My RGSoC experience.. !!

Hello everyone! Today I'm going to share one of the best experiences I had during 2017 which is "Rails Girls Summer of Code". I thought it would be better if I can tell you what is RGSoC before sharing my experience since most of us are not familiar with these kinds of opportunities out there..

RGSoC is very much similar to google summer of code (GSoC). But this is only for all people with non-binary gender identities or who identify as women (transgender or cisgender). You should find a teammate to work with you during the summer and you should have at least two or more coaches (Maximum will change). Normally this program starts on the 1st of July and ends on 30th September in each and every year. Yes! At the end of each three months, you'll get a stipend. 🎉🎈

Your application will play a bigger role in RGSOC selection process. I have written a post on the important points to consider when you're filling your application. And you can see the official application guide from here.

To apply, first, both of you have to create profiles and a team in RGSoC Teams App. Then you can go through the projects that have selected for the program. And then you can select two of them as your first and second choice. After all these steps you can start filling your application.

Now I'm going to say how I spent my summer internship and I'm very excited to share my experiences with you all.

Yes!, I got to know about RGSoC in 2017 through a session which is conducted by some of our seniors at my university. On that day, I never thought I could select for this program since that was my first attempt. And my team "Team Fusion" is the first Sri Lankan team and the one and the only team got selected for RGSoC 2017 from Sri Lanka. It's a miracle.!

When I was finding a teammate, I found Jankshi who was a Software Engineering Undergraduate from APIIT Sri Lanka. And luckily she was also searching for a teammate. Since we are friends from Grade 1 it was easy for us to form a group without any doubts. And five amazing coaches came up to help us. We chose two projects and without any delay, we applied.

After a few weeks, we got an email saying we got through the first selection phase and then we had to face an interview (just a video call) with the organizers. And yes, we got through that also. Like that, we were officially selected for RGSoC 2017. And our project was the one we put as our first choice, "OpenDF" from SCoRe Lab. OpenDF is a digital forensic tool and the task we got was to create a file browser to uploaded disk images to OpenDF using React.

We got one mentor from SCoRe Lab, UCSC for OpenDF. And We had given a supervisor who was very friendly and helpful from RGSoC and he helped us to overcome all the issues we got.

The special thing about RGSoC is, It is not another place to learn only coding. It helps us to engage more with the community and the industry at the same time. It forces you to learn more about open source contributions.

We had to work 40 hours a week together, for that we needed a non-disturbing working place. So, we chose APIIT Sri Lanka, since It was Janakshi's university and we can work together there freely. Their lecturers were super friendly and helpful.

Team Fusion

As the first step, we identified the main requirements and designed the file browser. Then we started implementing it as per the mentor's feedback. There were lots of open pull requests and close pull requests. 😀 But at the end of the summer, we learned a lot and were able to come up with a better design for the file browser.

Apart from coding, end of each an every day we had to write a daily log which contained the things we did and the things we plan to do on the next day. And we wrote two blog posts based on our experience at RGSoC during the summer. One in the beginning and one at the end of the program.

You can find our blog posts below.

    1. Meet Team Fusion
    2. A Song-like Summer

And once a week we had a video call with our supervisor to make sure everything is going well. Not only that, we had code checking sessions with our mentor and coaching sessions with our coaches throughout the summer.

After the program ended, we got free tickets to attend Dev Day 2017 (Sri Lanka) and RubyConf 2018 (Australia) conferences. Not only that we received a big gift parcel from RGSoC and the Sponsored organizations. Thanks all for those amazing gifts!!

And we wrote our experience at Dev Day 2017. You can read it from here.

The most important thing we got from RGSoC is the "community". RGSoC has a big community and they will help you in any kind of situation out there which related to technology and you will get lots of opportunities by interacting with that community. So it's worth applying and getting selected. So try hard! This will be a plus point in your CV and a great experience for your entire life also.

RGSoC Teams 2017

Hope this will help you to apply RGSoC in next time. Happy Hacking!

Kalpani