Rails Girls Summer of Code

Hi there!

In this post, I’ll be writing about my experience while participating in the Rails Girls Summer of Code. Before participating in this month-long contest, I had spent very less time working on open source projects and I wasn’t very well familiar with git and version control. My main motivation to participate in this contest was to learn about the open-source and start contributing to it ASAP! and what better and fast way to learn if not participating in a contest having a deadline which reduces your learning time and increases productivity.

So the basic requirement to participate in this contest is to have a partner in the same city as yours, find a mentor who’ll guide you throughout the 3-month long duration, and a place to work together after you get selected.

You must pick your partner wisely, Someone who’ll compliment you well. Such that both of you will cover each other’s shortcomings and together can make up for having a good tech stack.

In my case I had no one to partner with from my friend circle, So I went ahead and joined the mailing list of RGSoC and dropped a message stating that I am looking for a partner and mentioned the technologies that I am comfortable working with and where I am currently based(Delhi), I was approached by many girls but after talking to few I decided on to partner with Anjali Jain, A student of NSIT. We spent the month of January bonding over calls and texts, getting to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, about the projects that we have worked in the past, What we want to achieve out of this contest if we get selected, etc.

Once the Project list was made live on February 1st, we decided to pick 2 projects each matching our tech stack and read about them extensively, Studying their codebase, running them on our systems. After that we picked 1 project each and went ahead with making contributions on GitHub, joining their communication channels, participating discussions, etc.

This went on for the first half of February. The second half of February is where all the action lies. Those 15 days were filled with emotions ranging from Confusion -> Self-doubt->Moment of happiness -> Some more confusion ->Motivating each other->Then again to self-doubt

understanding someone else’s project is one thing and making significant contributions to it? Man! That was a different game altogether. After a series of issues and pull requests, we managed to make a few contributions. Now comes the most dreaded (best) part. Filling that Huge application form. It had questions about us, The projects that we had chosen, The contributions that we would make (Only after getting selected hah!)

After loops of iterations, we managed to fill that humongous application just as we wanted — Perfect! We were quite happy with our responses. Although the funny part was that while submitting, There was huge traffic on their website and so we couldn’t submit it on time, Tensed we opened Twitter to check if that was the case with everyone or just us and Voila! They had extended their deadline because of the glitch. But still, we could only submit at the very last moment.

Now we had to wait for a month for the next round. We were quite happy to hear back from them and that we had made it to the Interview round. Now the Interview round was a struggle in itself. They wanted us to be at the same place while giving the interview. So we decided to meet at a co-working space. It took us quite much time to find the place and get everything ready only to find that my Laptop camera decided to throw tantrum at the very last moment Whaaat! Quite naturally we panicked, We could see and hear them but they couldn’t. They wrote hello in that little chat box and what we wrote was — 2 mins(Are you kidding me? No greetings, just straight away that). We were panicking quite a lot (Feels funny to me now that I think about it) It was already 20 mins past the scheduled interview time so they asked us to give our interview at 9 p.m. that same day Relieved, We chatted quite a lot after that, went out for lunch and then gave the interview at night. Now that Interview was a hilarious one. We weren’t sure if it went good or bad. We both made some mistakes here and there. That’s a story for some other time.

All in all, it was a total roller-coaster ride which taught us quite a lot in a very short duration of time.

We didn’t get selected, Not sure if it was the lack of funds they got this year which resulted in selecting very very few students ( Both the projects that we had selected didn’t make it to the final list of projects) or maybe we just weren’t prepared for it as of yet :)

If you would like to get in touch to talk more, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. Alternatively, you can also email your queries to contact@simranpandey.com. Here is my Medium if you’d like to follow my stories, wherein I share my learnings and experiences! :)

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Happy learning!