We’re Hester and Victoria. We live in the Netherlands but Hester lives in Groningen (north) and Victoria lives in Eindhoven (south). We met by chance in June just few days before the application for Rails Girl Summer of Code was closing and also by chance we ended up doing this amazing Summer of Code together.
Victoria was still living at that time in Helsinki, at the same time moving to the Netherlands and it was great surprise to meet people even before arriving to the new country.
We didn’t get selected for the sponsored teams but still we wanted to make a team and we wanted to do something with Ruby on Rails during summer. We started on July 1st with a super intense session of more than 6h. Our brains were dead… and we continue from time to time.
Find time to do this voluntarily after work is very hard. Victoria works at Startupbootcamp with Dutch Expansion Capital and Ernst & Young in Eindhoven. Hester is running her own business, Noordwijs, in Groningen.
Why Team Unicorn? It is there something cuter than unicorns? That is why!
We first heard about RGSoC through @railsgirls and Facebook. That is also how we found each other to start the project. Hester already had been in contact with Peter, our super coach, who is helping us a lot!
Our project is Spree an open source e-commerce platform. Our coach was already working with them for a while and he introduced us to them. We decided to go for it and also Spree team were supporting us since the beginning.
Our goal for the summer is basically to improve our Ruby on Rails skills, give something to the Spree project, make Peter proud of us, and of course, have a lot of fun!
So far, we have been working in tutorials and recently started to do our baby steps in Spree. So far, very happy!
A few of our happiest moments so far are when things work after a few tries, when big problems become easy(or at least easier) and also seeing RGSoC brought us more than just programing skills.
If we could code anything in the world… Victoria will code an application to order breakfast delivered home on weekends, and Hester will code more one to make more time!
Last weekend was eurucamp weekend and I sort of promised to write a recap for you summery coders. So here we go, my personal highlights and other (fun) stuff:
Friday was dubbed ‘workshop day’ and a Rails Girls course was hosted, next to sessions for the more advanced conference attendees. I attended the beginners course as a coach. Txus was my co-coach and he drew the most comprehensible MVC - webserver - browser graphic I have ever seen, for our incredibly eager team. We even figured out a way for one of the girls to attend the eurucamp conference for free, so she could continue to learn, how cool is that?!
hello, MARS! (borrowed from RubyMonsters’ super fun intro to the terminal)
Joseph Wilk’s Creative Machines keynote was up after the workshops. He’d take the talk descriptions of eurucamp’s speakers and have a machine create haiku’s. We then needed to guess which one was his, and which one was from the machine. You guess*:
Philosophers talk
Humans boil ruby for fun
Clickety click love
I loved how Joseph, senior developer at SoundCloud, stressed the social aspect to recognizing and defining what creativity is. After the keynote all of us rushed to the SoundCloud party, for an evening of BBQ, drinks and good tunes.
Arne is a Rails Girls Berlin regular (coach). His talk was basically a call to “stop using strings to handle structured data”. Why? Well, Arne referred to the The science of insecurity talk of the 2011 CCC conference, saying how much of a security vulnerability it really is. Thank glob, Arne is working on his pet project HEXP, a Ruby API for creating and manipulating HTML syntax trees. You can check it out on GitHub.
Ashe’s talk was titled ‘Programming Diversity’. Ashe is known to be vocal about the lack of diversity in tech. And with diversity, she means more than just gender (like age, ability, sexuality, language, race).
She got the attendees to realise how priviliged we all are, and how harmful stereotype threats (‘wow you’re bad at math’ vs ‘girls are bad at math’) and marginalizing are. On the bright side, Ashe mentioned that in Bulgaria 73% of the women graduating, do so in (computer) science. Pretty cool, huh? She also had som nifty tips for people who want to increase diversity in their teams. Like: take a look at 100percentmen.tumblr.com and review your about pages, make sure the interview is as close to the actual day-to-day workflow as possible and offer mentoring.
Matt Patterson showed us how he parsed real-world ‘fuzzy’ dates with Ruby, transfering it from unstyled Word documents and turning it in a website. Say WUT?! Well, Matt struggled to order 31 march 1933 versus 1930s vs c1973, early 1946, from, by, after… But he solved it (and he promised to publish his slides shortly).
Matt co-coaches the Ruby Monsters, a study group born out of Rails Girls Berlin, with Sven Fuchs.
lauratryingoutkeyboards.tumblr.com (just kiddin’)
Joanne Cheng is a developer for thoughtbot in Denver, CO. In her spare time, she runs Colorado Code for Communities, an organization of developers and designers dedicated to making important local government data easily accesible through better interfaces. And: she plays arouns with Ruby-Processing, a simple wrapper for the Processing framework that combines the visual-driven environment of Processing with the fun of writing Ruby. Joanne pulled of some live coding, showing us a basic example of Ruby-processing. It certainly got me hooked! And though you’ll definitely not be asked to do this at your day job, Joanne claims she notices more she gained more confidence and code fluency, and she adapts the trying-out-first-and-refactoring-later at the work place.
Drawatars, it’s a thing (this one is from RGSoC mentor/supervisor/hero Andy)
Ellen König tought us to take all the cool stuff we learned during the conference and take it to our hobby projects and day job. Ellen is a professional software developer and part-time psychology student. She loves learning and teaching about technology-related topics, having learned more programming languages and technologies than she cares to remember. She has taught them to others at various opportunities such as university, work and most recently as a Rails Girls student and coach. She put her slides online ♥
Harry Brundage leads the Performance Team at Shopify! They have an “enormous Rails application who’s traffic at least doubles every year and processes a whole whackload of money for real people running real businesses”. Harry talked about what happens when a user is mashing the f5 key and how they (barely) handle cyber Monday, the online equivalent of retail craziness Black Friday.
Joshua Ballanco shared how one can get their Ruby EGOT (Emmy Grammy Oscar Tony). How? By submitting patches (that then get accepted) to MacRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius, JRuby, or some other Ruby implementation. Slightly unrelated: Joshua recommends to read a surplus of code than what you’re writing on a daily basis. Because it will help you become a better programmer, as you learn from others (mistakes).
Jan Krutisch, a freelance web developer from Hamburg, summed up (at least) 10 things you didn’t know your browser could do. Did you know for example that your browser can make music (and I don’t mean by playing back sound files)? I’m definitely going to play around with the CSS Filters and CSS Regions he mentioned!
###Lightning talks
There were some super fun lightning talks. Like about this difficult machine called baby (really!). Or about ‘Fuby’. It’s a thing. Or at least according to Txus - who had hand-drawn ALL his slides! Tobias would encourage everyone to start using Shoes (4), as it’s as fun as “putting sunglasses on your dog”.
And Laura Wadden talked about Rails Girls Summer of Code, Rails Grrls, their work on Rubinius and their plan to write a new programming language! Which is the coolest thing ever.
So. I guess that wraps it up. I got little sleep. And I did not once come close to the lake. I was too busy blogging, I guess. Anyhow… on to the next conference! ;)
The first time is always special. And the time after that. And the time after that.
Going to a conference - and maybe even giving a talk - can be loads of fun, scary, exhilarating and exhausting together.
So here we have a small conference prep package for you! We stuffed it with the best tips & tricks especially on how to give great talks and in general how to make these couple of (conference)days to the best of your life.
##Rock that Conference
Lucas Pinto: “My biggest tip would be not to be shy and go talk to people, make connections. A lot of people go to conferences not for the talks but mostly to meet fellow devs. It is always very inspiring and you always meet nice people. So if you come in gang, try not to stick with them 100% of the time plus it is easy to find an opener at a conf “hey, where do you come from, are you here alone/with your company, who do you work for, do you know the city well, etc. etc.”
Anika Lindtner: “Most important for me was to keep in mind, that the people around are eager to get to know you, too. Conferences are great for meeting people and mingle. Always check out the hashtag for the conference, so you’ll stay in the loop with what’s happening. Have your phone always with you and do a lot of funny friday-hug-pics. It’s a great way to spread the joy, have some fun with others - and it’s a super cool souvenir. Oh and don’t forget this last thing: Enjoy yourself!”
Floor Drees: “Definitely check out presentations by other programmer-speakers like Konstantin Haase, Patrick Huesler… Make it a fun and interesting experience for you and for the audience and pick a topic you have special affection with, so you can speak from experience.
Make sure your audience can identify with your problem right at the beginning, so you got them hooked for the solution (read: the rest of your talk) ;)
Test running your talk by your friends or (if you have the chance) a local ruby developer meetup thingie, is also a smart idea!
AND: don’t do a live demo unless you’re absolutely certain it (/ wifi) will work / you pre-recorded it (cook show style).”
The truly amazing girls of Unerdwear released a limited edition of a Rails Girls Nerdies. AND they donate all the profits to RGSoC to make your summer even better! True Story. The Nerdies will probably sell out in a minute, so be quick as a cat!
We hear rumors that, while wearing them, your code will get magically better ;)
So get your hands on them now!
But there’s nothing that couldn’t be sweetened with a delicious lunch. And thus started another week full of monster coding and learning many and more new things.
Some wonderful people from the Rails Girls universe (Berlin, Brno, Rotterdam and RGSoC)
###Happy Conferencing
After the raffle of the conference tickets last week, two of our students dived right into their first tech conf.
Jen and Joyce were part of this week’s Distill 2013 in San Francisco. And they didn’t just hear some talks and met many new people, they also held their first lightning talk! Congraz you two!!! We are very proud ♥
No rest for the wicked, though. The conferencing continues stroke upon stroke. Next week will see Nina and Julia at JRubyConf as well as
Maja and Laura at eurucamp both happening in Berlin.
In case you haven’t seen this one yet: Tiffany put together everything you have to think of when giving a talk - including all those little bits and pieces that can go wrong when you enter the stage. This makes for a perfect cheat sheet on upcoming talks. Yay!
Team New Rosies is attending the Strange Loop Conference in St. Louis on Sep 18-20th and Laura and Adriana can’t wait to meet fellow attendees. So if you know anyone attending Strange Loop or you’re going there yourself, just drop them a line.
###News from the teams
It is simply jawdropping to follow our students along their way, watching and working on all kinds of tutorials, implementing feature after feature and, of course, testing testing testing ;) Here are a few highlights and interesting reads from this week.
Alicja and Wiktoria of Team Species+ wrote an encouraging and insightful recap of their week:
Life on a rollercoaster. Facing problems in all areas of their coding work, there was this terrible feeling of constantly getting stuck. But they kept calm and eventually found a way out for each of their problems. Here they are in the middle of understanding AngularJS:
Team Punchgirls reached a milestone in their app development. They have implemented all the must-have features to have a minimal viable app. Congraz!
hello, MARS! (borrowed from RubyMonsters’ super fun intro to the terminal)
lauratryingoutkeyboards.tumblr.com (just kiddin’)
Drawatars, it’s a thing (this one is from RGSoC mentor/supervisor/hero 
