Since July 1st our teams already wrote 320 log entries, spent more than 128 hours coding and are contributing to Open Source projects like Speakerinnen, Lotus, Ruby, Discourse, CocoaPods, Exercism and many more - and this is only the beginning of the summer!
It’s been now 22 days since Rails Girls Summer of Code officially started and here are the students of 20 teams saying “hello world” from across the globe. Say hello to our teams from Melbourne, Sofia, Coimbra, Seattle, Berlin, Nairobi.. to name only a few.
Thanks to everybody who made this happen; to all our sponsors, private donors, and everyone who is helping to build this program; to coaches, mentors, coaching companies, supervisors, organizers, designers, helpdesk coaches and friends. All in all, we are now over 140 people contributing to the program and we couldn’t be happier to have so many helping hands. Welcome the RGSoC teams of 2015 who are changing the world of Open Source day after day: Greet them, read their daily logs and follow their Twitter streams, which you can find via our public twitter list.
Here is to a wonderful Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015!
We are Karla and Emma, a Californian and a Swede. Together with our mentors from Cocoapods, Orta Therox, Samuel Giddens, Kyle Fuller, and our coaches from GitHub, Rachel Myers, Rob Rix, Ross McFarland, Jesse Toth, Jake Boxer, and our private coaches Nevyn Bengtsson and Sean Mackesey we make up the team CocoaGems.
Karla and Emma met at various workshops, meetups and study groups in San Francisco this year to discover they were on a similar mission: learning to code.
Emma: After finishing my bachelor degree in social science focusing on digital and interactive media in 2009 I have been working with media production and IT. I was engaged in GeekGirlMeetup in Sweden at the time and did live streaming of events where nerdy, fun and talented woman talked about code and startup related subjects. I also worked at the Stockholm University with media production, IT support and management. In the beginning of this year me and my husband moved to San Francisco. I took a leave of absence from my work I decided to pick up on learning how to code. I did an online course in Python and got really hooked. I’ve been interested in what technology can do for us as human beings for quite some time now. It feels really empowering to extend that interest by learning to code and being able to build applications that people can use.
Karla: Since graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology in 2013 I worked a variety of jobs including working as a geographical researcher for Nokia Maps, tutoring and working in the Organic beverage channel. After my move to Berkeley in August 2013, I enrolled in a Computer Networking and Information Technology class at City College of San Francisco and a few months later I began working for Instacart a startup that provides on demand grocery services. While delivering groceries to offices in San Francisco I was introduced to many innovative products made possible with mobile software. During my time at Instacart I enjoyed pointing out bugs and doing small write ups for issues that I encountered. At several company gatherings I found myself talking to the engineers and asking them about the languages they used and about version releases and features that could improve the app. These conversations in addition to attending Women 2.0, Quantified Self and Women in Science and Engineering meetings at my UC fueled my desire to take my social science skills and combine them with a new set of technical skills to build products with the potential of improving people’s lives. I decided to try out some Ruby tutorials on Code Academy and soon after found myself hooked on Python tutorials. Half an hour long stints turned into 3 hour long sessions after work. To further grow my skills I attended my first Girl Develop It workshop - which was an Intro to HTML and CSS workshop led by Pamela Fox at the Mozilla back in February. That first workshop led me to enroll in a JavaScript series and soon after I also began attending tri-weekly study groups and meetups.
Why “Team CocoaGems”, what does it mean?
CocoaGems is a combination of the words Cocoa and Gems. Since we are working on CocoaPods, which is written in Ruby and built by a collection of Gems we wanted to combine those two words into one to describe our project.
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
Emma: I met Karla at various meetups, workshops and study groups in San Francisco where I had moved beginning this year. I had decided to apply to a developer boot camp to transfer my career and was preparing my applications. A friend of my husband who is also learning to code told me about Rails Girls Summer of Code. It sounded really cool to be able to work on an Open Source project while learning to code and on top of that receive a scholarship to cover living costs while doing so. Almost too good to be true. The only concerned was that it was only two weeks to due date. I asked Karla if she wanted to apply with me as a team and off we went to read up on the suggested Open Source projects, reaching out to mentors, coaches and companies that would be willing to work with us. We had a blast and finished our application at the very last minute.
Karla: The first time I came across Rails Girls Summer of Code was back in late February 2015. I was sitting out on my deck at night and looking for more coding resources. Rails Girls Summer of Code came up when I was looking for additional Ruby Tutorials. It looked like an amazing program! I looked at the site wishfully. Fast-forward to April 2015 – nearly two months after coming across the site – I walk into Haus Cafe in the Mission to meet up with my programming study buddy Emma Koszinowski and she asked me if I was interested in applying to Rails Girls Summer of Code together. Without hesitation I accepted.
I decided to apply because I figured that regardless of the outcome – applying would be a great learning experience. I had no idea what the odds of getting in would be but I knew that the only way to find out was to try. There is an endless list and reasons as to why I decided to apply. Mainly I love the idea of learning more about open source and reaching out to potential project mentors to learn about their projects. Reading through their project proposals allowed us to learn a ton just by trying to figure out what each project was about. Our learning speed accelerated before being admitted to RGSoC by the mere act of applying. And that is precisely why I would encourage everyone who is interested in growing their skills through mentorship and Open Source contribution to apply.
Credit to all of our coaches!! Upper from is left Nevyn Bengtsson, Rob Rix, Sean Mackesey, Middle from left Jesse Toth, Bottom left Jake Boxer, In the bigger picture from left Rachel Myers, Emma Koszinowski, Karla Sandoval and Ross McFarland (Image: all github avatars. The bigger picture by Matt Todd)
What project are you working on?
We are working on CocoaPods, a dependency manager for iOS development. Cocoa is apple’s native object-oriented API for making applications for OS X. Pods are third party libraries that can be used in an Xcode project for making iOS and Mac applications. Before CocoaPods existed, these libraries had to be installed and maintained manually. CocoaPods enables an automated way to install and keep Pods up to date. Our project aim is to make CocoaPods more modular by moving modules out of the main CocoaPods project into plugins so that they are easier to change without affecting the rest of the CocoaPods project.
Karla: Currently I am working with Samuel Giddins one of our CocoaPods coaches on a repo called Cork. We are extracting banner and text wrapper from CLAide and creating a new gem to better architect the code and add better tests. Later this summer we are working on CocoaPods issue 2279 to take the CocoaPods project and parse it into a collection of gems organized by functionality.
Credit to all our mentors!! Upper left Orta Therox, Karla Sandoval and Emma Koszinowski. Down from left, Samuel Giddens, Boris Bügling and Kyle Fuller.
What are you most looking forward to this summer?
Emma: It’s hard to pick one thing. It so much fun to get to know the CocoaPods members and our coaches at GitHub. This is also my first time working on a larger code base, which is really exciting. This project really enable us to get the best out of both the Ruby and iOS community.
Karla: I am looking forward to contributing to CocoaPods and getting to know our CocoaPods and Github coaches and mentors better.Developing my programming skills in Ruby and Swift is also at the top of my list as is developing making some progress on the Audio BookMark Tool project -Panel Power. Some other equally important qualities I look forward to developing during RGSoC include learning how to work effectively as a team by practicing SCRUM and test driven development.
We are three weeks into the program and it’s that time of the summer again for.. Yes, you’ve guessed it: our first conference raffle!
As in the last twoyears, some pretty wonderful conferences have donated free team tickets for you, dear RGSoC students. Attending conferences is one of our favourite things about the field we work in: we just love the conference vibe, meeting new people (and old friends), and sipping coffee while learning tons about Ruby, web development, and the newest tools out there. We think this is one of the most valuable experiences for newcomers – and we want our students to witness that exhilarating conference vibe, too!
Last year’s RGSoC team CodePadawans at Arrrrcamp (Image: Anika Lindtner)
Our selected conferences
As of now, we have over 30 tickets to give away for 13 conferences located all around the world. We are incredibly grateful to these conferences and their amazing organisers, who put a lot of effort and hard work into making these events happen and into making them accessible to everyone. We’re glad to have them support us in promoting diversity in tech, and they deserve all the love in the world <3
We’ll announce the winners of the conference raffle later this week. We are still talking to more conference organisers, so if you don’t get a ticket for this first raffle, don’t worry! We will be doing a second one next month with the remaining conferences. Hooray!
Are you an organizer of a Rails, Ruby, JavaScript or web development-related conference – and would you like to give our students an unforgettable experience and join the list of awesome conferences above? Let’s talk!
Shoot us an email: summer-of-code@railsgirls.com
Hello, we are Aya and Anke and together with our awesome coaches and mentors at ThoughtWorks, we’re Team Alster Hamburgers. As you can guess from our team name, we’re based in Hamburg, Germany.
The students: Aya & Anke (Image: Anke)
Aya: Hi, I’m 19 years old and I’m studying Computer Science and Economy in Nuremberg at the moment. I’ll be living in Hamburg during the Summer of Code though - pretty exciting to live in a new city and get to know so many people! I’ve been learning a few programming languages like Java and C for a year now but it’s all still very new to me, so I’d still consider myself a noob when it comes to programming!
Anke: While my university degree wouldn’t suggest it (I once studied cultural science and wrote my thesis on witch persecutions), I’ve always been interested in more technical jobs. I remember how a university class on the internet’s cultural impact first got me interested in HTML (the internet was still shiny and new back then!), and I built my first website in Pico, a not-so-comfortable text editor under Unix. After university, I worked as a technical editor, in tech support and as a product owner. I started to feel more and more coding envy while working with programmers, so I decided to do something about that and started studying in my free time. I’m also still very much a beginner but really excited to learn more over the course of the summer! When not near a computer, you often find me behind a camera or a sewing machine.
Why “Alster Hamburgers”, what does it mean?
The Alster is a nice big lake in the middle of Hamburg - not far from the ThoughtWorks office and perfect for relaxing after a long day of coding when Hamburg doesn’t shower us with the rain that it is famous for. Maybe while eating a well-deserved tasty hamburger, too! :hamburger:
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
Anke: I attended a Rails Girls workshop in 2012 in Cologne and got really curious about learning more. I continued studying by myself and followed the Rails Girls news - the Summer of Code always sounded really awesome but it was only this year that everything fell into place: I was able to take the summer off, met another interested Rails Girl at the Hamburg meetup, and we quickly found our coaches at ThoughtWorks who were just as excited to help a RGSoC team for the summer as we were about getting involved. Yay! But that would have been almost too easy, and my first teammate suddenly changed her mind and dropped out right before the deadline. Oh no! Was this the end to my SoC dream? But thanks to the magical powers of the internet (in this case, Facebook and Twitter), the news of the open position reached Aya and we were able to team up, and luckily, she was happy to move to Hamburg for the summer.
Aya: … and I heard about the RGSoC program via a desperate Facebook post by Anke. I thought to myself “Wow, I really don’t get why somebody would drop out of the Rails Girls program! I’ve always wanted to learn Ruby because we only learn Java and C in my computer science course at university. It’s such a cool thing to work on an open-source project and learn a new language for the summer!”. So I decided to write Anke and apply for the SoC. Luckily she was still looking for a partner at that time! Yay!
We will be contributing to the LEAP Encryption Access Project. LEAP is a project to give all internet users access to secure communication, and we will dedicate our summer to helping out on its email web app. We’re just getting started with our first project, which will add a token-based user registration feature to the web app’s signup functionality. We chose LEAP because we find it important that people on the internet can choose who they want to communicate with, without wondering in the back of their minds who may be eavesdropping on their conversations.
What are you most looking forward to this summer?
Aya: I’m really looking forward to working with all these experienced programmers and building something on my own! I think it’s just really cool to be able to ask questions almost any time of the day (thanks to the different time zones of our mentors/coaches). That way you’re never left alone for too long and can get on pretty fast and I love that!
Anke: I can only agree with Aya: We got a really warm welcome to the project and have a great group of coaches and mentors to help us. I also look forward to meeting more of the other SoC teams! I’m excited to get involved in a real project and contribute to open source, and after only a few days into the summer, I already feel like I’ve learned a ton of new things - so it will be great to look back at the end of it and marvel at all that knew knowledge!
You can follow our RGSoC adventures at @alsterburgers.
Hello to everyone from Sofia, Bulgaria :)
We are Sophia and Boryana - Team RailsGirlsEnthusiasts (RailsGEnthusiasts)
and our coaches Andrew R., Marta R., Tsvety M. :)
###Who are we?
Sophia & Boryana, RailsGEnthusiasts Team (Image: Sophia & Boryana)
#####Sophia:
After finishing my Master degree in Economics, I have worked mostly for IT companies as I was engaged mainly with sales & marketing activities. Last year I decided that it is time to get knowledge inside, I mean to know how the software programs and systems work. That is why I took the decision to start learn programming and to learn how to create apps myself.
First I started to learn HTML & CSS at the beginning of 2014.
I learned about the Rails Girls Sofia event, but I missed the one held in March 2014. I applied for the next one in October 2014. I was really very happy to see the confirmation e-mail and it was the beginning of my learning process. After the event I started to visit the local study groups in Sofia, which were organized by the main organizer of the Rails Girls Sofia event – Dimitar Dimirov. I have visited the study groups each week since then.
#####Boryana:
My work has nothing in common with my education and my education has nothing in common with programming :) Everything started all of a sudden :) By chance I saw a friend of mine I haven’t seen from a very long time. Her name is Siana and few days later she called and told me about Rails Girls Sofia and the study groups and wanted to take me there. I didn’t want to go but I had promised, so I went, luckily :) The people there changed my life :) I’ve never thought I would be doing something like that, but here I am studying, learning, coding, smiling and feeling wonderful :)
###How did we hear about RGSoC?
Actually, our coaches (Dimitar Dimitrov and Marta R.) from the study groups told us about this program just before the Easter Holidays. They said “It would be a great opportunity for a fast start in the world of technologies.” So, during the holidays we were busy preparing our applications for RGSoC and successfully applied at the very last day :)
###Why RailsGirlsEnthusiasts?
Well, the name of our team speaks for itself about our big enthusiasm for learning how to code :)
<%= we_believe_in_our_skills %>
###What are we working on?
Our project is RubyGameDev.com with owner and our mentor Andrew Havens. It’s a community-driven, information hub designed to help people build games in Ruby.
Some of our tasks are:
Create guides/tutorials section
Improvements on current features
Creating new features
Updating pages, etc.
###What are our expectations for this summer of code?
We have big expectations and we know we have to work hard to achieve them. We really want to learn coding, to create different software programs and apps. We want to lay the basis of our future career development as RubyonRails developers.
Thank you TheOryx.com for inviting us to share your great working atmosphere.
In the left - Petar (TheOryx), Boryana & Sophia sitting in the middle, behind us our coaches Tsvety and Andrew (Image: Sophia & Boryana)
###If we could code anything in the world, what would it be?
#####Sophia:
I would like to create an app for people with different disabilities which can connect to each other. The app will have many features and will offer to the people different possibilities, which can make their life easier.
#####Boryana:
I don’t know yet… Let’s learn first… :)
#####Thank you RGSoC for giving us this great opportunity!!! :):):)
