How it all began...

Posted on September 6, 2013 by RGSoC Team

The story about Travis CI and Rails Girls Summer of Code. How this all started and how magic happens. This is one of the reasons why we just love them. Read on, dearest friends!

Introducing Team Magda

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Magda

Hi, I’m Magda. This is my coding story.

For me coding is freedom. Freedom from the corporate world, from being tied to one city, from an office, from a 9 to 5 lifestyle, and most importantly - freedom TO be creative. This is why I started coding - to be able to live the life I’ve dreamed about without resigning from my professional aspirations while expressing my creativity.

Rails Girls Summer of Code was the best thing that could happen on my way to ultimate nerdiness. I have chosen impress.js , one of the most starred open source projects on GitHub. Impress.js was created by my awesome, dedicated mentor, Bartek. It is a JavasScript framework for building presentations using an HTML5 canvas. That means a lot of JavaScript. As an aspiring front end developer it has been a perfect project for me.

For the last two months I had the opportunity to write some juicy JS code. I was developing new features for impress.js - plugins for automatically generated layouts, substeps and more. And then came the idea to create an application for end users to create presentations. I created a Rails application that generates the code for a presentation based on the user’s choices. The prototype is already working, but my imagination for additional features is endless. Luckily, I still have some time to make it more awesome. You can read about the progress on my blog.

If I could code anything in the world I would bootstrap my lucrative startup. This is not a dream, it’s a plan :).

A big thanks to the people who rescued me from beginner frustration and helped me understand what is going on: Bartek, John, Chris, Mateusz - you saved my passion for coding. Thank you!

Cherry on Survival Kit

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Anika

A few days ago, we put together a conferece survival kit for you, dearest students. Now you know almost everything there is to know and we are sure, you’ll return from your adventures safe and sound and unharmed.

But we also have a cherry on top for you (what’s a survival kit without, right? ;)
Here it comes.. say ahhh!

###Rails Girls Summer of Code Slides for you!

A big thank you to Floor, who put them together and a lot of love into them. They look amazing and include everything you need to have for your talk. Wonderful, right?

Important here is that these slides include slides with our sponsors at the end. If you use your own slide (which you still can, of course!) please mention the platinum sponsors Github, Travis and our gold sponsors Tilde, 37signals, SoundCloud and Google Open Source at the end of your talk on an extra slide, since they are the reason we can have this georgeous Summer of Code! ♥

###Speaker Coaches coach you to speak

Of course, that’s not all! We want to thank these awesome people who have offered to be your speaker coaches.

They will help you review your slides, practise your talk, give feedback and any other magic trick they have up their sleeves for giving a great talk. Some of you already met them, some we still have to connect for the upcoming confs:

Put your hands up for them, because they are just awesome for doing this! And we are very very sure, you’ll now not only survive your conferences, but make them to the best of your summer!

Namaskara World: Team Diasbits<3

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Sakshi and Pallavi

We are Pallavi and Sakshi Team Diasbits from India. The name Diasbits, as we are contributing a bit to diaspora*, the privacy-aware, decentralized social network. Also, Diasbits, came to our mind as assembling bits of diaspora* to enhance its developement.

Sakshi: I had started coding in Ruby a few months before I got to know about RGSoC. The Rails Girls Summer of Code was introduced to me by our coach Arihant. I applied for RGSoC to get in touch with the open source and do wonders.

Pallavi: I heard it from FSMK(Free Software Movement, Karnataka) mailing list. I was always interested in working on web applications and wanted to start with Ruby on Rails.

The Rails Girls Summer of Code encouraged us to get hold of Ruby, Rails, Git workflow, Jekyll. Already 2 months of the summer of code have come to an end, and we are now in a situation to stand confident and present our work of this entire duration. So far, we have been able to finish our project on Rails Girls Rails App Generator. We created a Jekyll Bootstrap based website that contains the links to some cool Rails tutorials.

The mid-July to mid-August, was a period of workshops, seminars, meetings, interactions and what not. :) We attended the Rails Girls workshop, Mysore, Rails Girls event, Bangalore, Jaipur Ruby users group meetup, FSMK (Blender sessions, 9 days workshop).

Currently, we are working on a few diaspora* issues and features like adding an ignore user icon on the profile page of a user, adopt a pull request.

We chose to work for Rails Girls App Generator as it seemed to be easy for the beginners and diaspora* because it gives us immense exposure to open source and to the concept of decentralization of data.

Our happiest moment was when we got selected for RGSoC and we are the only team from India who made through :)

If we could code anything in the world Pallavi: I would love to code a phone book app for my Dad because he writes in his diary and keeps searching for it. Sakshi: I’d code to make a machine that would insert the whole book into my memory in one sec, so that I don’t have to cram anything during exams :P

- On Twitter: Sakshi and Pallavi

Meet our Platinum Sponsor GitHub!

Posted on August 30, 2013 by Alexandra

Hands up, who hasn’t heard of GitHub? We probably won’t see that many raising theirs. For those who are new to all these development details, here is what GitHub writes about themselves:

“GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.”

What this really means is that more than _three million people_ store their code in one place. This is neat because cooperation on projects suddenly becomes so much easier. You can search for projects, learn from other users’ code, fix their bugs or finish their features. And you can do all of this without having to ask for write access to the repository first or sending patches via email.

At the same time, GitHub is also a bit of a marketplace. It’s great to be able to take a look at the source of a gem or library when you think about what you want to use. You can find collections of useful snippets, and share your own. And it’s a fab place to show the world what you’re tinkering with.

For some, GitHub now almost equals open source development. That’s also because GitHub has made git much less intimidating, and turned it into something accessible to mere mortals. Just check out their help section!

Of course, all Rails Girls Summer of Code teams have public repositories on GitHub to securely store – and version control! – their hard work.

Most importantly for us, GitHub generously supports Rails Girls Summer of Code with a platinum sponsorship which helps a bunch of dedicated women to get deeper into coding and open source projects - how wonderful is that! Alicja & Wictoria from Team Species+ have something special to say:

Thanks and hugs to -the Octocat- all GitHubbers, you’re awesome! ♥