy course that our coaches and mentors pointed us to, we feel that we are now comfortable with the architecture of a browser.
Knowledge of TDD and application. Testing has now become a very important aspect of our programming.Now we use it frequently and know how to write tests and apply the idea of TDD. We are writing tests for the commands on qutebrowser..
App features. We are currently solving issues 1395, 844 and 47 and hopefully we will have a pull request for one of them this week and for our tests.
Python3. We have expanded our knowledge in python forexample the use of pdb, decorators and more OOP.
Qt. We read a great deal QtUrls when trying to solve issue 1998, understanding the QtWebEnginee.
Becoming Github Gurus. We are now quite used to performing various GitHub gymnastics such as rebasing, squashing, resolving conflicts, etc. (but sometimes it still acts mysteriously).
Our first conference
Arrival. We arrived in Nairobi, Kenya for the conference on Wednesday 20th of July 2017 in the morning. We rested for some hours before we started the conference.
Networking session. We attended this session on 20th/July/2017. We made alot of friends, exchanged business cards and it was an amazing evening.
Day 1 of the conference. We gave a presentation on how drones, sensors and apps are rewriting the rules in agriculture and the future. This talk pulled attention from the attendees after which we got an invite from one of them to do the same talk at another engineering conference in nairobi.We listened to other presentations from other women in the african tech space.
Day 2 of the conference. On this day we did not have a talk but we listened to different panels being conducted by different women in the tech space in Africa. They talked about common reasons why women exit stem , how to succeed as a woman in tech , how to run successful startups and the various innovation opportunities in the fintech space. We also witnessed some women led startups pitch their products and win funding and incubation space.We ended the day with getting some swag from google.
And Yeah..our kickoff Party
We also had an amazing kickoff party with our host C.K Japtheth and the great minds Shakira and Angela
Community involvement
Rails girls Kampala. We are currently in the process of reviving Rails Girls Kampala chapter,a community that had gone cold after thoughtworks left kampala . We are doing this so that future RGSoC fellows have a commnunity they can call home in uganda as we impart ruby on rails web development skills to ladies in our commnunity. As part of the program , we shall run an 8 week cohort of ruby on rails programing sessions and a rails girls kampala all with the support of our hosts The Innovation Village kampala.
Hack for Corruption. We are in the process of organising a hackathon to cub the raging problem of corruption in our country. This is an idea that was bone during a discussion we had during our rails girls kick off party with the Team lead of The Innovation Village kampala. We talked about how technology can impact our country and as we closed the party We coined hack for corruption which is the war against corruption.The organisation for the hackathon is underway with the help of our hosts The Innovation Village kampala.
Tips we want to share
Take a deep breath, don’t panic. A castle wasn’t built in one day :)
You need to first clearly understand the problem before writing code for it.
Understanding the code flow is the first step to diving into legacy code.
Writing tests for legacy code is one of the best ways to understand the code base.
Be persistent because persistence breaks resistance. Look for all possible ways for squashing that bug, don’t give up and don’t settle.
Make your week’s plan and stick to it.
It’s good to express your problem in clear way, so your helpers can give related suggestions and solutions.
What will we do next ?
Finish all the issues at hand
Write more tests for the project
Embark on solving other issues
Revive rails girls kampala
And we are always looking for new contributors for qutebrowser, so please, join us!
Follow us on twitter and like us on facebook for daily updates :)</p>
We are Patricia Arbona and Melissa Fabros, and we are based in the Bay Area of California.
Patricia had lived her entire life in the Midwestern part of the United States, primarily in Ohio and Chicago. She attended the University of Chicago for college, and studied Latin American history in addition to Spanish and Portuguese. Afterwards, she had a career at a major educational publishing company, where she was an editor and translator (Spanish-English/English-Spanish) for Spanish High School textbooks. She believes passion for foreign languages translates well to programming, because she views programming as learning a new type of foreign language. She moved out to the Bay Area earlier this year, to attend Hackbright Academy, a fellowship for women who wish to transition to software development. It was at Hackbright where she met her dear friend, Melissa!
Thanks for the intro, Patricia! Melissa comes to programming from the world of non-profits and higher education. Her interests in programming started in middle school where she was one of the first girls to join the computer club. However, she majored in English and American Literature in college. She loved the way literature “codes” the human brain to build worlds and emotions in the imagination. She is a PhD candidate in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She maintained her coding interests by making small web page projects. A friend once told her that reading good code is like reading good writing, which piqued her curiosity. Since that conversation, she went from teaching at the University of California, Merced to taking part-time coding classes, completing a Google Summer of Code internship, graduating from Hackbright Academy, and starting the Rails Girls Summer of Code fellowship.
Together, we’re working on the Lektor project, a Python-based content management system. The project uses the Python programming language to build static web pages that also have a dedicated administration interface. The build system is in Python, admin UI is written in React.js, and the static pages use Markdown.
Clockwise from top-left, Team Hackbrighters (Patricia and Melissa), Gavin Crooks, Ramil Nobleza, Samantha Trieu, and Armin Ronacher.
What have we achieved so far?
We merged a pull request that helps users install the Linux dependencies needed to run Lektor. We’ve tasked ourselves with giving some love the Lektor’s admin UI.
The first thing we did was to set up our workstations at Github’s office in San Francisco.
Everyone at GitHub has been extremely supportive and welcoming us for our summer fellowship. Octocat has been especially helpful in giving moral support:
We also had our Kick-Off party with our sagely mentors. At the Kick-Off party, Melissa and Ramil caught a Zubat!
To accomplish our task, we’ve reviewed our Javascript fundamentals, particularly solidifying our knowledge of scopes, closures and javascript objects. We found Nodeschool and the Node community really helpful and welcoming as we dived into Javascript! NPM's mascot Haggis, a wombat, was giving us moral support at Node School
We researched how developers test React.js components by interviewing every front-end developer we walked into.
This is us, for most of our journey learning JavaScript and exploring the vast possibilities of front-end testing:
What tips do we want to share about our journey?
Transitioning from another career (We’re both humanities majors previously deeply involved in Education) is really hard. Be nice to yourself while you’re learning because learning to code is a marathon, not a sprint. Some days you won’t be able to wrap your mind around a new or difficult concept.
Transitioning careers is difficult. It’s moving into the unknown, and some people won’t understand why you’d pursue something new. People who are close to you will question you about your choices–they may see your decisions as rash and drastic. Others may doubt you. But if you invest time in yourself to learn, to meet people, and to establish new roots (whether in a new town or a new profession), the concepts and people who seemed mysterious start to make more sense.
You have to believe in yourself and find friends and colleagues that will help hold you up during hard times.
What will we do next for the project?
We’ll make a pull request for an update to the community page’s Code of Conduct.
We’ll write test coverage for Lektor’s Admin UI page.
We are in the process of learning React, so we can contribute updating the UI’s components.
Coach Aurium, Geisa and Emma - (Image: Geisa Santos)
Online meeting with menthor Maren Heltsche, coaches Daniela Feitosa and Brena Monteiro and supervisor Ines Coelho (Image: Ines Coelho)
Team Vegemite with our coaches Tim, Kevin and Jo
Team Vegemite eating Vegemite!
Our Winter of Code at camp.js with Jed + Sharkie from Thinkmill
NPM's mascot Haggis, a wombat, was giving us moral support at Node School