The Final List of our Teams for Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014

Posted on by RGSoC Team

It’s time to celebrate! After a great spurt in the campaign and with the incredible support of our students we’re happy to announce: We are able to fund 10 sponsored teams, and there will be 6 volunteering teams, 32 students in total \o/.

You have met the first seven teams a while back. Please say hi to the remaining 3 sponsored teams, and the 6 volunteering teams of this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code. We’re stoked to see that much enthusiasm!

Akanksha Agrawal and Sana Khan from Pune, India will work on a memory visualization tool for Rubinius, which will help to get insights to memroy usage and find memory leaks. They will be supported by their coaches Prathamesh Sonpatki, Vipul A M, and Nishant Modak from Pune, as well as their mentor Dirkjan Bussink based in Netherlands, and long time core contributor to Rubinius.

Kai Baraka and Valerie Sparks from Atlanta, USA will work on various improvements to Bundler at the AT&T Foundry and Hypepotamus offices, supported by their team of coaches Dion Salvage, Shawn Johnson. Roger Mahler and Andre Arko will be their mentors. See here for the detailed project proposal

Britney Wright and Jamela Black from Washington D.C., USA will work on BrowserCMS and a BrowserCMS integration with Spree. They will be supported by their coaches Patrick Peak and Tatiana Bodnya at the BrowserMedia offices, also connecting them to the Spree team which both are located in Washington, D.C.

Volunteering Teams

Rocio Paez and Evette Kotze, from Lima, Peru will work on a personal migraine research and diary tool which will help to collect statistics and insights about the process of migraines. They will be supported by their coaches Gustavo Beathyate from Lima, and Francesco Rodriguez from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Catherine Jones and Tracy Mu Sung from Sydney, Australia (our first team from Australia, yay!) will work on Spree, improving documentation, refactoring tests, and improving existing features. They will be supported by a great team of coaches: Elle Meridith, Geoff Hodgson, Leonard Garvey, Andrew Harvey, Toby Hede, Dan Draper, and David Parry. Trung Le from Spree Commerce is going to be their mentor.

Jen Diamond and Stephanie Betancourt, “The Standard Librarians”, from Los Angeles will work on a Try Ruby Standard Library in-browser REPL. Michael McCormick will be their main coach and they will be hosted at and supported by their Coaching Company Pivotal Labs. Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene and Konstantin Haase will help as their mentors.

Abril Vela and Colleen Masterson from Chicago will work on an LTI (Learning tool) that integrates with online learning management systems based on standards. The goal is to build a tool to help children practice reading skills, with a focus on helping children with dyslexia become more proficient at reading. Liz Abinante from Girl Develop It Chicago will be their main coach, and Paul Hinze will provide additional support.

Katharina Zwick and Brigitte Markmann from Berlin, Germany, will be working on a RapitFTR Rails backend for an upcoming rollout to Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria in November. Klaus Fleerkötter from ThoughtWorks and Erik Michaels-Ober from Soundcloud will be their main coaches. They will be hosted at the SoundCloud office with access to a pool of additional support coaches such as Duana Stanley (who coached a successful team last year) and others. Sri Prasanna will act as their mentor, supported by Stuart Campo coordinating the project on UNICEF’s side.

Akshata Mohan and Aayish Shetty from Bangalore, India will be working on our Rails Girls Summer of Code Teams application, putting it into an even better shape for students to connect, form teams and apply for next year’s Summer of Code. Monika Mahanthappa, Pavan Sudarshan as well as Thomas Andrew Elam will be their coaches, and our very own Sebastian Gräßl will act as their mentor.

Meet the first seven teams for Rails Girls Summer of Code 2014!

Posted on by RGSoC Team

We’d like to thank everyone who send in an application, the quality of submissions was exceptionally high this year. The selection team had a tough 3 days deciding which teams will spend their summer coding on a number of outstanding Open Source projects. Without further ado, we’d like you to meet the teams:

Utah Kate Newman and Lyz Ellis from Seattle, USA, will code on Diaspora*, at their Coaching Company NIRD. Renee Hendricksen (RailsBridge) will be their primary coach, and Rails Girls veteran Kerri Miller will help out. Fun fact: Lisa Passing and Carolina, took part as a volunteering team in Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013, and will now be their mentors. Find the project proposal here.

Paola Garcia and Melissa Torregrosa from Barranquilla, Colombia will be improving accessibility in Rails by adding ARIA support. Laura Garcia Casadiego, Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013 alumni and a Computer Science student, and Roberto Miranda Altamar, lead Ruby on Rails developer and coach of the “New Rosies” team last year, just like Guillermo Iguaran from the Rails Core team, will assist them.

Ute Mayer and Magdalena Frankiewicz will work at the offices of their Coaching Companies Asquera and SponsorPay in Berlin, Germany, coding on Padrino. They will be supported by a great team of coaches: Jan Schulte, Florian Gilcher, Ernesto Miguez, Sebastian Ziebell, and Kacper Bielecki. Bodo Tasche will be their mentor.

Cathy Nangini and Qian Zhou from Helsinki, Finland will work on a port of Liquid Feedback to Grape/Ember. Check out the proposal here. They will be supported by their coaches Miika Pihjala and Mukesh Thakur at their Coaching Company, FlowDock. Oliver Barnes from São Paulo will act as their mentor.

Sarah Haselbauer and Edna Kropp will work on making speakerinnen even more awesome. See here for their project proposal. Maren Heltsche and Anja, Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013 alumni, are their mentors. Both are active at Ruby Monsters who built speakerinnen as a learning project. Chad Fowler, Duncan Davidson, Ryan Levick, Benjamin Mateev, Aditya Yadav, Dennis Schneider, Stefan Schmidt, and Hans Hasselberg will all be there to support them as coaches, over at their Coaching Company 6wunderkinder in Berlin. Duana Stanley, Rails Girls and OpenTechSchool veteran, and coach at last year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code, as well as Erik Michaels-Ober, both from SoundCloud, will help by doing an additional code review.

Marija Radevska and Magdalena Gulicoska from Skopje, Macedonia will be working on SeeMeSpeak, an application that helps you learn sign language, supported by the entire Macedonian Ruby User Group (no kidding!). Dalibor Nasevic will act as both their lead coach and mentor. Check out the project propsal here.

Karolina Kamińska and Magdalena Niedźwiecka from Warsaw, Poland, will work on the Species+ project at their Coaching Company Rebased. Piotr Szotkowski and Tomasz Stachewicz, both frequent Rails Girls coaches, will support them as their coaches. Simao Belchior de Castro (UK) from UNEP WCMC will be their mentor.

We’re looking forward to what will be another fantastic summer no doubt!

Please support us!

We aim to support 3 more teams, and we have a huge number of additional, amazing applications to pick from.

Please help us reach this goal and come on board as a sponsor, open a giv.ie campaign, and ask everyone you know to donate to Rails Girls Summer of Code!

Also please check out our sponsors who help make this happen.

Team Selection for 2014

Posted on by RGSoC Team

After 60 hours of rating over 100 applications for Rails Girls Summer of Code, we now are proud to say: we’ve made the first step. We have selected the first 7 teams and will notify them throughout the day via email.

Because this is the second edition of RGSoC and our future students had so much more time to prepare, this year’s average of applications was even richer, more complex and an even higher standard than last year. So many amazing applications but also, so hard to pick only very few of them.

We still have 3 spots for teams left, which could be accepted, provided that we are still able to fund the budget.

We are currently at USD 74 K, that means we need only USD 16 K to fund those last seats. Please help us take on 3 more wonderful teams, and make their dream of a Summer of Code come true.

Let’s help fund them and start another summer with 10 awesome teams!

Givie is here! Use it to help us fund the last 3 teams!

Posted on by RGSoC Team

We have raised an amazing amount so far but we have so many great applications and every donation counts! We wanted a way to help raise money to get the last 3 teams (or more!) sponsored, so we created http://givie.io.

It’s a pretty simple concept: you create a campaign, decide on a fun pledge you would be willing to do if you get enough backers, and BAM! Start spreading the word amongst your friends, family colleagues, anyone really and let them know why this is important. Givie redirects your supporters to the RailsGirls Summer of Code site, and after they have donated, the number of backers on your campaign gets updated.

The idea for Givie came from Duana’s personal campaign last year when she promised to go one month without coffee if she could get 20 people to donate to RailsGirls Summer of Code. For someone whose twitter name is @starkcoffee, this was something people were curious to see. We created Givie so that we we can scale this idea!

Duana sent this tweet out a few weeks ago, and fellow Australians-in-Berlin Marc and Sara answered the call:

Please check it out, create campaigns, and help us fund more women for Summer of Code 2014!

http://givie.io

Oh and we’d love to get your feedback! Email us at hello@givie.io or tweet @givieapp.

Yours truly, The Givie Team: Duana (@starkcoffee), Marc (@marcgreenstock) and Sara (@sareg0)

Final Spurt is ON! Help us fund the last 4 teams!

Posted on by RGSoC

Hi there! As the end of the application process is just around the corner (May 2nd), we thought we might update you on the status of the crowdfunding campaign. But let us give you the tl;dr version first:

Donate now!

So let’s see what happened in the last 27 days. We’ve updated our progress bar, with the help of our designer Rebecca and we love it:



… and as you can see we are halfway on the road to support 20 students (10 teams) to work on a Open Source project of their choosing this summer. Help us fund those last teams!

We are detemined to help our students have an amazing experience like for example Laura had. She was a student last year: “Last summer changed my life. I never expected this and now i’m moving to Hamburg to work as a graduate developer at ThoughtWorks. I couldn’t have done it without the Rails Girls Summer of Code and my mentors.”

Last week we received so much support and kind words from our community - we’re still blushing! The wonderful Ruby Rogues mentioned us in their podcast, and so did Scotty and John from ideveloper.co. Jen Myers (also one of our Trust Comittee members) talked about Rails Girls Summer of Code to Mike from UGTASTIC at RailsConf. We were also mentioned as the ‘web tip’ of the week on fm4 (awesome radio station you should check out nevertheless) and… guess who was featured (twice!) in The Ruby Weekly?! Spoiler alert: it’s us! Plus, we love every single support tweet from you, especially when there’s a lot of hearts in them:

So we guess the only thing left to say is this:

Join our supporters today and help us reach our goal this week!!!1!!1

Reach out via Twitter, ask your company to sponsor us and/or empty out your pockets to help us fund our future students. ♥