Hey all,
It has been a long long ride since February and it's finally July! This is when we start our Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) 2017 program, by working and contributing for Tessel. Having seen Tessel as a project in the RGSoC project list of 2017, we were eager to take it up at once since, we felt that through this project we would be able to discover both the horizons - Hardware and Software.
Team 276linesofCode is an amalgamation of all things tech and electronic. The Team comprises Shravika Mittal and Brihi Joshi, a duo from New Delhi, India, in their sophomore year of College at IIIT Delhi. We are a dynamic duo that believes in learning and strengthening concepts while on the way to developing something.
Shravika is an Undergraduate majoring in Computer Science and Engineering. It's been hardly a year since she's got her hands dirty with programming, and it's already a vital part of her daily schedule. She brings out dedication and hard work in the team, excelling in whatever she does.
Brihi is majoring in Electronics and Communication Engineering and loves to mix and fiddle with creativity in code. She brings in the caffeine-induced, late night coding sessions along with fresh experiments in the team.
What is RGSoC?
Rails Girls Summer of Code is a three month long award-winning global fellowship program aimed at bringing more diversity into Open Source.
It is about helping introduce newcomers to the world of programming further expand their knowledge and skills, by contributing to a worthwhile Open Source project. The focus is not on producing highly sophisticated code, but rather participants learning transferable skills from their project work. Apart from inducing coding skills in real world projects, RGSoC inculcates community building, by introducing its scholars to the mentors who are in control of the actual projects.
The RGSoC team structure goes like this :
- The Students - A pair of Students who are enthusiastic to work on a chosen Open Source Project.
- A Project Mentor - Usually an active contributor in the Open Source Project that is chosen. He/She is responsible for guiding the students in the project related tasks, features that are to be added and overall development of the project.
- The Project Coaches - They are selected by the students during the time of the application and might be local (present in the same location as the students) or remote. They usually help the students in handling technical difficulties throughout the course of the program.
- The Project Supervisor - They are the representatives of the RGSoC orga team and guide the rest of the team with the procedures of the program.
RGSoC has both the sides - technical as well as social. Apart from working on the project, the team even needs to get involved in social meets such as a team call with the project supervisor, maintaining daily logs about what was achieved and what challenges they encountered that day, writing blog posts about their experiences etc.
This year, 20 teams were selected among which, 16 are Sponsored teams (We are one of them 😄) and 4 are Volunteer teams.
First and most important of all, to have fun! We are way too excited to start contributing and giving our best to this community. Before the program started, we went through the Tessel repositories, got our development boards and familiarised ourselves with JavaScript. Soon after the program began, we sent in a few PRs to understand the contribution protocol of Tessel.
Soon as we complete the Tessel tutorials, we would be kicking off with an implementation of the 1-wire protocol in Tessel, which requires a lot of reading and working from our end. Then we are looking forward to move to a real world project, which can be solved using Tessel.
Before the beginning of RGSoC 17, we had formulated a plan to work on a project called Humanoid Arm Project (HAP). We would like to continue our work on this and bring it into realisation for solving some day to day problems using technology.
Having experienced a few IoT developmemt boards before, we cannot wait to delve deeper into the various functionalities and modules that Tessel has got to offer us. Also, Rust and JavaScript is a new experience for us. This would be the first time both of us are contributing to an Open Source project and we would like to learn the most we can from it.
RGSoC is a full-time program and requires 40 hours of work per week. We try to put in ~5 hours per day together and whatever remaining time we get to work on this program. We have created a slack channel for communication amongst the rest of the team. Our coach, Kelsey and the rest of the Tessel team and community is always up for helping us wherever we are stuck.
We really hope RGSoC would help us transition from Team 276linesofCode to Tesselators so that we can be a part of this community even after RGSoC is over.
Here's to an exciting summer! 🎉 🎊