Every year, our students work from the most varied places: university campuses, coworking spaces or coaching companies… Even though you can work on RGSoC from anywhere, coaching companies not only provide the space for our students to work, but also coaching support. We could be here talking about all the benefits from being a coaching company or a student at a company, but we thought it would be best for you learn from the students’ and the coaching companies’ own words. And to make things more interesting, there are pictures of the workspaces too! :)
Before we jump into that, we just wanted to announce our new Coaching Companies page on our website. This is the least we can do to show them how much we appreciate their support. Thank you!
Iza and Kinga at Code Quest! (Image: Iza and Kinga)
Iza and Kinga
“There are some nice work spaces in Warsaw, for example Google Campus, which we truly admire, but none of them could compare to the coaching company. And we are honored to have an amazing one - Code Quest!
It’s not only about having a desk to sit at and coaches nearby. It’s a boost of energy in the morning, when you meet all of the amazing people, that are a part of Code Quest. It’s a chance to see, how a software house works. It’s an amazing opportunity see everything from the inside, not just look in from the outside.
Thank you, Code Quest!”
Magda from CodeQuest
“We love Rails community and we’re proud to be a part of it. That’s why at codequest we support events like Rails Girls workshops and Rails Girls Summer of Code. Next to open source collaboration, such events are our small brick to build awesome environment we are working in. And it’s a pleasure to work with such people as RubyCats Iza and Kinga!”
Thea and Marie at SoundCloud! (Image: Thea and Marie)
Thea & Marie
“Being part of a Coaching Company means:
- Having real-life support
- Seeing and being surrounded by rolemodels (on the way to being a programmer, being surrounded by programmers). Also, you are surrounded by so many experts and you can find them all over the work place! :)
- Having structure and a well separated work/learning and living-place for more effective learning. This makes a big difference concerning motivation and for a better work life balance.
- Contacts (having small or longer talks in the cafeteria with people from Soundcloud is not only inspiring but also a way to get to know more people working in the field).
- Best possibility to check whether you really want to spent your days like this, even though 3 months is a little short, it is good enough to find out if you like what you are doing.
- What could only be better? having a RGSoC-3-month-Hackathon instead of a coaching company ;)”
Duana from SoundCloud
“RGSoC is a way for us to address diversity issues in our industry, contribute to open source and sharpen our mentoring skills-but the biggest reward is seeing how people from such different backgrounds can thrive in code and help us forge a more inclusive and diverse tech culture.”
Naggita and Joannah at The Innovation Village! (Image: Naggita and Joannah)
Naggita and Joannah
“Coaching companies undoubtedly play a big role for the teams doing RGSOC. They give teams the right visibility, mentorship to jump start their career , guidance on the projects they are working on and help them to easily reach the technology community because they already have avenues to great tech meetups , gatherings and communities.
The innovation village Kampala has given us incredible visibility in Kampala and without doubt Africa as a whole, we have appeared on one of their TV stations, ( IdeaT V), talking about our involvement in RGSoC and community outreach . We also have access to a tech community that inspires us to jump start our development.
We have been introduced to a very significant network of very inspiring people. These people have given us ideas, encouraged us and mentored us. Some have inspired us to chase our dreams and become better engineers.
It has helped us in becoming better speakers by giving us a platform to speak at an event. They have given us for all events we want to do as a team. It has really bent its programs to accommodate our suggestions on possible tech gatherings and involvements so that we can fully achieve one of our goals for RGSOC, community involvement.”
Japheth from Innovation Village
“Supporting the RGSoC defines why we set up The Innovation Village as a destination of ideas. Supporting RGSoC becomes a perfect opportunity for us to collaborate globally with partners who have significant experience that we can customize locally as we give an opportunity to brilliant girls to bless the world with their ingenuity.
All beginnings have the potential of immense possibilities. As we interact with the RGSoC, it might appear as if they are benefiting from us and yet we are benefiting more from them by giving them an environment they can bring ideas to life. Out of a simple conversations with the the ladies I could see possibilities of a series of projects they could bring to life with the proper mentorship.
The best thing about being part of RGSoC is being in the presence of possibilities. My experience so far is this is about raising to challenges through viable solutions driven by tech. Being part of RGSoC brings the best opportunity for this given it allows the global perspective to local talent who can be inspired to become local change-makers to everyday issues.”
Ula and Katarzyna at Rebased! (Image: Ula and Katarzyna)
Katarzyna and Ula
“We meet our coaches every day, not only when we need some advice, but also
just to say hi. Thanks to that we can learn not only from our experience
but also by watching real developers at work. We have our own working
space, with our desks, whiteboard and some fun stuff. We can see how IT
company works from inside, how everyday job looks like. Moreover, we can
take part in companies internal trainings which is very insightful.”
Piotr from Rebased
“Rebased is super happy to be an RGSoC coaching company for the third
year running; we strongly believe in helping underrepresented people
find their way in tech and fostering diversity in open source. Being
able to help a team discover the joys of programming in a welcoming,
non-stressful atmosphere on a worthwhile project (and shipping
the code to production!) is always a great experience.”
Ramya and Kylie at Culture Amp! (Image: Ramya and Kylie)
Ramya and Kylie
“The best part of having a coaching company is that we get to experience
working in a professional environment. We’ve had the opportunity to pair
program with coaches, which helps with understanding the requirements of
what we’re working on, and how to make code more efficient. Our coaches
have such amazing brains, we’re wondering when do we start thinking like
that?
How Rails Girls Summer Of Code helps us to learn to code is that it is not
just about learning code, it’s about having best practices such as daily
standups, test driven development, well maintained code, and elegant
solutions. One of the things that we love about Culture Amp is that they’re
big on fostering community - the people who work here organise, take part
in and speak at events. Culture Amp have been very welcoming, and we’ve
taken part in their Conference Culture X Design, which was the first
conference Ramya has ever been to.
Culture Amp have helped us jumpstart our career in software development by
challenging us to ask the right questions in order to get the answers we
need, and to learn how to find essential information. Their lunchtime Brown
Bag sessions on tech topics such as Github and Docker have given us real
world education in issues that affect them. We’ve also noticed that our
open source contribution graphs on Github are so much greener! It’s been a
great opportunity for networking and meeting people within the company, and
finding out about the culture of a company that cares greatly about what
culture is.”
Jo Cranford, coach from Culture Amp
“Diversity is a huge issue in technical teams - women are generally
underrepresented, particularly in engineering roles. Our research shows
that more diverse teams not only perform better, but are more inclusive and
generally nicer places to work. In our own teams, we are very conscious of
what we can do to create an inclusive work environment for everybody, and
we also carry out research into diversity and inclusion across other
companies. It’s a really important issue for us, and one that we actively
work on!
As an organisation, Rails Girls is making a real difference - one of our
engineers got her start in Ruby at a past Rails Girls event. We have
sponsored Rails Girls events in Australia over the last eighteen months,
and our engineers are encouraged to join both the local events and summer
of code as coaches, and supported in doing so. We have also supported other
local events including SheHacks. As a company we are continuing to look for
opportunities to support and help encourage diversity within the community.”
Play in pain, Play in problem and Play in all sorts of conditions.
- Roger Federer
image taken by Sahar Siddiqui
Die hard Roger Federer Fans, our team name itself reveals our first common interest to join hands together to form a team in the first place.
We are Mansi Goel and Sahar Siddiqui from IIIT-Delhi, India, in our 3rd year of Undergrad School and ready to take this journey of learning something new for the benefit of society with full energy and enthusiasm.
Our first exposure to the Rails Girls Summer of Code was when a team from our institute (Jayasi Mehar and Megha Arora) got selected for it.
To us, it seemed like a great achievement that you get to work with one of the finest developers in open source. Frankly, we couldn’t really understand the real essence of ‘Open Source’ until we got affiliated to the development society of IIIT-Delhi i.e. Byld.
Our seniors became our mentors and guided us through all the terms. This way we realised the enthusiasm within ourselves to code for the community.
Mansi: When I first heard that the application process is going to begin soon, first and last person to cross my mind was Sahar. There just couldn’t have been anyone else for this. Sahar: I was introduced to RGSoC by Mansi herself. I’ve always been interested in taking up challenging tasks but at the same time hesitant in applying for some. And Mansi asking me to pair up for RGSoC’16 was just a blessing in disguise.
We both knew it is going to be tough considering the academic workload we have in the Institute. But the desire within us to learn something and the fact that we would be working with people all over the world who will guide us superseded all our fears.
Why PyDSA?
Project ‘PyDSA’ is an Open Source Python Library for the implementations of various Data Structures and Algorithms. Along with this, it provides a visualisation tool for beginners to have a deeper understanding of working of Algorithms.
We are Python lovers. We get a problem and the first way that comes in our mind to solve it is through Python. Choosing PyDSA over any other project was comfortable for us and at the same time challenging considering our ardent love for Algorithms and Python. We have got to give it our best :p
All images have been taken from Rails Girls Team App with permissions
First Pydelhi Conference
We attended our first ever conference in March when we found out that one of biggest PyDelhi conferences was happening very close to our institute.
Amongst most amazing talks on latest tools and technologies, we realised that participation of women is drastically low in these kind of events.
We were so disappointed by the fact that there is such low awareness amongst women and we realised the importance of initiatives like RGSoC to promote girls into this environment.
It also happened to be the place where we first met our Mentor, Amit Kumar who also introduced us to two of our coaches, Anuvrat Parashar and Saurabh Kumar.
Coaches, Mentors and Supervisors
We got introduced to our mentor in the PyDelhi Conference who did an amazing job at encouraging us to apply for RGSoC. He even helped us find out coaches.
All our Coaches form a highly enthusiastic group of programmers who never fail to encourage us, are available 24/7 for help and are more than willing to motivate us to continue our journey in Open Source that we have started with RGSoC.
We have been fortunate enough to have Vaishali Thakkar and Sophia Takeva as our amazing supervisors throughout this journey of RGSoC.
image taken by Sahar Siddiqui
What we have achieved so far?
We designed the basic draft of PyDSA visualisation website. Link to wireframes : https://goo.gl/8paaNx
We learnt about Pep8 format, Python Tests, Travis CI and a few issues and their solutions.
We set up a Django server and made a Test App in it.
As guided by our coaches, we started learning more about d3.js library and tried to code a few visualisations in it.
We learnt how does the interaction between the frontend and backend works using d3.js in frontend and Django framework.
We learnt about classes and objects in Python and Design Patterns that should be implemented in order to structure the PyDSA library.
Completed the list of algorithms mentioned in the list of algorithms required for the first official release.
In the process, we have reviewed some Pull Requests made by others and we have sent a few of them ourselves.
To set up the official web app on Django platform.
To implement all the basic visualisation algorithms using d3.js.
To complete the documentation of the algorithms such that they are easily understandable.
To prepare further algorithms in such a way that the code is reusable in the Open Source Community.
Keep helping others and spreading the word about Open Source :D
image taken by Mansi Goel
We are so glad to be a part of Rails Girls Summer of Code’16 and Open Source itself and really hope this journey doesn’t end with the Summers. We wish to contribute to the community as much as we can! :)
We are Daria and Veronika, from Prague, Czech Republic, and together we form Team XYZ.
We met at the Prague Women in Tech meetup in July 2015. Daria was already part of the group since it started, and Veronika had just returned to Prague after living abroad for three years, and she was looking for a support study group to continue her learning. Eventually, we both became involved in organizing meetups and coding sessions, and we decided to apply for Rails Girls Summer of Code together.
Why XYZ? Well, we put that name into our application as a placeholder, and we thought we would come up with something a little catchier later on. But we got used to it and we kind of grew to like this name, so we decided to keep it.
We are working on KeystoneJS, an exciting open source framework for developing websites, applications and APIs. Our project is mainly built using JavaScript based technologies - Node.js, Express.js, ReactJS and MongoDB.
We, students, get immense support from our coaches Jano and Josef, for which we are eternally and endlessly grateful. Our mentor Max, one of KeystoneJS core contributors, patiently answers all our questions and provides valuable feedback. We are supported and supervised by last year’s RGSoC participant Sofia from sunny Sofia, Bulgaria.
This is our team:
(Images in this collage were provided by the respective team members)
Daria’s journey to software development started with working as content-manager or simply copy-paster of content into CMS and e-shops. She realized she actually wants to learn the “behind-the-scenes” technology, so she started with creating simple HTML/CSS webpages then continued into modifying WordPress themes, and in the end got her first job as WordPress developer for a small marketing agency. Since smaller scale web development doesn’t necessarily mean actual programming, she kept postponing learning any language seriously and concentrated on learning tools instead. After landing accidently on a big project as frontend developer, she had to quickly get the basics of modern frontend tooling and realized how badly she lacked decent Javascript (or any other language) knowledge. She is really grateful to RGSoC and Keystone for such amazing opportunity to work on dynamically developing open-source project and learn a lot about react, node.js, mongodb, git and many other exciting technologies.
Veronika comes from Moravia, specifically the Zlín region, which is a part of Czech Republic right next to the border with Slovakia.
Her background is in traditional linguistics - she studied English and Italian Linguistics and Literature.
She became interested in programming and related technical disciplines at the time when she was working in customer service and wanted something new and exciting to learn. JavaScript and Python seemed very well suited for a novice learner, so at first, she was browsing tutorials and online courses - it became her hobby to solve simple programming puzzles, just like other people like to do sudoku or crossword puzzles in their free time.
She was hooked, and later on she decided to take this hobby to the next level and started attending various workshops and intensive courses, which eventually lead to the decision to take a plunge, enroll into Summer of Code and get involved full-time in a real project.
Here we are at work, apparently very busy and focusing on something important:
(Picture by Fred)
What we have achieved so far
Became better at JavaScript (crossing fingers)
Built password complexity API and min/max options for text field
Implemented smooth scrolling in the admin UI
Reviewed existing docs and moved them to KeystoneJS repo
Used npm for package management and running local environment for Node.js
Wrote our own unit tests
Learnt basics of deployment to Heroku
Built blog with KeystoneJS
Tried out ReactJS
Learnt many other small things (jade, markdown, basics of jsx…)
Tried out working in a coworking space
This is the view from our office:
(Photo by Veronika)
Tips we would like to share
Don’t get discouraged by difficulties! Programming is not easy, it is actually very challenging, and that’s what is so exciting about learning it. In fact, pick difficult tasks! It will push you further.
Community is important! Get adopted by your programming family and you will get endless support in hard moments.
Take regular breaks! Refresh and gather new energy in your free time. It is important to relax.
Take care of yourself! It is easy to get lost in time while you’re fully immersed into coding. Keep yourself hydrated and don’t forget to eat your lunch :)
Strengthen your theoretical knowledge as well! Nurture your curiosity to find out how things work behind the outer layer.
Our next steps within the project
Make own Twitter field for Keystone
Build a visualization of available lists in Keystone’s Admin UI
Submit a “How to build a blog with Keystone” article for Keystone documentation
Hi! We are Soumya Sharma and Srishti Sengupta from New Delhi, India. This is our first time participating in an open source program. We are very excited to be associated with it and working for our project. Our project is VOC and is a part of the PyBeeWare community.
Soumya: I am a final year student at IIIT-Delhi who absolutely loves Star Wars! I love working in the tech industry and especially spending my weekends at hackathons learning new technology and making innovative things. I have varied interests which include curling up with a book and going on exciting hikes.
Image: Team l1ghtsaber
Srishti: I am 21, currently residing in New Delhi, India and am pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIIT-Delhi. I loved to tinker around with computers since childhood, and have always wanted to work in the field of computer sciences in the future as well. This very thought has fueled my desire to become a computer science engineer and use my knowledge to make a change. Other than programming, I have several hobbies which include playing the piano, graphic designing, and reading books. I am a trained western solo pianist and have completed till Grade 5 of the solo piano course offered by Trinity College, London. I started learning piano in 2003 and have been addicted to it ever since.
Image: Team l1ghtsaber
We (Soumya and Srishti) have known each other since the last three years and have done several course projects together in our institute. We’ve been roomies for a long time now and are BFFs! <3
More about our project
VOC is a transpiler that converts Python bytecode into Java bytecode. In this, a .py file will be converted in a .class file that can be executed in a Java Virtual Machine. This is useful for writing Android applications or writing web applications for situations where JavaEE is the only available deployment platform. The documentation for this project can be found here: https://voc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
What have we achieved so far?
The first few days were spent in understanding the vast code base. RGSoC kickoff started with a call with our mentor, our supervisor and all our coaches. We had an amazing time talking to them. It was highly enriching and all of us got to know more about the project we’ll be working on (i.e. pybee/VOC).
We started with working on setting up the test suite. Slowly, we progressed onto working on some datatypes, looking at their inbuilt methods. We worked on the float, bool, string datatypes. By the end of these two weeks, we had 2 PRs submitted and merged! :D
What we plan on doing ahead?
This time, for us has been about getting into the groove for coding, getting to know the codebase, becoming familiar with the internal datatype objects.
For the next few weeks, we plan to write tests for those datatypes which don’t have tests written for them yet. Since this is a new thing for us, we are taking the help of our mentor and coaches for the same. Apart from this, we are trying to finish writing the code for as many datatypes as we can each week.
Team Reactives with coaches Vanchi (left-most) &Arrchana (right-most). Image taken by Arrchana
Who We Are
Hello, everyone! We are Team Reactives: Shwetha and Tu An with our coaches Arrchana and Vanchi. All of us are in Singapore and living in the same university campus. Being 2 undergrads and 2 Ph.D. student, we haven’t worked together before this and probably wouldn’t have if not for the summer of code. We two met each other as fellow guitar players for our university’s guitar orchestra and found our coaches through the Rails Girls website. This programme has brought us closer as we encounter and overcome obstacles together.
Tu An (left) & Shwetha (right). Image taken by Arrchana
Shwetha
Hi, I’m in year 2 of computer engineering at the National University of Singapore. I have had a passion for coding since my parents are coders and they first introduced me to GW-Basic back in middle school.
Tu An
Yo! I’m a mostly self-learning coder, who started out due to the mythical fear of programming prior to joining my engineering major two years ago. It’s a wonder for me to discover my fondness in coding (& weirdly long hours of debugging) after plowing through basic C programming course as a year 1. Currently, I’m still sticking with my biomedical engineering major as an undergrad, but I really hope to pursue further studies in computer science disciplines. As a junior, I’m figuring out my most interested IT field. I have been eyeing a few after two years of exposure to basic levels of computer graphics, web development, and testing automation.
The best thing in my learning journey so far is extending my abilities beyond myself and sharing my knowledge regardless of how little it seems. Besides coding and exploring other technologies, I really love guiding younger ones (like teenagers) as they pick up coding - the new literacy skill for present & future generations. Moreover, I hope to help others enjoy programming as much as I do despite the crazily deep & lonely valley of the learning curve for newbies as I’m there now and hoping to get through it soon.
We have learnt a ton together. From beefing up our Unix command line skills to picking up Ruby and Rails. We learnt about working in a team: that communication is critical for productivity. It might be tempting to take a crack at it on your own but if just 1 mind working on the issue is not working out for days on end, more heads just mathematically improve the odds of solving the issue.
And of course Git!!! It has been extremely useful for us to keep multiple versions of our old codes and avoid random bugs since we can revert them at no memory costs (at least locally).
Also, we got to learn about accessibility design principles. It was an eye-opening for our team to know about the multiple screen readers across various major platforms such as Orca for Ubuntu, NVDA & Jaws for Windows, VoiceOver for OSX. Many considerations which are required for designing web apps & pages with accessibility have never crossed our minds before beginning this project. Awesome features that we took for granted like dropdown menus, scrolling bars, hidden cards, tabs all turned out to have highly demanding logic implementation behind if made accessible,especially for the visually impaired.
What we’ve achieved
We had a major hiccup in our progress at the very start in installing and building our project so we decided to work with the latest release for now. Working with that version, we have managed to build a basic prototype to test server communication.
We also experimented other technologies such as JS, Reactjs + Webpack + Babel + Electron for cross-platform applications. We made a super simple prototype with these technologies to quickly try out our ideas for accessibility design on the view layer. Our plan for this prototype is to implement the MVC, connect the application with the local server and package it for Sonic Pi.
Iza and Kinga at Code Quest! (Image: Iza and Kinga)
Thea and Marie at SoundCloud! (Image: Thea and Marie)
Naggita and Joannah at The Innovation Village! (Image: Naggita and Joannah)
Ula and Katarzyna at Rebased! (Image: Ula and Katarzyna)
Ramya and Kylie at Culture Amp! (Image: Ramya and Kylie)
Team Reactives with coaches Vanchi (left-most) &Arrchana (right-most). Image taken by Arrchana
Tu An (left) & Shwetha (right). Image taken by Arrchana