The word “dysania” is defined as the state of finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning…which we found to be fun and appropriate for our team name since we both suffer from this condition.
We first met at Rails Girls Los Angeles in April 2013 (hosted by Jessica Lynn Suttles, coach of Team Bundler), which was the first time either of us had ever started learning Ruby/Rails. After that, we were hooked, getting more involved in the LA Ruby/Rails community, and attending local meetups and study groups.
We first heard about RGSoC through @railsgirls and immediately wanted to participate. We were both aspiring software developers interested in starting to contribute to OSS, and we considered RGSoC to be the perfect introduction. We were excited about the idea of immersive hands-on learning while contributing to a real project. The fast pace and sheer amount of information would keep us on our toes, but we would have each other, our coach, and our mentors to keep us on track.
Our project is working on Discourse, a 100% open source Rails forum software. Kurtis (aka Captain Kurt) first introduced it to us, and we found it to be the most interesting out of the Ruby OS projects we considered. We believed in its cause, and were especially drawn to the fact that Discourse is so welcome to contributors.
Our goal for the summer is to extract all oneboxing into a Ruby gem. Oneboxing is a feature of Discourse where if you include a link to a site (e.g.Twitter, Wikipedia), it will try to create a usable snippet/preview for you automatically. By extracting this feature into a gem, it can be used by projects other than Discourse, and will also make testing much easier since the code will be more modularized. If time permits, we’ll also be implementing oneboxing for other popular sites that aren’t supported yet.
So far, we’ve been working on the beginnings of our discourse-oneboxer gem. We pulled in all of the oneboxer files and specs from Discourse and restructured them to work within the gem, removing Rails dependencies and fixing tests using RSpec. We’re now rewriting some methods that we don’t have good tests for. We’ll be registering our gem on rubygems.org soon (possibly today!), which is pretty damn exciting. And of course, we like to think we’ve been getting better at Git and pair programming a little bit every day.
We’d say our happiest moments so far are at the end of every session with Captain Kurt, when we realize we’d been focused and in the zone for 2-3 straight hours.
If we could code anything in the world… Vyki would build OSS applications for city governments to improve workflow and transparency in the city planning process. JZ would invent teleportation.
We are so happy to announce that Tiffany Conroy
poured her wisdom into this article for you.
Tiffany, interaction designer and developer at
Soundcloud, started the project
weareallawesome
where she aims to motivate women in tech to get more visible and speak at
conferences. Being a speaker herself, she has started a wonderful collection of
resources to help you with that - from articles on how to be a role model to
practical tips on how to make good slides.
A simple formula for talking about your project
On an opening slide, have your name(s) and Twitter handle(s).
Introduce yourself using 30 words or less. You don’t have to mention RailsGirls.
Using one or two slides and less than 2 minutes, explain the problem that your project addresses.
Show a slide with your project name or logo, and introduce your project by name. Maybe mention RailsGirls if you want, if you have not already.
Using four or less slides, explain how your project addresses the problem.
Optionally, use one slide to talk about difficulties you encountered.
As a conclusion, discuss any future plans for the project, or how people can learn more or follow your work.
Close with a “thank you” slide that shows your names(s) and Twitter handle(s) again.
Basic tips for short talks
Here are some tips on how to look and feel like a pro while giving your talk:
Show how excited you are about your project
Bored speakers are boring. Enthusiasm is contagious.
Be prepared and practice
Know exactly what you want to say, and practice it out loud a few times. You don’t have to memorize word for word. At least once, you should practice your talk while standing and advancing your slides.
If you and a partner are presenting together, then rehearse together. Only switch speakers once or twice, and don’t interrupt each other.
Slides are for illustration purposes only
If your slides have more than a few words each, no one will listen to you talking. Bullet points are very tempting but are almost always a bad choice.
Demos! Have a backup plan
So you want to do a live demo.
The internet will fail. Your code will break. Always make screenshots or a video as a backup plan.
Also, if you are going to do a demo, then rehearse switching from the presentation mode to the demo and back again.
Test your tech setup before your talk
Find a time before your talk to test your laptop with the projector. Make sure your notes are showing on the laptop and the presentation on the big screen. If you need audio, make sure the audio is connected.
Just before presenting, make sure you CLOSE all applications that you do not need for the presentation, especially messaging apps like Twitter, Skype and email clients. Under your Energy Saver options, change the timeout so your computer won’t fall asleep while you talk. Put your phone in Airplane Mode.
Stay calm, and don’t rush yourself
If you need a moment to find something on your computer, or find your place, or remember a thought, go ahead and take the moment. I like to have a bottle of water with the cap kept on so that if I need to think or slow down, I can take the cap off, take a sip, and put the cap back on to give myself time.
Never apologize, even when it is your fault
If you have technical problems, or forget something, or made a mistake, do not apologize.
Never apologize for being unprepared. If you are unprepared, be as confident as you can be with what you do have, and keep it short, so you don’t waste people’s time.
End before your time limit
If no one is timing you, time yourself. In the very worst case, if you start to run over, jump to your final slide, thank everyone and say “Unfortunately I have used all my time, so please talk to me afterwards”.
What a week! We can’t even decide what to tell you first.
Well, okay first things first. First, you’ll get a hug! This week from Team Unicorn ♥
##Conferencing
This week could have been called the week of ultimate conference raffling. As you probably know already, we got some tickets from awesome confs and this week the raffle fairy picked some winners! Wohoo! This means no less than that beginning with eurucamp next week, our students will start to rock the tech confs of this world! ♥♥♥
##Hammertime, terminal tools and congratulations
Okay, let’s have a log ;) at our Teams:
Carsten, the coach from Team Highway to Rails
had a special day and Team Inchworms revealed how to make your co-workers do something ugly into their ASCII with a terminal tool:
We are blown away by all these witty, smart and funny articles all the teams are writing. If you can’t get enough, too: follow them on this twitter list.
##RubyRubyRubyRuby!
Thanks to RGSoC mentor Andy, everybody spent some minutes, hours, days addicted on this:
We bet in a minute you’ll be infected, too. Warrior.attack!
As you know, we rolled up our sleeves to get you some
free conference tickets to make your summer even better and send you out into the
coding community.
We have been offered no less than 49 free tickets at some of the best Ruby
conferences on 3 different continents. Most conferences offer free
tickets, which is really fantastic, but some of them will even cover flights
and accomodation for you. And all of them are really worth visiting!
You are invited you to attend, talk, mingle and meet some of the most awesome
members of our community.
A very warm thank you to all of these amazing conferences!
You sent us your wish lists.
We made our brains fume by thinking about how to implement the raffle and and our
conference raffle fairy has written some code. If you want to look at our
cards you can find the logic behind all this
here
The gist of it: We made sure that everybody who applied had a good chance of winning a ticket and that
nobody came away empty-handed. We also applied the rules announced on our
conferences page.
Now heeeeere you can watch how winners were picked. Make sure to watch it
in HD in fullscreen mode,
it’s fun :)
We are so grateful for all those fantastic conference organizers pulling all
these free tickets out of their magic hats for you. And we couldn’t be more
happy: You get to go to fantastic conferences and in most cases
meet other RGSoC students to rock the conference days with!
Oh, how we wish we could be there too and see you all spread your wings and
fly into the community … but we hope, you’ll keep us in the loop and tell
the world how your first conferences have been!
Now we even have
a few tickets left …
that calls for another raffle! We will let you know what happens next soon.
We are team Highway to Rails. We chose the name because of the ACDC song “Highway to Hell”. When you replace the word “hell” with “rails”, it really sounds like we’re doing something incredibly exciting, which, of course, we are!
“Don’t need reason, don’t need rhyme
Ain’t nothing I would rather do
Going down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too
I’m on the highway to RAILS.”
We heard about RGSoC first and foremost on twitter, but we’re also members of a weekly Rails Girls project group in Berlin, so news quickly spread. We applied because we’re both at a sort of turning point in our lives: we want to change career paths, we’re interested in coding and technology, and it sounds like fun.
Unfortunately we weren’t accepted to the summer of code. However, we had already found a place to work (tables in the IT department at Absolventa) and a couple coaches (Carsten and Felix, developers at Absolventa). Luckily, the company was as sad about us not getting in as we were, and were nice enough to create two internship positions for us. So now we’re summer of code volunteer students, working full time on a project called event_girl that Absolventa will hopefully use when it’s done.
Event_girl is the brainchild of the Absolventa IT department. Since they’re sponsoring us, it makes sense to work on something they have knowledge about/is useful to them. But don’t worry, it’s still open source! (painfully so… our commit history at this point is insane). Event_girl is a way for an individual person or company to keep track of a bunch of tasks happening in the background of a system, set restrictions such as date/time/frequency, and check to make sure various tasks are being fulfilled, or (and this is the hard part) aren’t being fulfilled.
We’ve started our our app from scratch, and so far we’ve laid the foundations with twitter bootstrap, a couple models/view/controllers, set the restrictions, nested our resources, and done some testing with Rspec. This week we started looking into Action Mailers and our app actually sent us an email!
Happiest moments:
Tam’s happiest moment so far isn’t anything specific, but rather, a kind of ritual. Carsten writes various things for us to do on index cards, and then when we finish them, we rip them up and put them in a glass. It’s a great feeling to look at that index card, know we’ve done the somewhat confusing thing written on it successfully, and then rip it up and put it away. At the end of the summer we’re going to throw them in the air and dance around in the ensuing mess (and then clean it all up).
Susanne’s happiest moment so far was when Absolventa said they’d sponsor both of us as RGSoC volunteers! She also enjoys the feeling of finally being able to (kind of) understand what the model-view-controller is all about.
If you could code anything:
Tam loves audio and making podcasts, and has a mini dream of making an app where users can upload field sounds they record directly onto a corresponding map. Things like this already kind of exist, but not to the extent she’s looking for.
Susanne still wants to program an app where people around the globe can add favourite bakeries onto a map. They could add specifications like “sells dark bread”, “sells pretzels”, “sells gluten free bread” and so on. (Susanne is German, so whenever she travels she really missed German bread.)
