L-R: Basia, Ania and a RGSoC cake (Image: Magda, CodeQuest)
Hello! It’s Ania and Basia and we are team GirlsCodersWarsaw from Poland. We work at the CodeQuest office in Warsaw on the RubyClerks project. We are supported by two coaches here at CodeQuest - Jarek and Łukasz and also by two remotely coaches - Tomasz and Piotr.
Who we are?
Two young women with different background and different life experience, but with the same idea for life: become a coder.
Ania: Coding was always in my blood. I built my very first webpage about twelve years ago. It was written in Windows Notepad, pure HTML with a little bit of CSS. Though, when I went to high school I forgot about it. Because, as I believed, web development was not for girls. I graduated from Psychology but started to work as an editor and copywriter. About a year ago I decided to attend the Rails Girls workshop in Łódź. There I saw a completely different world and found out, that I could be whoever I wanted to. I continued learning coding and decided to go for broke and apply for the RailsGirls Summer of Code program. And here I am! :)
Basia: Hi, I’m Basia, I am 31 years old and I have been learning programming for more than a year :) Before that I was managing a yoga school and a company producing artistic cakes. I have background in humanities; I graduated from Polish philology. I’m a mom and I raise my daughter myself (she’s 12). This is a very important experience in my life! For the year I have been learning programming I have worked as the creator of artistic cakes. I baked the cake that is visible on the picture above :) Now I’m here, intensively learning and finally I can focus exclusively on coding. This is what I needed, yay!
Why “Team GirlsCodersWarsaw”, what does it mean?
Our team’s name is pretty straightforward. We are girls, who have become coders as well, and are located in Warsaw, so the choice was simple. Later we came up with the name SzynyDziewczyny which is just a literal translation of Rails Girls and it sounds really funny in polish. But unfortunately, it was too late to change the name.
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
Ania: I heard about RGSoC during the RailsGirls workshop in Warsaw in February. There was a lightning talk given by one of the coaches, Karolina, who took part in the program last year and was very enthusiastic about it. I thought I also would like to take part in such a program, but it was just a pie-in-the-sky idea until I started attending .Class workshops. There, I met Basia again, with whom I got acquainted with at the RailsGirls workshop in Łódź last year. She asked me, if I wanted to become her teammate for the RGSoC this year. I agreed without hestitation, as I already planned to quit my current job.
Basia: I heard about the RGSoC last year after my first Rails Girls workshop. I applied then, but didn’t get accepted. Today I’m not upset about it, because I really needed this year (or even more) to become friends with rails and ruby. That time gave me confidence and ensured me that I really want to code. I realized, that I like it more and more. For over a year I have been doing everything to become a programmer. RGSoC is my bridge between self-learning and real programming. I’m very happy that I am where I am.
What project are you working on?
We are working on RubyClerks which is a web application built in Rails. The application allows to run an e-shop. We will be working on payment engine based on stripe, but first we want to review our knowlegde of rails and frontend by building our own training apps step by step. Then we will dive into rails engines, stripe, haml, and test driven development - rspec. We chose this project because it is mainly about rails and we want to learn most about it.
What are you most looking forward to this summer?
Ania: I really want to learn as much as possible in order to be ready to work as a programmer in the future. What’s more, I want to get to know RubyClerks app well because I aim at building an e-shop for my dad’s business. I’m also looking forward to meeting a lot of positive people from rails community and it has been already happening. It’s going to be an exciting summer!
Basia: This is a really big adventure for me! I want to learn learn and learn, I want to take advantage of the expertise and big experience of our coaches. I hope that this Summer of Code will help me to become a junior web developer in some awesome company like code quest <3 I also take a lot of energy from this program. I love to read daily logs of other teams - it’s very supportive, that there are so many amazing women who learn intensively just like me right now. I’m going to get drunk with that atmosphere, it is great fuel! Rails Girls community is really the best!
Hello Everyone, it’s Esther and Resla working on Speakerinnen. We come from Nairobi, Kenya: The Green City Under the Sun.
Introduction
Team Techylite is originally made up of three ladies, Resla Wesonga, Esther Monchari and Dorcas Adhiambo. To get a clear picture, think about The Three Musketeers, The Three Stooges or Destiny’s Child. For the summer of code, however, Resla and Esther will be working on Speakerinnen.
L-R: Esther, Resla, Dorcas (Image: Resla Wesonga)
Why “Team Techylite”, What does it mean?
Early last year, on a chilly Tuesday morning, we met in a small room that then housed the Nairobi Developer School. We were all new to Ruby programming and all the the new things our instructor, Njira Perci, told us sounded foreign and cool to know. Within a week we were friends. We took the less traveled path and decided to keep on with programming even when our peers dropped out along the way. We expanded and even learnt about Android and created a few mobile actions. Esther and Dorcas had previously done Programming with Android and they kept working on this path.
How we came up with this name is actually a funny story. It was inspired by the word “socialite”. Just as socialites attend social events we attend all tech events thus the name Techylite. There are a few women in the Kenyan tech space so the women who are present are conspicuous. When we attend events, we always show up in three and we have even been nicknamed the three musketeers. There is a Swahili proverb that says ‘Ukiona zinduna na ambari i papo’ that applies to us. If you see one of us, the other two are just round the corner.
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
About May this year, we came to hear about Rails Girls Summer of Code(RGSoC) in two different and related ways. Esther read a post on the iHub blog that encouraged women to apply for this year’s edition of RGSoC. Resla was encouraged by a friend who had read the blog post to apply for it. Dorcas was out of town working on a different project. When we(Esther and Resla) met to catch up on what we had been doing, we had a similar idea of what we wanted to do. We both wanted to improve our Ruby on Rails Skills.We decided to put up our application and as luck may have it, we got a spot in this year’s batch. We went ahead and asked our first teacher of Ruby Programming, Perci, to continue what she had started and she gladly accepted to be our coach during the period.
This summer (It’s actually the Cold Season in Kenya.) we will be working on Speakerinnen, a website that helps conference organizers find women speakers and moderators. We chose to work on Speakerinnen because we personally identify with the problem they are solving. We attend tech conferences and most of them have very few female speakers or none at all and when we saw what Speakerinnen was doing, it was our first bet. Shout out to Maren Heltsche, our mentor, and the rest of the team for the wonderful work you are doing.
We will start the summer by first learning and running tests on our own mini programs, both TDD and BDD. The current speakerinnen tests are written in Cucumber and we want to change them to RSPEC. Afterwards, we want to work with Ruby Internalization to create a Swahili version of the site so we can help East Africans find women in tech speakers for their conference. We are generally new to the idea of Internalization and we are looking forward to learning a lot about it.
What are you most looking forward to this summer?
We are looking forward to an awesome summer of code. We hope to improve our programming and learning curve. We have already had several meetings with the awesome team we are going to work with: Maren, our mentor; Alex, our supervisor; Percilla, our coach, and the entire RGSoC team. They are all friendly and eager to help us through the whole process. We look forward to an exciting summer.
Julia: I’m a Star Trek fan! Voyager is my favourite Star Trek Series and is really worth watching. It’s about Captain Janeways crew getting lost in the Delta Quadrant. which means 70 years away from earth (Alpha Quadrant) and their search for a way home. That was the inspiration for the team name.
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
Julia: A friend of mine went to the Rails Girls Beginners’ workshop and told me afterwards about this cool summer programme, that I should apply for. Currently I’m in my last year of university (studying applied computer sciences) so it is nearly time to find a ‘real’ job. But I didn’t feel ready yet for a developer position so three months of intense coding would be excellent!
I teamed up with my friend Lucie. A few days before the application closed I had to heavy-heartedly part with Lucie since she got an amazing job offer. I didn’t really think that I could find someone else with only two days left to meet the deadline but I tweeded anyways. And that’s how I met Maren :)
Maren: I am part of one of the Rubymonstas one of the first Rails Girls Berlin learning groups. Sven Fuchs one of our coaches was one of the initiators of Rails Girls Summer of Code. So I saw it developing over the last years. Last year I was already part of the programme as a mentor of speakerinnen.org. This year I saw Julia’s tweet as she was spontaneously looking for a new pair to work with. I think it was fate :) - two days before the deadline. I finally applied because I wanted to spend more time coding as I did until now. On the one hand to have more time to learn and on the other hand to get more routine in coding.
What project are you working on?
We are working on diaspora - a decentralized and privacy oriented social network. We picked some open issues that we will work on during the next months: show the geo-location of a user on an Open Street Map, improve picture uploading, create a moderator role and improve the interaction with the tumblr API. We published our project plan here.
What are you most looking forward to this summer?
We are very happy to have the opportunity and the luxury to spend a lot of time on learning new things and to improve our programming skills and routines. We also like working in a team with different people and so we are really looking forward to work with our lovely coaches Andi, Bastian and Finn, our mentor Lisa our special-supporter and diaspora developer Christophe and our supervisor Verena. Not to forget Aakriti and Timo who offer us desk space and support in their office at blacklane!
Hello from Aussie! We are Sarah and Vi, and together we make up the student part of Team Melbourne. We will be spending the summer working with the wonderful people from Discourse.org and our coaches, Jo, Adel and the amazing people from Redbubble.com
Vi and I with the MacBooks. Redbubble coaches, and our 2 female coaches Jo and Adel (Image: Vi)
#####Who are we?
Sarah: Pursuing a degree from Melbourne that has zip nil to do with Computer Science. I took up a concurrent diploma of Informatics in order to receive formal instruction. Just returned from a semester abroad in Philadelphia where I trained in the despair of C language and was amazed at the strong emphasis and seemingly endless opportunities for technology and coding in the U.S. I love adventure sports and yoga!
Vi: I run a very small online business selling exam preparation content and look for projects that look interesting (and hopefully have the opportunity to do). I started to learn to code in late 2013 to be able to support my online business and have been addicted since. I love how creative programming is and was blown away by the generous open source community.
#####How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
Sarah: There’s a lot of emphasis on connections, many times my friends assume I find out about opportunities through personal connections. But no, that’s not how I found out about this. The internet is my best connection! On the net one link led to another, and I found out about the Google Summer of Code. I was curious, and more searching led me to many other open source programs - RGSoC being one of them. I applied straight-away once I found a lovely pair (Vi) and a very supportive community in Melbourne.
Vi: I heard about Rails Girls Summer of Code through a google search and via the Rails Girls Community. I wanted to apply ages ago, but could never find a pair that could take 3 months off. Luckily, I got hooked up with Sarah through the Rails Girls Melbourne community - Yay! Around the same time, I was playing around with using Discourse to create an accounting forum and also wanted to serve ads on it, so I sent an email off to Sam, one of the co-founders of Discourse as to whether they’d be interested in advertising as a project for Rails Girls Summer of Code. They were! and so we made an application - it seemed like the right time, right project and right pair to apply.
#####What project are you working on?
We’ll be working on making an advertising plugin for Discourse.org. Discourse is a 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the internet that works as a mailing list, discussion forum and long-form chat room. We know it’s simple purpose, but advertising is something that users of Discourse want because it makes the operating of their forums financially sustainable. It’ll be interesting and challenging technically because we get to look at Discourse, Ember.js - a javascript framework and learn javascript and various advertising platform APIs.
#####What are you most looking forward to this summer (winter in Melbourne)?
Sarah: Winter in Melbourne is Spring-like temperature in Canada/New York. It’s erratic with cold winds, but it won’t snow. Isn’t that cruel? :-( Why go through all that when there isn’t going to be any reward (the snow)? Jokes aside, I’m looking forward to learning, breaking and making things happen!
Vi: Not getting the flu… nah, I’m looking forward to learning about new things and most importantly, contributing to open source. I’ve used open source so much in different web apps and am grateful to those who make open source. I’m also grateful to have to opportunity to be able to contribute to it, with such fantastic coaches and mentors. Also… working with Sarah (who is an absolute delight!) is another thing I look forward to.
Our team twitter account is @teammelbkoala - Do follow us to keep updated on our progress.
We are Maud and Roos, better known as Team Cheesy. Proud to be Dutch, we identify with our country’s best, and some argue even only, culinary treat. Greasy, smooth and tasty, that’s us! Also, we love to make people smile (“Say cheese!”) and joke around with a little cheesiness.
Fun Fact #1: Psst… don’t tell, but “Kaaskoppen” or “Cheese Heads” is a not so friendly nickname for Dutchies.
But what we love most is… coding! Making stuff work and work even better. Back and front. So if we could choose anything in the world, why not start by making the Rails Girls’ lives easier? That’s why we chose to work on the one and only Rails Girls Summer of Code Teams App. For noobs: that’s the web application where everybody who is involved in the SoC is working with the application process, the team, activity updates, et cetera. As a back- and front-end combo, we can add some fantastic features that will improve the experience of this summer of code and the next ones to come.
Fun Fact #2: Maud’s favourite cheese is Dutch blue cheese made out of raw milk. Brrrr.
But we weren’t always as melty as we are now. Actually, we just met on Twitter before the summer. After Maud heard about the SoC at the RailsGirls workshop in Utrecht and Roos on a JavaScript meetup in Berlin, we started looking for a teammate on Twitter. Co-organizer Lieke Boon (now our supervisor!) did the math and 1 + 1 became Team Cheesy.
Fun Fact #3: Did you know we started a campaign #thingsrailsgirlssay on Twitter? Send your own RailsGirls proverbs @team_cheesy!
And holy cheese, do we have a pro-team of coaches to support us. The top coding superheroes of our small country got together. We’ve got:
Thijs Cadier who’s “monitoring the crap out of Ruby apps”
Hans Gerwitz who’s way (!) too humble about his full-stack superpowers
Andre Medeiros our Screenhero who’s always there for the rescue
Yorick Peterse, “general geek” and simply too smart for his age (ENVY!)
Shannon E. Thomas our UX and front-end superGIRL
The Artifical, the brand-new-skippybal-rooftop-terrace-daily-snacktime-equipped palace Roos may call her office this summer
Artwork: Roos de Bildt
Even though this might become a little cheesy, we want to thank all of our coaches, our supervisor Lieke Boon, our mentor Carsten Zimmerman and the Rails Girls Summer of Code organisation for all of their time, dedication, effort and kindness. Because honestly, the happiest moment so far has been to meet everybody and realize what an amazing team of people we have who voluntarily put so much effort in our learning process. Heartwarming! <3
So everybody, keep cool and keep coding. We wish you a cheesy summer!
Fun Fact #4: [by ghost editor] Did you know Roos finished Team Cheesy's first Pull Request? Yes, you do! Hint: take a look at your team's activities page...
