What we learnt and accomplished during RGSoC
- 4 minsOur Happy Ending - All things must come to an end, but every end becomes a new beginning.
We cannot believe that it’s September and RGSoC is ending soon. It seems like just yesterday, we were prepping up our application forms !
Our Experience
We were asked the following question in our application forms “Why are you applying to RGSoC ? What would you like to achieve by the end of the summer ?“
Here’s a short excerpt from our answer as the actual answers are too long.
“We want to improve our ability to understand a large codebase and become better developers. We want to become confident individuals who can manage their time effectively. Through RGSoC we want to meet women who have broken norms and set standards to come together and change pre-conceived notions. We want to make new friends from all over the world with whom we can share ideas and get insights on our code !”
As we looked back at the summer, we asked ourselves, “Did we achieve any of that ? “ The answer is a big YES. We achieved all that and a lot more than we had hoped for ! :)
Things we learnt
-
Test Driven Development - Indians have this term “Jugaad”, roughly translated “jugaad” is a hack or a workaround. Before RGSoC, we used a lot of “jugaad” to make our codes work. Through RGSoC, we learnt to write proper, optimized, linted code that had to adhere to certain standards. We refactored our code many times and no longer use “jugaad”.
-
Collaborating - Lots and lots of pair programming sessions ! We have learnt many techniques and strategies by watching our mentors code.
-
Code Reviews - We learnt how to work on code reviews and also how to review others’ code.
-
Git - Git is awesome. We had to close a PR because our commit history was unclean. Ever since, we have started squashing commits and writing proper commit messages.
-
Time management - Juggling University with RGSoC wasn’t easy. We learnt how to utilise our time wisely. These three months meant less outings, less Netflix and chill, but it was totally worth it.
-
Tech Stack - Ruby on Rails, ReactJS, Enzyme, Jest, RSpec, Capybara.
Challenges we faced
We were completely new to test-driven development and we initially used to write code that worked just fine. When the CircleCi tests would fail continuously, we realized that we had to write clean, efficient code and also write tests before pushing the code.
Initially we used to think our doubts and errors were silly, and that we would be judged for asking such simple questions to our coaches or mentors. Slowly, we learnt that no question is silly, and asking saves a lot of time.
What we have achieved?
1000+ lines of code written!
14 Pull Requests submitted, 8 merged, 4 in progress!
23 issues created (for further enhancement of if-me)!
7 Pair programming sessions!
The friends we made
We met such amazing people. We cannot believe we have friends from Korea, Berlin, Delhi, Africa, Spain etc. The love, positivity and goodwill the RGSoC community fosters is just amazing. Special mention to RGSoC Slack. It is our favourite slack channel :)
Terrific Thursdays - We are going to miss our sweet and adorable supervisor Srishti. We loved chatting with you on Thursdays every week. Thank you for being such a great support during the past three months.
If-me community - Julia, Alvaro, Camille, we had a blast working with you all. Thank you for all the encouraging words, dealing with our silly doubts and for making us better developers. RGSoC would not have been possible without you all.
RGSoC’18 in Tweets !
The ending is only a beginning in disguise. What’s next for us ?
First and foremost, if-me is amazing and we want to be associated with it for as long as possible. We will continue contributing to it and hopefully become mentors for if-me in the next-edition of RGSoC ! We were the first team from our college to make it into RGSoC, we want to mentor other girls and encourage them to apply to RGSoC next year. Other than RGSoC, we want to mentor others through programs like LearnIt girl, GSoC etc. We also want to use our learning experience to land awesome internships next year and continue to grow as developers.
[This blog post was originally published on railsgirlssummerofcode.com]