Rails Girls Summer of Code

Introducing inchworms

Posted on by Anja and Carla

Hej Everbody,

We are the inchworms and we chose that name because the coding process for us is like crawling inch by inch. Also we like this video.

We’ve been working with Rails Girls Summer of Code for two weeks now and here is a short review…

In the first week we tried and managed to get the hang of the Ruby framework Sinatra. In the second we were busy with screencasting our newly acquired knowledge for other beginners. The first week went pretty fast, the second was a bit exhausting because we had to review and redo everything on a Mac with an older version of Ruby (previosly we both worked with Ubuntu). But also we learned a lot! Primarily how to cope with failure.

We’re both in the rubymosters project group, where we meet once a week and learn how to code. It was there we first heard about the Rails Girls Summer of Code. Since we both enjoyed learning how to code so much we thought RGSoC would be fantastic to participate in: we could spend every day, not just one evening a week, learning.

Our RGSoC-goal is to understand how to build a couple of sample apps with Sinatra, produce some screencasts for installing and working with Sinatra, refactor some Sinatra tests, and in the last month build a web application for the visualization of a large public dataset of EU farm-subsidies. We will do this together with the open knowledge foundation.

We choose the Sinatra project as it’s a ‘lighter’ and more basic framework than rails. We thought it would help us understand on a deeper level how rails and all other web application frameworks operate. The motivation for the visualization-project was to build something useful that helps make sense of a large dataset about an important EU program. We also want to help the open source community and give something back.

The happiest moment was when we got code working on a first attempt without resorting to google or asking for help.

If we could code anything in the world Anja would like to code a new internet without surveillance, or at least a mail program with easier encryption, and Carla would like to recode her own brain.

We have learnt that work isn’t finished in one day, that you have to think a lot about the code and how it could work (or work better), and that you have to get used to failure :-)

Anja and Carla

Anja and Carla in front of the Computer

image courtesy @zaziemo

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