The Spree Girls are Tracy Mu Sung and Catherine Jones, we are working on Spree eCommerce and live in Sydney Australia. There are 2 teams working on Spree this year, and we think this is fine since it is such a massive project. What makes us unique are that we are the first, and so far only, RGSoC team from Australia!
We both work full time, so are undertaking the RGSoC part time outside of our jobs. We meet up one night during the week, all day Sunday, and work remotely from each other the rest of the time. We make good use of Skype and email during the week, and have Google Hangouts with our mentor Trung Le in Melbourne (although we hate Google Hangouts).
We are a volunteer team, and you can find out more about what that means here.
###How We Got Here
Catherine is a former fashion designer from the UK, who went back to college to study multimedia design. Once exposed to code she became so enamoured that she went on to study web design. She was taught using C# and PHP, but quickly found out how much better Ruby was.
Tracy became exposed to coding while working in Digital Marketing. She met Catherine at one of the many Sydney Ruby events, and both have become actively involved in the community, attending Ruby Conf, Rails Camps, Hack Nights and ending up being mentors at a Rails Girls event.
###Our Hopes From The Project
We chose to work on Spree because one of the core contributors to Spree lives in Australia, the amazing Trung Le, and was keen to take on a Rails Girls team and teach them all about Spree. As Australia is not in a convenient time zone with other countries, it was important for us to have a mentor who was local (even though he is in Melbourne, not Sydney, it’s the same timezone).
As a part time team, our goal is to understand Rails better and learn, rather than make a new feature or add functionality for Spree.
###Our Experience So Far
Our original intention was to learn by answering issues from the log or questions on the mailing list, but after a few weeks of trying this we discovered that other people could answer things quicker than we could even understand the questions!
It was very dispiriting to spend a few days trying to work out the problem and come up with a suggestion/solution, only to discover the issue was since closed.
Spree is a massive project that has been around since 2004. It is a flexible ecommerce system that can be used to create online retail stores for products, games, downloads, subscriptions…almost anything because it is so flexible. It has a lot of users and contributers, a very active community and a constantly updated issues log and mailing list.
Although only one repository, it is four separate engines: Front end, Back end, core and API. The complex nature of the Spree gem means it is taking us longer than expected to get our head around even the business logic (even though we started one month earlier to read all the docs and try to understand the project!)
After 3 weeks working on 3 issues and submitting only 1 pull request, we are now changing direction to focus on the business logic using drawings and understanding the concepts of service objects.
What we have learnt so far, and what our mentor keeps emphasising, is that understanding the business logic and being able to explain the business problem, is much more important than understanding the code. If you can understand and explain the problem first in laymans terms, then the coding part will be a lot easier.
Hi everyone :-) It’s time for our short introduction. Team Species+ are: Karolina Kaminska and Magdalena Niedzwiecka.
Karolina was studying Hungarian language at the University of Warsaw. She knows 5 other foreign languages apart of Hungarian. She’s also interested in computer graphics and a wide variety of different things. But when she attended the second edition of Rails Girls Warsaw last year, she finally fell in love with web development. In order to participate in RGSoC she quit her job.
Magdalena graduated in journalism at the University of Warsaw. Until quite recently she was working as a PR officer in one of Warsaw PR agencies. She was specializing in running PR projects for IT companies. Her first experiences with coding took place this year at the end of February - it was Rails Girls Warsaw workshop. Since then she does her best to learn.
Last but not least - we both are mothers :-)
OK, and now a few words about our project.
Species+ is a web service for accessing key information on species of global concern. It’s based on the CITES database (here you can find out what CITES is), but uses CMS data as well - everything in order to protect endangered species of animals.
Species+ has over 20 thousand visits per month. Our task in the project is to analyse users’ behaviour. How do they search for species? Do they browse online or download data? Which bits of species information are most often accessed? After we extract this data, we’re going to create a tool for making the information more readable.
To find out more about users’ behaviour, we use ahoy_matey gem. At the moment we have to add ahoy tracking to Species+ API requests.
Let’s be honest - our project is not easy. During the relatively short time we have to learn some PostgreSQL & SQL and a lot of Ruby & JavaScript. From time to time we are facing problems with various gems & their compatibility with different versions of Ruby. Sometimes we feel a little bit overwhelmed, but we know that it’s just leaving our comfort zone. And when you leave your comfort zone, magic happens.
Hi everybody, we are the ARIA Team and we want to say hi! My name is Melissa Torregrosa, I am 24 years old, and I’m a graduate in Computer Science. After my graduation I was working in the field of quality assurance and information system audit. I consider myself as an outgoing person, friendly and responsible. Paola Garcia is my teammate, she is 25 years old, she’s from Barranquilla-Colombia and she’s a graduate in Computer Sciences as well. She was working as a Process Analyst before RGSoC. Her goal this year is to become a Ruby on Rails developer. Currently she spend her time studying and researching technology, and enjoying time with her family.
We met at the University 5 years ago and there began our friendship. Guillermo Iguaran is our Mentor, Roberto Miranda and Laura Garcia are our coaches. We met Roberto and Guillermo during University and became good friends. Paola and Laura are sisters, and Laura participated in last year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code, and through her heard of RGSoC.
##About our project!
The project name is “Improving Accessibility in Rails through ARIA”, and we chose this idea because right now people with disabilities who are working in development software applications have limitations with the tools they use. Traditional software developer tools weren’t designed with features who are required to be interpreted by assistive technology.
###Our goals are:
1. To add ARIA attributes to error pages thrown by rails, so that developers with visual disabilities can identify the details of errors.
To add support for accessibility attributes to the form helpers (label tag, form tag), so that developers can create web applications more easily.
To add ARIA attributes to Ruby on Rails official website, in order to become an accessibility website.
As you can see, since we are working with ARIA attributes that’s the reason for our name “ARIA Team”. We feel really excited with this opportunity and hope that our project will have a positive impact in the software development progress.
IF you ended up empty-handed, don’t worry, you will get another shot as we’ll be adding new conferences for a second round of ticket raffling.
And now what?
Well, now you can all start planning your trips and accommodation. Let us know if we can connect you to the local Rails Girls community to make your stay even more fun.
Many of you get to attend a conference as part of your Summer of Code. Else you might also go to local meetups or user goups. For all of these, we highly encourage you to share your story in a lightning talk and spread the Rails Girls word. A lightning talk (usually about 5 minutes long) is a perfect way to show people you’re there, share your knowledge, inspire others with your story and get in touch with many wonderful and interesting people.
Talking to a large group of people, especially those more experienced than you, might feel like a large hurdle to cross. This is completely normal, even the most seasoned speakers still carry that feeling with them when they go on stage. Remember that everyone has to start somewhere, and lightning talks are the best ‘somewhere’. There is even a conference dedicated to lightning talks!
“But what am I supposed to talk about? I only just started!”
Well, the talk could be about your project and your contribution, how you found out about the project, why you decided to take on this task, the overall Rails Girls movement (there are still so many women out there who wanna learn coding and seldom have the chance to do so), the motivations to learn coding and sometimes change your complete life path along with it, … The options are endless!
It doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re talking tech or social. Lightning talks are designed to be a kind of “have a sneak peak at this little thingy” chat.
Alright, let’s talk!
There’s a massive amount of tips & tricks out there how you can prepare for a talk. We gathered those in “How to go to a conference”. There you can also find helpful nuggets on how to prepare your talk. They’re especially useful when that flutter says ‘hi’ again.
In addition to those:
Try out your slides at home or within your team. Get familiar with different projector types, speaker notes (they can come in handy) and timers so you know how much time you have left to convince the crowd of your amazing project!
Try and put as little text as possible on your slides and have them support your chat in a visual way. We are all visual people and like nice pictures of you (two) coding, or a screenshot of your commit bar on GitHub ;)
We will prepare a slide deck with some factoids and numbers about Rails Girls Summer of Code. Shoot us a mail if you'd like to have that as a template!
Sweet, now I only need a time and a place
To get you talk on the agenda, contact the conference organizers about the possibilities. We could also get you in contact with them - just ask us!
Alternatively: many conferences have a CfP (Call for Papers) where you can submit your talk proposal. It should have a choosing where you say how long your talk’s supposed to be. If it hasn’t got a separate checkbox for this, you can also add questions to your description or write an email to the organizers.
A lightning talk is a great way to get some stage experience. And it’s over before you know it - promised ;)
If you know more great tips, please add them in the comments!
Photo Credits (from left to right and upper to lower row)
