We love making things easy for our supporters - YOU -, which is why we’ve compiled a list to help you help us make the upcoming RGSoC great! Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Sponsoring
Making it all possible
Just like last year, we have several sponsoring packages for you to choose from: tiny to bombastic, we’ve got it all. Perks for sponsorships include having your swag in the care packages we send to all of our teams, your logo on our presentation slides and website, a mention in our Hall of Fame page, and mentions in our tweets, facebook posts and on the blog. Of course, being an early bird sponsor will qualify for some extra buzz! If you are interested in a sponsoring slot for the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015, you can find all the detailed information here.
ALL the sponsors! ALL the partners! ALL the swag! (Photo: Wiktoria Dalach)
Supporters
Like sponsors, but different
Outside of the monthly stipend itself, we also try to enable learning for our accepted students during and after the Summer of Code. And what better way to learn than to be part of a study group, to read books on interesting new topics, or to join an online class? In the previous editions of the Rails Girls Summer of Code, we’ve been very lucky to find supporters in the form of conferences, online learning platforms, book publishers, and the like, who offered what they do best: conference tickets, vouchers for free classes, and great free books to keep the learning going. We know that education can come in the most diverse form, and we welcome any offer or support that we feel will help our teams get the best out of their learning experience. Willing to commit to leading a study group for a year? Got a special deal on educational material for our teams? We want it all! Contact us.
Coaching
Coaches are our hidden gems
If your company wants to support us in donating time, this is your way to go! We are eternally grateful to all coaches who are dedicated to the teams during the summer. They are one of the core features a team needs in order to apply and have a successful experience.
Allowing your devs dedicated time to coach a team will support a great cause, let you stay in touch with the Open Source community and help advertise that you are working together with us towards getting more Women in to Software Development. A good example for this are Soundcloud, Absolventa, 6Wunderkinder or Travis CI, who have supported teams as companies and stood by them with all the coach power they could give.
Your devs can work as local or remote coaches, or help out in our helpdesk-channel. We’ll write a blog post about your engagement and give you opportunities to reach out to our students with Job/Internship opportunities.
all the other ways to help
In the past, we have also had people on our core team being supported by their companies not only to coach, but also to work on Rails Girls Summer of Code issues and tasks, such as main coordination, design work and development work on our website or teams app, supervising teams, and so on. This is a great way to support us, because there is always a lot to do for the RGSoC (and a lot of the work can be done remotely).
We need all the support we can get! (Photo: Anika Lindtner)
Hopefully, we have given you a couple of ideas to support us this summer. Contact us if you have more questions.
The Rails Girls Summer of Code crowdfunding campaign
is officially open! And you
thought that christmas only came ONCE a year! ;) We’re opening up our campaign
page to the wider public today, so spread the word and
donate!
No amount is too little!
Over the last two years we’ve learned quite a lot about how to run a global fellowship
program. However, one thing has always been consistent; the generous support (both financial and otherwise) of the programming and technology community.
Whether you have a little, or a whole lot to give, every cent raised makes a huge difference to
creating a bigger and more expansive program in 2015.
Over the last few months we’ve been talking to some of our most ardent supporters
to get on board with some early sponsorship. Many thanks to our earlybird sponsors,
Travis CI, GitHub, SoundCloud, Google Open Source, Basecamp, Turing School of Software and Design, Keen IO,
Site5, and TeaLeaf Academy for supporting us with their sponsorship before we even opened
our crowd funding campaign!
To top it off, a number are even coming back for
their second or third year of sponsorship! Not only do these early bird sponsors ensure that
our crowd funding can really start with a bang, but also to remind us
of the consistent help we’ve had from the tech community in making Rails Girls Summer of
Code a reality.
Want to help out in other ways?
If you are the maintainer of an open source project, please consider submitting it
to our list!
A developer looking for a way to use your coding powers for good? Find out more
about coaching a team?
Is this the superb owl everyone keeps talking about? (Photo: funelf)
It’s only February, but the whole team is already hard at work to make the upcoming Summer of Code the best one yet! In order to do this we need you. Yes, you, awesome-project-maintainer! Last year we had a huge variety of projects our students got to work on such as Bundler, Spree, Species+, and Rubinius; for each project, one or more maintainers were “project mentors”: the go-to people if students had questions that were specifically about the project. We want to make this happen in 2015, too. For this we want you and your project on board!
We’ve made it super-duper easy for you and put together a small and handy guide to submitting your project for the Summer of Code. Here it is! It will hopefully answer most of your questions; and if it doesn’t and you are still confused about something, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
It’s real. We can’t believe it, it’s been such a wonderful journey. These were the last days of the Summer of Code!
The program came to an official end as of the 30th of September, so we took a few days to think about the things we enjoyed most about this year’s proceedings. We asked the people behind RGSoC to take some selfies to share their favorite moment/lesson/thing of their summer or a message for you.
If not me, then who
As awesome as it sounds, RGSoC is not just willed into existence by the magical powers that be. It’s achieved through the hard work and dedication of organisers, supervisors, coaches, mentors and helpdeskers. It’s achieved through the incredible financial support of sponsors and the wider community and last, but not least, the Travis Foundation.
So, scratch that. There was a whole lot of magic happening. Everyone involved spread their unique mix of fairy dust on whatever they took on, from blog posts, to tweeting, to finding sponsors, and gathering conference tickets, to answering queries on the helpdesk in the middle of the night.
It’s this spirit of working together as a community that reminds us why we make RGSoC happen. All of you are the magical spark who made this fairy tale come true again.
Emma Watson made a very eloquent and timely observation in her speech for the launch of the ally-campaign, #HeforShe, a few weeks ago; “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?”
To everyone who said “It’s going to be me.” - to supporting RGSoC, to supporting more women and more diversity in Open Source - you deserve no less than a standing ovation. You are our heroes and heroines, and have made it clear the sort of place you want the Open Source community to be.
32 new beginnings
With the help of the wonderful community we raised $95 k, and with that money we were able to provide sponsorship to 10 teams - that’s 20 participants. We also had 6 amazing volunteer teams this year, wich brings us to 32 students in total. 32 stories to tell, 32 new beginnings.
The teams worked on projects such as Rubinius, Spree, Bundler, Diaspora*, BrowserSpree CMS, Speakerinnen, Species+, created a tool for documentation testing or started a migraine tracker - to only name a few. Meet the teams here: https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams.
Something to remember the summer
To fight any post-summer-of-code-blues, we began to creating a mixtape dedicated to this year’s RGSoC, and we want your song to be on it! Which song made your summer? Just tweet to us with the link to the song on SoundCloud and we will make it a part of the mixtape.
The core RGSoC team was Jen Diamond
and Stephanie Betancourt. We had a lot of friends in
our study group and other people who wanted to contribute as collaborators so we opened
up the project to them as well. Omowale Oniyide
and Josh Loper
joined on as core collaborators from the inception of the project and presented with us
at Rocky Mountain Ruby 2014. We had other contributors throughout the summer including
Rob Wilkinson, Jalil Mohammed, Ashok Modi, Kobi Levy and Eric Mathison.
Feats of Daring - A New Way to Explore The Ruby Standard Library
The Standard Librarians have been creating a new learning tool for the Ruby community over
this summer called Feats of Daring. A user will be able to go to our site and learn
about the Ruby Standard Library in a very similar way as you would go to TryRuby to
learn some Ruby. The user will go through a series of adventures where they will learn
about the top twenty libraries. The libraries are also broken down into chapters so you
can easily browse through and see what is available.
We Built it, From Cali to Texas
When we started on this project all members and collaborators were based in or near
Los Angeles, CA. Midway through we had one member work remotely. The rest of us met
in person from 4:00 - 9:30pm, Monday through Thursday at Pivotal Labs Los Angeles
from July to September.
Solving A Need while Learning Ruby
A good way to learn Ruby is to explore the Ruby Standard Libraries. The libraries
however can be a little dense for people new to programming and Ruby. We decided to
make learning about the libraries a fun experience by creating a tool that breaks
them down by using common, real life experiences and relating those
experiences to the functions of the libraries.
How we did it
From developing user profiles, to building features centered around our user’s experience,
and to creating stories that our users can actually relate to - this was a massive
project. We are grateful for the amazing support we had from our sponsors and coaches
at Pivotal Los Angeles, our mentor Pat Maddox, and our story coach Mike Bonifer.
We had an inception of our project where we broke our ideas down into stories,
identified our users and created wireframes. Pivotal LA coaches worked with us four
nights a week from 6-9:30. We worked with a different Pivot each night so we were able
to see many different teaching styles and methods. Everyone had their own git tricks
and ways to break stuff down so we could understand it. They were also great at standing
back and letting us work on the project ourselves until we had a question or were about
to fall into a giant hole. We did retrospectives and iteration planning meetings to
keep us on a roll with the project. We all know how lucky we were to be able to work
there and are so incredibly grateful to have had that experience. Not only did we make
progress with the project but we learned their Agile/XP ways of working.
Rocky Mountain Ruby 2014
After we finished our proof of concept for Feats of Daring we presented our experiences
with Summer of Code at Rocky Mountain Ruby in Boulder, CO. It is an amazing conference
full of great speakers and discussions. We met a lot of other developers who have
inspired us throughout the years including Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei. For a few of us
it was our first professional conference. It was great to see professional developers
in action gathered from all over the world, sharing their creations and learning
from each other.
Our Mentors
Our amazing mentor Pat Maddox really changed the shape of our
project by suggesting that we use mob programming.
It helped us even the playing field between people with different levels of programming
knowledge, helped stay on the same page and accelerated our learning. He took us on
a field trip to San Diego to meet the pioneer of mob programming,
Woody Zuill, who let us work with his team. We
experienced a well oiled machine of a team working together seamlessly. They
allowed us to join in their mob rotation. Each of us worked on a C# project for the
first time ever and actually made contributions.
Mike Bonifer was our story coach who helped us
define the scope of the stories that we are using to accompany the code as Emerald
moves along in her journey through the Ruby Standard Library. He also came to
San Diego with us to mob and dropped by Pivotal to give us some team building
techniques. Pat, Mike and Woody all really helped shape how we worked together.
Our Coaches
The coaches we had from Pivotal Labs Los Angeles are
some of the greatest teachers we have ever had the opportunity to learn from.
We can’t thank them enough for taking time out of their busy schedules to share
their knowledge with us. Special thanks to Ross Hale for opening up Pivotal LA
and allowing it to become our second home during the summer, and thank you to our
coach Mike McCormick for being our lighthouse throughout this process. He helped us
through various hurdles and was our main advocate. Also thank you to our main coaches
John Ryan, Ryan Moran and Eric Hu. who worked with us tirelessly as we build the project.
Others Pivots who helped us along the way: Mariana Lenetis, Ian Ornstein and Peter Alfvin
who worked with us a few nights, Abby Sturges who helped us with our UX, Nikki Thayer
who helped us with our CSS, Dave Belotti, Zachary Girshman who joined in on our
inception, our Director of happiness Elizabeth Miller.
Thank you to Rails Girls Summer of Code for this amazing opportunity.
We have all individually grown from this experience in so many ways. We hope to coach
a team to work on Feats of Daring next year for RGSoC and pay it forward. Continue
to watch as Feats of Daring grows at our blog
where we will be continuing to post updates on our progress.
