Hello! We are Shelly and Pilar, and together we make up the student part of Team Tessie. We will be spending the summer working with the wonderful people from Hood.ie.
L-R BR: Aaron, Clemens, Ramon; FR: Shelly, Pilar, Igor (Image: Michael Emhofer)
Why “Team Tessie”, what does it mean?
When we first met up to discuss applying for Summer of Code, we did so in the cat cafe (Cafe Neko) here in Vienna. As a result, we named ourself “Team Neko” but discovered a couple of weeks thereafter that there was already a gaming blog with that name so we were once more back to the drawing board!
We spoke about our shared love of sea monsters. Not only did we both fondly remember Tessie from Earthbound, but we both had similar memories of stories of Kelpies. We weighed up calling ourselves either “Team Kelpie”, or else “Team Tessie” and decided on the latter when we realised it might not be the best idea to name ourselves after the evil one!
How did you hear about the SoC and why did you apply?
Shelly: I started learning programming languages by myself in an effort to kickstart a career change. I was learning alone which gets a bit difficult after a while. My partner travelled to San Francisco for the very last GoGaRuCo and met @cczona there. From ever so far away, and with the magic of twitter, Carina put myself and Floor Drees in touch. I heard of Summer of Code through Floor, who also introduced me to Pilar as a prospective team mate. Summer of code struck me as such a fantastic (and supportive!) programme so I knew there and then that I wanted to do what I could to get to take part in it.
Pilar: I had been studying genetics at the University of Vienna when out of the blue my brother invited me to go with him at a local developer conference, DevFest. Floor Drees gave a lightning talk about RGSoC there. At this conference I was just completely captivated by how inviting, open and friendly the people working in tech are. At a later conference, Kod.io, Anika Lindtner gave a talk on RGSoC where a member of the audience, Mirjam Zenz, mentioned she was organizing a Rails Girls event in St. Pölten. I just had to go! So I applied, got accepted and had a magical time. RGSoC was brought up, yet again, and it already sounded amazing but this was like a sign, RGSoC wouldn’t stop chasing me so I decided to pursue it myself.
What project are you working on?
We will be working with the lovely folks of Hoodie. We are beginning with building an app, first using JS, HTML, and CSS. We will then make the same thing using Hoodie. This is to give us a deeper understanding of Hoodie’s capabilities, as well as show us how much easier things are with Hoodie!
After this, we will be diving into pouchdb, and then onward deeper and deeper into Hoodie. We are both really excited to get into all of this!
What are you most looking forward to this summer?
Shelly: It’s hard to pinpoint one thing! I am really excited about working on Hoodie, both in terms of the project itself as well as working with the hoodie folk. I’m quite a fan of how welcoming, friendly, and interesting they all are! It’s going to be great to do all of this with Pilar, I’m really lucky to have her as a teammate! We clicked right away and have so much in common so I know this summer will be a great one! I’m also looking forward to getting to know the other teams. Hurrah for new international friends!
Pilar: I am extremely excited about getting to know the feel of what it’s like to work in tech, but above that to work with this amazing group of people. Everyone is so enthusiastic, supportive and helpful, I can’t get over how lucky I am to be working with such a great team. I also happen to have the best partner in the program. We get along so well and have so much in common that working together is not only going to be easy, but loads of fun as well. I feels as though the RGSoC teams and organizers are one big family, so I’m definitely looking forward to meeting all the awesome people involved with RGSoC this year.
Our team twitter account is @teamtessie. Do follow us to keep updated on our progress, not to mention bonus goat gifs!
Happy Rails Girls Summer of Code Kickoff Day, everyone! ♥
Today is the beginning of a three-month adventure we are going on with all 20 teams of this RGSoC 2015! All in all over 130 people - coaches, mentors, supervisors, organizers, helpdesk coaches, designers - are excited to start this journey today. All over the globe there are going to be hangouts and “LET’S DO THIS!!”-outcries and a lot of love through twitter.
We are collecting all the team’s twitter accounts in a twitter list, so you can follow them there as well.
Timezone fun fact: The first ones to kickoff their Summer (or actually Winter ;) ) of Code were Team Melbourne from Australia (UTC+10) and they have written a wonderful blog post about their first day!
The last ones to start into the day are our Teams from the US, Team Expat from Seattle and Team CocoaGems from San Francisco (UTC-7).
Another fun fact is that today is also the birthday of Shelly from Team Tessie. What better way to start your Summer of Code with an awesome cake and confetti! We are working on shipping all the confetti gifs we can gather to Austria today (be sure to wish Shelly a happy birthday in our RGSOC Community Slack channel if you are around) - in the meantime, Team GirlsCodersWarsaw are doing great on the cake front and are kicking off their summer with the most delicious looking cake.
This is looking to be a wonderful start to a magical three months adventure! Stay tuned for blog posts about the teams, more fun facts and a lot of magic. So, hop on over to our teams app to see all our teams and what they are working on during the summer.
LET’S DO THIS!! Have a happy happy happy summer everyone. Let’s change the future of Open Source together ♥
Whoohoo! They said the third year will be the hardest – but in the end, we broke all records with our crowdfunding campaign. We still can’t wrap our heads around the fact that we can fund 16 teams this year: that’s 6 more than in the last two years.
As our goal for the summer has been met and all the teams have already been selected, we’ve decided to “close” our crowdfunding campaign for the summer. What this means: you will still be able to donate on our donation page and all the money will go towards next year’s efforts. You can never really start early enough ;)
Thank you so much!
Donations in numbers
We’re glad so many of you, sponsors and private contributors, have donated. We would not make it without your support and the support of our lovely community – and for that, we simply can’t thank you enough. Before we start thinking about the next step (getting ready for the kick-off), here are some fun facts from the campaign.
With 53 sponsors on board this year, we’ve hit the jackpot (and our highest number of sponsors to date). Hooray!
After last year’s Tobias’, Jeremys and Patricks, this year’s most common supporter first name is… *drumroll*… CHRIS! We counted 3 of them, and an additional Christoph, as well as a Christopher. We’ve also had contributions and visitors to our campaign page from all over the world: Berlin to New York, Helsinki to Philly. Now that’s what we call global!
We love emojis
As always, our private contributors were always very creative with their comments – we counted 14 messages with emojis alone! Our favourites: a story, an overload of hearts, a panda and even.. some code! And because we love kittens, someone also posted a nice little kitty face for us. =^.^=
We <3 User Groups
We’ve also received donations from user groups: vietnamrb (thank you Trung!) and Ruby Slovenia, who have set up a donation system for their attendees with beautiful Ruby Slovenia stickers for every donation. How amazing is that? Thank you so much, Miha and the whole of the Slovenia User Group! You rock! And so do your beautiful stickers.
Once again, THANK YOU from the whole RGSoC team – we couldn’t have proved that “third year is the hardest” saying wrong without you. Now let’s get this summer started – so we can prove those other stereotypes wrong.
It’s finally today! The day we can proudly introduce you to this year’s edition of awesomeness and Open Source coding power. Please meet the official 2015 teams (and yes! we could sponsor 16 (!) teams this year, thanks to this most amazing community we are all part of). Thank you all for making this happen:
Our 2015 sponsored teams are spread all over the globe!
Welcome to the summer, everyone! We are so happy to have you on board and are looking forward to a wonderful experience. It was extremely hard to select the teams out of 58 teams that applied, since everybody basically put in a great application. We will publish a blog post about how we selected the teams and what we were looking for this year soon. So stay tuned!
CHEERS to a wonderful summer. We can’t wait for July 1st to come - only 27 sleeps to go!
We love it when people contribute to Open Source, and hopefully someday there will be no need for a “Rails Girls Summer of Code”, or similar programs, to make that happen. With that in mind, the fact that your team was not selected for this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code doesn’t mean that you can’t have your own Summer of Code! And it certainly shouldn’t stop you from contributing to the project you had chosen (or to any other one, really).
Take a look at platforms such as Open Hatch, Code Montage and Code Triage, which list Open Source Projects actively looking for more contributors. Take some time to familiarize yourself with the code of a couple of projects there, and then ask if you can contribute. See if your coaches are still able to help you, and maybe check if a coaching company or local co-working space is able to host you for the 3-month period.
Dear (coaching) companies - you should definitely take up this opportunity and offer internships or other possibilities to these awesome, motivated women!
Whichever way you decide to work, make sure you find a safe environment for yourself and your team mate, and that you set up a professional relationship with everyone on your team. We can only recommend having a Code of Conduct; here is ours, if you need inspiration. You can invest as much time into your project as you have available this summer (or winter, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere!), and it might be a good base to apply again next year. You could also get in touch with the project maintainer of the project you applied with and see if they are able to take on one more team – but be aware they might be quite busy with their RGSoC team already.
If you’re a beginner at the language of the project you’ve chosen, you can give yourself time to learn the basics at your own pace until the program starts – or, take the first couple of weeks to get learning before you make your very first contribution. Either way, we suggest you talk to the project maintainers at some point before the summer to figure out if there are some beginner-friendly issues you can help out with. Trust us, a lot of maintainers really appreciate having newcomers around, and they’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.
We’ll try to give you appropriate support – unfortunately we cannot be there for everyone, which is why we cannot take on an unlimited amount of volunteer teams, but we’re hoping to provide guidance when needed and a dedicated communication channel where you can chat with the community.
Start contributing to Open Source and make this summer your Summer of Code! <3
