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.
So at its core the LoadToCode team consists of two components: Thea & Marie. They found each other in Berlin on their way to learn programming. What a lucky coincidence! Now they are one of 20 teams all over the world that are participating in this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code. Of course, Thea & Marie are not the only components that are needed to make this summer as code- & joyful as possible…
…so the Rails Girls Summer of Code has started!
Say Hello to Berliner Team LoadToCode
Big Team Laugh (Image: Team LoadToCode)
So our Rails Girls Summer of Code has started, we got welcomed by our hosting company SoundCloud and got an introduction to the company + a goodie bag! Day by day, we get treated very well, coffee and food only adds to the good feeling! So on the picture you see glorious & very smart Duana, patient & clever Remy and last but not least encouraging Ruby hero Sergio!
Here we are! LoadToCode = Thea + Marie
Psssst: Here we are, sitting at our desks, looking very serious and trying to understand Rails, Git & LEAP. I mean, this picture is an exception, we normally don’t look that funny.
Component “Marie”: Finishing her Masters in Interdisciplinary Latin American Studies and was researching about the user experience of period tracking apps from a social perspective. She became curious for programming after a Rails Girls beginner’s workshop in 2015. She is a fan of digital rights like encrypted communication and dared to dive more into coding. She is more than happy to combine many interests during the RGSoC.
Component “Thea”: She holds a bachelor degree in economic computer science and gained some work experience in that field. However she always wanted to deepen her programming knowledge. She then started to get involved with Ruby/Rails via the RubiesOnDaCloud study group in Summer 2015. Now with the RGSoC she is ready to put more effort in the project “to learn programming”!
Team Picture of Thea & Marie (Image: Team LoadToCode)
Hippie-Hackathon | What happened so far
So we got invited to a whole week of a hackathon (we call it Hippie-Hackathon), full of LEAP-knowledge, Q&A with Leap-Coders & last but not least socializing via campfires and advanced mime guessing. So how would YOU describe Quantum, SHA 512 or propietary software?
(Image: Team LoadToCode)
This does not only look code- & joyful on the photos, it really was. A little campfire is highly recommendable for the teams who are having a winter of code or the teams that live in Germany!
What we learned
Overview of LEAP Architecture: Learning about Bitmask, Soledad, Pixelated! It is complex, but not impossible to understand, we recommend to start using these services. They care for your security and privacy!
Web Applications with Rails, creating a blog webapp with Rails
Git & Github
What comes next:
So in order to get more structure and keep track of our tasks, what we have done and we’re we heading to, we created a Kanban board.
Kanban Board: Goals, ongoing tasks and Backlog :) (Image: Team LoadToCode)
At the end of our 3rd week we’re gonna improve our presentational skills and give an overview of the LEAP project to our coaches at SoundCloud. 20 minutes of presentation and 10 minutes Q&A, so we hope to be prepared enough for the tricky questions.
At the end some dog content! \o/ Here you see our favourite Colleague, adorable mate and patient listener!
The Twitches in their element! (Image Credits: Humans of IIITD)
Yeah, that’s not quite how the Twitches came into being. It was a heatstroke that led to us meeting. If you have ever seen a Bollywood movie, you will relate. On a scorching July morning, our protagonists/narrators met at a college orientation, that both of them would not end up joining. Vrinda was feeling too hot and was lost on the campus when she asked Taneea’s Mom for directions.
T: I hated you on sight.
V: I don’t even remember seeing you. But I remember asking your Mom for directions. She is so sweet.
T: (Rolls her eyes) Oh, she remembers seeing me.
Just to give you a little introduction, T stands for Taneea:
“I am an Indian student pursuing Bachelors of Technology (B.Tech) at IIIT-Delhi. I have a myriad of interests, coding being just one of them. A hacker, a programmer, and a hardcore Berlin Artparasites fan, I am an outdoorsy person who likes to solve problems in real life (including the ones where almost everyone on Earth spells my name wrong). I am a hopeless romantic and a geek, but an unlikely one. A day spent with my laptop, and an interesting problem to solve, having delicious food (with copious amount of exercise, of course!) only to get into bed with a hot cup of coffee in hand is my idea of bliss. I hope to touch lives and make a difference to the world through my work and expression. I want to be an engineer, a problem solver, and all things awesome!”
And V stands for Vrinda:
“I am a Computer Science Engineering student at IIIT-Delhi. The best way to describe myself would be that I am a problem solver. For me, coding is a way to solve problems. I live for the rush that you get when your code finally does what you want it to do- or more often than not, something similar. I am also an avid reader and a language enthusiast (coding as well as natural languages). I can speak, English, Hindi, German and some Punjabi. Few things are important to me in life, programming being just one of them, and reading, and good food. Good food is paramount. So is Harry Potter - I am a fangirl @TheChirpyBitch. Also, I love TV- comedy shows, sci-fi thrillers, detective shows. My current obsessions include Orphan Black, Veep and everything Marvel.”
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
Our not-so-pleasant encounter was soon followed by life in adjacent rooms of our campus dorms. What came next was a similar taste in music, a shared love of reading, writing and a common craving for caffeine in the wee hours of the night and mimicking iconic Bollywood scenes, like here:
Team Twitches, in their element, pretty much! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)
We first started working as a team at the end of our freshman year- for a course assignment. We quickly realized that we worked well together, filling the gaps for each other. From then on, there was no looking back. We were elected as the coordinators for our college’s Literary Society in our sophomore year, and that really tested us. We clashed a lot but at the end of the day, we would find a way to make both our ideas work. We have been roommates for a year and loved every minute of it.
“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
Our decision to apply to RGSoC this year was extremely delayed. It wasn’t until February that we’d made this decision. And after that decision was made, the next biggest challenge was to find our coaches. 3 days, an infinite number of messages to people asking them to coach us, and a ban from Meetup.com later, we had four amazing and capable coaches willing to take on the task of coaching us throughout the summer. That’s when, to represent our twin-like nature and preserve our love for fiction and fantasy, we came up with the name “Twitches”.
Team Twitches' customized logo! (Image Credits: A dear friend of the Twitches' : Varnit Jain)
As part of the Rails Girls Summer of Code, we are contributing to OpenFarm, which is a free and open database for farming and gardening knowledge, that according to one of our mentors, Rory Aronson, also is a potential API for Farmbot.
We were first attracted to OpenFarm because of the plethora of opportunities that it provides to programmers and non-programmers alike. The learning curve is huge. It also has great potential in India where two-thirds of the population are farmers. Right now, we are getting accustomed to the code base by solving issues. It is so satisfying when your PR gets merged! Next, we would like to add our own features to the website.
Two PRs Merged on the same day! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)
To get selected as a sponsored team for RGSoC’16 was probably (read: definitely) one of the best days of our lives. It gave us an opportunity to grow not only as programmers, but also to grow as an integral part of the community of women developers contributing to open source across the globe. The first week of the program brought with it celebration, excitement, nervousness, and even frustration. Between uninstalling Linux, getting notified by a bot that we hadn’t updated our log (and having a mini heart attack because of it) and sending our first PR- it was truly a roller-coaster ride.
Team Twitches with their supervisor Ramon! (Images: Team Twitches)
The RGSoC team even put us all on the ‘Thank You’ board, and the students got our very own Slack channel for community bonding!
Team Twitches on the Thank You Board! (Image Credits: Ana! (RGSoC Organizing Team))
Key Learnings
Never write ‘Yes, do as I say’ if Linux asks you.
When submitting a PR:
Hound: 17 violations found
Us: We would like to be excluded from this narrative.
Don’t forget to write the daily logs- or the bot will remind you.
Try solving a problem yourself before asking for help. Most of the time, you can solve it- it’s just lack of confidence that is stopping you.
Never judge an issue by its cover.
Never fear or hesitate to ask for help. It can come from the most unlikeliest of places.
Like always, Albus Dumbledore has exactly the right words:
“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”
Disclaimer: A special thanks to JK Rowling, and Khaled Hosseini for being amazing writers and providing us with quotes that we'll carry with us till the end of time.
We are Elvina and Micaela of team kindr3d (<3 Octavia E. Butler). We first met on the Rails Girls Frankfurt event last year and became bffs instantly (over cake and pizza).
Instant BFFS
Half a year later we decided to apply for RGSoC so we can move to the same city and code together. We also share similar views and values on the industry, startup culture, diversity and feminism.
Elvina and Micaela
Now we are based in Frankfurt and dwell in the office of Namics (unlimited fruit and coffee supply!), where our coaches (Max, Nino and Vincent) happen to be working as well. All of this under caring supervision of Max.
Team kindr3d
This summer we are working on Discourse (under watchful beard of our mentor Robin) and learning to be jacks of all trades (or full-stack developers as they call them on linkedin). By the end of the summer we hope to visualise a bunch of data and have fun. The learning curve for the project is rather steep, but we have faith and help on our side. Before we have fun with svgs and colourful graphs (and charts) we have to figure a lot of stuff out.
Total recall of our summer so far
It has been more than 2 weeks already!!1111 It feels like ages and we’ve learnt so much and so little at the same time. Since we start from the opposite sides of web development (front- vs back-end) we are trying to create a curriculum, that fits everybody’s levels and needs.
how we felt starting the summer
So we went deeper into Rails. And then started working on Ember.js.
when you learn controllers and models in rails and ember mean different things
We inject ourselves with some juicy database and SQL knowledge.
ready to send some queries!!
We also had some deep conversation with our coaches on how software development works, what leadership is and what team works is all about.
All this information was at times overwhelming.
hold on
Sometimes development is hard. Sometimes you have to wait for virtual box to download (while installing Discourse).
Rebooting is not an option
Any advice?
Keep calm and assertive. Know when to chill and relax.
Cesar knows best
Fake it till you make it (most of the times).
Concerning previous point: Everyone suffers from Imposter Syndrome. Talk it out and you will feel better 👊
You are not alone 👽
Coffee saves lives ☕
Always remember where you parked your bike 🚲
What’s next
Learn some data vis theory and what information is the most useful for discourse users
Get some fake data and turn it into graphs
Structure some great and informative sql requests
Render resulting charts/graphs and diagrams and not break the rest of discourse at the same time
Get deeper in rails/js/D3
Not to get lost and always look on the bright side
Not to run out out of maritime metaphors for our logs
we are trapped and there is no one to blame but ourselves
Thanks!
We feel very lucky to be part of this great community and contribute to such a meaningful project we also happen to like. To everyone else we wish the best of luck and many happy lunch breaks this summer. You folks are great!
Sherri and Anitha on the First Day of RGSOC (Image: Team MitPal 2016)
This July we, Anitha and Sherri, began our Rails Girls Summer of Code journey as Team MitPal. We first met at Rails Girls Atlanta meetings, and learned how similar our backgrounds were. We both have backgrounds working in the IT field in non-development roles and have some coding experience. Pamela Vickers, our Rails Girls Organizer recognized that we would make a good team for RGSOC and suggested that we pair up. She also upped the ante by becoming one of our coaches along with Pete Holiday. Our mentor, Henne Volgelsang, and supervisor, Shelly Coen, round out our team. Our project for this summer is Open Source Event Manager (OSEM), an open-source event management software tailored for free software conferences. We’ve been training on our own to become software developers, and have set some big goals for ourselves this summer. Our ultimate goal at the end of our journey is to find our first job in development.
Anitha I have a Masters in Communication and Network Engineering, and worked as a software engineer in test for an year in India. Due to personal reasons I had to quit my job and moved to the US 6 years ago. I always felt that solving problems and learning new skills would make me a satisfied and happy person. To make myself happy and bootstrap my career, I have been learning web technology through MOOC courses, bootcamp, meetups and other resources. I thought that a more focused and comprehensive hands-on training like Rails Girls Summer of Code would help me become a more well rounded software developer. I am very excited to contribute to a huge, open source project.
Sherri I have a degree in Public Relations, but began my IT career right after college when I became a technical writer for a startup. From there I moved into Business Analysis when another company I worked for had a need and asked me to join the team. I always wanted to be a developer, but it was difficult to transition to another role. There was always another project that needed attention, and the promise of opportunity ‘in the future’. Finally, I decided to take the leap and focus all my attention on changing my career and life. I trained on my own for awhile, but I felt that I needed to take classes in a focused environment. I then decided to attend a bootcamp here in Atlanta and completed the backend engineering program there a little over a year ago. Since then I have been looking for my first software engineering job. I felt that RGSOC would be a great way to train and learn in a supportive environment.
The first couple of weeks have been a blur, but as we reflect on it all we have gained a lot of valuable experience in a short time. We have gained experience working with another developer, figuring out things together instead of working alone. We get to learn by example by watching our coaches figure out problems, and then taking that knowledge and apply it to what we are doing. We’ve learned how to analyze an issue, troubleshoot a problem, and research different solutions. We are figuring out how to approach developing a solution. We’ve also learned how to use tools like Byebug, and most importantly how to ask for help and what questions to ask. Fail fast, and ask for help quickly.
Team MitPal and Coaches. l-r clockwise: Anitha, Sherri, Pete, Pamela (Image: Team MitPal 2016)
As we move through this experience, we learn more about ourselves and how to navigate this new landscape. Some of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned are:
Be patient with yourself
Schedule regular breaks. Get away from the code.
Read Apprenticeship Patterns
Talk to your partner and discuss the best ways for you communicate as a team
Pace yourself
If you haven’t failed, then you haven’t tried. Failure is a part of learning.
Some days truly feel like there is so much we want to do, but so little time to do it in. We are learning to pace ourselves and celebrate all of our victories. This week we are going to continue moving forward and finish working on our first issue and create our first pull request. Our next big goal is to work on adding a newsletter option to the application. We’ll keep learning and keep doing.
RubyCats
Iza & Kinga/ RubyCats
Tosio & Manio
Rysio & Leon
Loading (Image: Team Wikimedia Commons)
Big Team Laugh (Image: Team LoadToCode)
Team Picture of Thea & Marie (Image: Team LoadToCode)
(Image: Team LoadToCode)
Kanban Board: Goals, ongoing tasks and Backlog :) (Image: Team LoadToCode)
CTO of SoundCloud (Images: Team LoadToCode)
The Twitches in their element! (Image Credits: Humans of IIITD)
Team Twitches, in their element, pretty much! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)
Team Twitches' customized logo! (Image Credits: A dear friend of the Twitches' : Varnit Jain)
Two PRs Merged on the same day! (Image Credits: Team Twitches)
Team Twitches with their supervisor Ramon! (Images: Team Twitches)
Team Twitches on the Thank You Board! (Image Credits: Ana! (RGSoC Organizing Team))
Sherri and Anitha on the First Day of RGSOC (Image: Team MitPal 2016)
Team MitPal and Coaches. l-r clockwise: Anitha, Sherri, Pete, Pamela (Image: Team MitPal 2016)