Only a couple of days to go until our program kicks off in 16 different locations around the globe. We want all participants to celebrate this day with us on July 8th! In Berlin, for example, we’re planning a low-key kick-off picnic. On July 8th, we encourage you to have a little get-together in your own city with your team; have a picnic, a small party at your coaching company, celebrate with cake, coffee, a tea party or a bbq!
It doesn’t have to be a huge party, and should be an opportunity to bond with your coaches, your team mate, other local teams, and your local community. If you have a coaching company, maybe you can even ask them to cover some of the drinks/food, or to let you use the location after office hours.
If you want us to connect you to other teams or alumna in your city, let us know — we’d be more than happy to do that. You can also open an issue in our Github summer-of-code issue tracker if you want to make the event public or use that as an RSVP list.
We wish you a wonderful kick-off day on Friday and an amazing kick-off party next week — we can’t wait to see how you celebrated your first full week of RGSoC. All pictures are welcome, and we’d love to see your videos, too.
For the first installment of our “Alumna series”, we’ve spoken to Oana Sipos, who took part in RGSoC 2013; she’s currently living in Belgium but is planning to move back to her home country, Romania, very very soon. When she’s not busy coordinating Rails Girls events (she’s organised four editions in Brussels so far and has started the Cluj and Timisoara chapters), she loves playing with bits all day long!
Where do you currently work and what do you do?
I am currently working for UnifiedPost, a Belgian company developing its own products for document processing where I am a combination of a developer and a technical writer.
What does your usual day look like?
My day is a nice mix of documentation, writing tutorials for all kind of internal gems we develop and training people on the platform built in-house. It is a bridge function where knowledge transfer is critical.
How did you get interested in programming?
Ever since high school I liked the mystical side of it – it felt powerful and intriguing to know programming-related stuff. At university, I studied Telecommunications; so technical studies, but still not programming-oriented enough. So I took my heart in my hands and started learning by myself and with the community’s support.
Is a career in tech something you had planned all along? Where did you work or what did you study before?
Not sure I have planned it, totally not after finishing university; however a semester at KU Leuven brought it more on my way so I gave it a chance :) Sometimes, the best things happen when you are planning the least.
Which of your skills helped you most to be successful during RGSoC?
I was part of a volunteering team in RGSoC, as I couldn’t find another girl to pair, and (now I say) luckily that lead to organizing all those Rails Girls events. Critically thinking, it wasn’t necessary a skill, but the ambition / perseverence / stubborness to join even if I was by myself, was what made my RGSoC experience a fruitful one.
Which difficulties did you face during the program — and how did you overcome them?
Motivation was definitely the first one of them — being alone there was just too difficult to keep it up. Discussing with people around me helped a bit, but not sure that made the trick. Having a clear to-do list and speaking up when something is not clear would definitely be my allies, were I to start all over again.
How did Rails Girls Summer of Code help you get to where you are today?
A very nice part of Rails Girls Summer of Code was that they handled free tickets to conferences. This is how I got to go to ArrrrCamp in Gent, Belgium and give a talk. That was a way to spread the knowledge about RGSoC and at the same time, a call to organize Rails Girls Brussels since I could find no girl to form a team. By the end of the conference, I had a bunch of developers interested to help and coach and also I was introduced to my current company :) so, tl;dr life changing!
Who do you look up to in your field? Do you have any role models?
My friends who told me about Ruby definitely are. All the people in the Ruby community (with special thanks to Belgium Ruby User Group) who have been very helpful and encouraging also. I cannot pinpoint to a specific person, but they are definitely those closer to me, in the community.
Do you have any advice for future Rails Girls Summer of Code students and for women who wish to work in tech?
Working in tech is challenging, but not nearly as difficult as it may seem. Just give it a try, keep the ball rolling and ask for advice when you are stuck. Don’t stay stuck, there are plenty of people out there willing to give a hand. Walk before you run ;)
What is it like to work in tech?
I must start with “it is not about coding all day long”. It can be, but there are other functions which need both an understanding of technical specs and a set of soft skills. Get out of the box and for sure you will soon identify all kind of opportunities.
Is it difficult to be a woman in tech?
This is about knowledge more than it is about genders. I was the only girl in my office of 13-14 developers and hardly felt different because of being a woman. It might need a while to prove yourself, but I guess there is this starting point everywhere when you are new in a team. Just go for it and don’t let this stop you ;)
We have managed to get FOUR extra teams on board this year!
Last week we announcedseventeen RGSoC 2016 teams. Unfortunately, one of them (TeamASU) has cancelled their participation for personal reasons. As much as we feel sorry when someone can’t do the Summer of Code after being selected, we are super happy to greet new teams. Now we have twenty in total! This is truly amazing, isn’t it? Remember, all of it became possible due to your support: the money you sent us over the last few weeks opened up the possibility to sponsor 2 teams and support 2 volunteer teams. Thank you for making this happen!
And now, meet our new teams!
All of our 2016 teams (updated)! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)
We’ve had so many awesome applications this year, and picking only a few was incredibly tough; we really wish we could have had the money (and the resources) to have them all on board. But let’s not forget how far we’ve come this year already: Thanks to our amazing community and sponsors, we are able to fund not 11, not 12, but FOURTEEN (!!) teams for 2016 — and have an additional 3 take part as volunteer teams. Look at them all on our map:
All of our 2016 teams! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)
For the very first time in RGSoC history, we’ve got teams from Egypt, Singapore, the Czech Republic and Brazil — it’s so great to see teams applying from “new countries” every year, and we can only say a huge THANK YOU to you all for spreading the word among your own communities.
And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: it’s time to announce the teams we’ve chosen to take part in Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016! Here they are:
Sponsored Teams
KaUlah (Ula and Katarzyna)
Location: Warsaw, Poland Project: GitLab Community Edition
RubyCats (Izabela and Kinga)
Location: Warsaw, Poland Project: Rails Girls Summer of Code — The Teams App
Joda (Dayana and Johanna)
Location: Berlin, Germany Project: SoundDrop
Twitches (Taneea and Vrinda)
Location: New Delhi, India Project: OpenFarm
MitPal (Sherri and Anitha)
Location: Atlanta, USA Project: Open Source Event Manager
RGAU2016 (Kylie and Ramya)
Location: Melbourne, Australia Project: exercism.io
l1ghtsab3r (Srishti and Soumya)
Location: New Delhi, India Project: VOC
kindr3d (Elvina and Micaela)
Location: Frankfurt, Germany Project: Discourse – Visual Forum Analytics
For every team that didn’t make it: please don’t let it discourage you. As much as we love our scholarship program, there are many ways to start contributing to Open Source and our initiative is only one of many. <3 Have an amazing summer — we sure can’t wait for ours to start!
Our thank_you board is almost complete! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)
As we are a few days away from announcing the selected teams, we can’t help wondering how this new batch of students will change the world around them. Meanwhile, July is almost around the corner. This means that our fundraising campaign for RGSoC 2016 will be closing in a few weeks, and all the money we receive after that will be used for RGSoC 2017. So if you still want to help us out getting another extra team this year, you can contribute here.
Having gone through all the 90+ applications we had this year, we are utterly impressed with all of their incredible stories and how they have been overcoming so many personal and professional obstacles in order to be able to learn programming. On top of this, many of them have created and/or helped out on their local communities doing things like organising events and helping children and women take their first steps in coding. So yeah, in the end, after reading these applications we just wanted to fund everyone because we realised that this scholarship would be just that “little” push they need to change their lives! :D
Money talks and donations are always a sensitive topic, but it is a topic that we need to come back to, as we can proudly say our program is entirely funded by people just like you and companies just like yours who want our tech community to be more inclusive and diverse. We really couldn’t be more grateful for that and the students feel the same way.
Our students understand how important this opportunity is for them and the impact they have on other people’s lives. Pursuing a career as a developer will inspire other women to follow their steps or at least give them permission to dream about it; unfortunately, many women don’t even consider a career in tech because they never think it could be a viable possibility for them. When they see individuals they can relate to, people from all sorts of places, social backgrounds and ethnicities, their perception changes and beautiful things happen.
Some of our students (left to right): Carla and Anja (Team Inchworms); Resla and Esther (Team Techylite); Maren and Julia (Team Delta Quadrant)
Every time you or your company donate, we can proudly say you are helping people like Carla and Anja, two students from Berlin who have participated in the first edition and since then, have started working as developers for Travis CI. Anja even co-founded an Open Source project with another group of amazing women. The name of that project is Speakerinnen and it’s a platform where women speakers from all over the world can create their profiles, making it easier for conference organisers to have more diverse panels and lineups. But their story doesn’t end here!
In 2015 Speakerinnen was submitted as a project for RGSoC. Resla and Esther from Nairobi, Kenya, were the selected students to work on that project during the summer. And they didn’t stop there either: they are active members in their community and give talks at several events, like the 2nd Annual African Women in Tech Conference.
And then there are record-breaker teams, like Team Delta Quadrant, who spent the Summer of Code not only contributing with 1.850 lines of code to Diaspora, but also speaking at eight events and helping out in seven workshops as coaches. Way to go Maren and Julia!
So, as you can see, they really don’t take participating in RGSoC lightly! We actually could spend days telling all the amazing stories (over 100 stories!!!), but we need to stop somewhere — at least for this post! However, we don’t want to ruin the surprise, but there might be some news about this topic very soon… ;)
The question of each RGSoC is still the same: how many lives are we going to change this summer?
If you believe we can make tech more inclusive faster, help us fund as many teams as possible! Really, help us out here because Mia is not helping! So far we have managed to sponsor more than 11 teams (oops, should we have revealed this?), but we would love to have another extra team this year! Let’s #DiversifyTech!
Our thank_you board is almost complete! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)
Some of our students (left to right): Carla and Anja (Team Inchworms); Resla and Esther (Team Techylite); Maren and Julia (Team Delta Quadrant)