The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Rails Girls Summer of Code and Travis Foundation (Interview)

Episode Date: May 20, 2014

Adam and Jerod talk to Anika Lindtner and Floor Drees about Rails Girls Summer of Code, Travis Foundation, fundraising, supporting open source through grants, and ways the community is showing their support of diversity in tech.

welcome back everyone this is the changelog where i remember supported blog podcast and weekly email coming with fresh and what's new in open source check out the blog at the changelog.com our past shows at five by five.tv slash changelog. And you're listening to episode 122. Jared and I talked to Anika Lentor and Flor Drez about Rails, Grills, Summer of Code, and Travis Foundation. Today's show is sponsored by Ninefold, Codeship, and TopTal. We'll tell you a bit more about Codeship and TopTal later in the show,

but our friends at Ninefold, they're doing some awesome stuff. They're a high-performance platform for deploying and hosting Ruby on Rails applications. Their platform is built on their own infrastructure with servers in the U.S. and Asia Pacific, and because they own their entire stack from hardware up, they provide you with quantifiably superior performance compared to the competition with more economical scaling they make it extremely easy to deploy rails application straight from a get repo by either using the online wizard or the infamous cli command line interface they also offer great support zero downtime downtime deployment, SSL, Redis, Memcache, load balancers, and firewalls for free, straight out of the box. Experience Ninefold's superior performance and easy deployment with a 30-day free trial.

Just visit Ninefold.com slash the change law to sign up. And now, on to the show. We're joined today by Anika Linter and Flor Drez. They are some awesome women in tech doing some cool stuff. Rails Girl Summer Code, Travis Foundation, and a ton of other cool stuff. But I'll let them do their introductions for themselves. Anika, why don't you go first? Give the listeners an idea about who you are and kind of what you're doing these days.

Hi, I'm Annika and I live in Berlin and I studied something totally different. I studied linguistic and gender studies and I started Rails Girls Berlin out of interest because I fell in love with programming at a workshop and from there it was just a tiny step to where I'm now and now I'm working at Travis CI and I'm running the Travis Foundation

and with this I'm organizing Rails Girls Mode of Code the second time now. Travis CI is also, I don't know if you know this, Anika, whereas GhostMouthCode did a second time now. Travis CI is also, I don't know if you know this, Anika, but Travis CI is a partner of the ChangeLog. So for those who are members, you can go to the changelog.com slash benefits and redeem your awesome, long story short. So, Flora, how about yourself?

I know you're a longtime listener, first-time caller, so to speak, for the changelog. So who are you and what are you up to? Yeah, I think we tweet about every week, right, whenever I'm listening to the podcast again. So for me, this is very exciting. So, yeah, hi, my name is Floor. I live in Berlin right now. But at this very moment, I'm in Vienna.

I used to live here for three years. I started programming about two years ago, going through the Rails Girls guides by myself and with my co-workers. And that got me so excited that I wanted to get involved in the whole Rails Girls community. So I've organized about three of them back in the Netherlands. I am from the Netherlands. I'm organizing one in Austria next month and one in Azerbaijan, of all places, in October. Yeah, and last year, a little bit late on, I got involved in Rails Girls Summer of Code. And that was such a great experience that I wanted to join as a part of the organizing team again this year. And it's been a blast so far.

You mentioned tweets and excitement, and I've got to give a shout-out to the tweet you did just before the show today, and we'll link to it in the show notes. If you go to the tweet and it's not moving, click the actual link where it says go to Imgur because it's an animated GIF that was just rocking. So I love that Gif, by the way. Cool. I'm glad you do.

Yeah, you know, Anika, from your perspective, though, you'd mentioned that you went to school for linguistics and gender studies. And I guess to some degree it's really shaping where you're at now with Rails Girls Summer of Code and what you're doing with Travis Foundation. And just in general, I know that there's a lot of conversation around diversity and inclusivity. And it's a big hot topic right now in tech. And to some, it's very real in terms of their life.

But can you give us an idea of maybe where, I guess, where the idea of Rails Girl Summer Code came from? I know it's a campaign. Can you give us some of the backstory of what started this? There was a blog post, there was a dream. Give us the backstory. Funnily enough, I wasn't there when it started, but I can tell the story pretty good by now i guess so um this started with a

meeting from where organizers from race girls berlin and coaches met and here in berlin we were one of the the first group actually that after a beginner's workshop from race girls that we said okay we wanted to continue coding together and to continue learning together. So we organized follow-up workshops and we started these study groups. And we encouraged everyone to start their own study group. Just grab a coach and meet up every week or every second week and keep on learning. And Sven Fuchs is one of the most active coaches and one of the most active community members here. And he started a study group, I think, two years ago.

And this is one of the best study groups and most awesome study groups I've ever seen. It's called Ruby Monsters. And yeah, and they were just learning and and i think they were just um missing a goal where to learn two words true there was yeah of course you can learn a lot about ruby i guess or like build your own um website and stuff but uh so they met and um and wanted to see what what what what can we build for women to get even deeper into code and and their the idea of a rails girl summer of code was born and this is a little bit different than ruby and google summer of code as i understand it because it focuses on learning by doing so have's the best way to learn, right?

Yes, yes. Actually, it's awesome. And of course, I haven't done any other Summer of Code or even this one as a participant. But as an organizer, the idea is so great to have. Have you work on a project and then actually get you deeper into code while you're working on that project. And while you working on that project and while you work on that project and you contribute to open source you are in these three months um you are a full-time

programmer and you can actually see if that's something you would want to get into so we we give women the opportunity to kind of see um how this works and if they actually would want to work as a programmer and to give them a chance to contribute to open source full time. So yeah, that was the idea behind Red Customer of Code. And then I guess it was such a great idea that they started to work on this right now. And Sven Fuchs, he gave a lightning talk at a beginners workshop and then a whole

organizing team formed around him and they just got started and i think the whole um the whole idea was born in april or something and then they started the crowdfunding campaign last year and within two weeks i guess had $80,000 and they could support 10 teams to come on board for XCosm of Code. And this whole process wasn't longer than two to three months, I guess. So this was kind of like a crazy idea, crazy dream. It was like, okay, let's just build it. And that's the amazing story. That's the kind of fairytale-y kind of thing I like from that story.

And I actually joined in June when Travis CI took me on board. And I got on board as a community manager and to organize or help organize customer of code with them. So that was when I came. You touched on one detail I think is kind of important for the listeners, and I think it's important for a couple of reasons. One is to show your perspective. You come to this, and you're an organizer of all of this as a non-developer. But you said earlier in your intro that you fell in love with programming.

Can you talk a little bit about what it is like organizing and operating in a world where you're not as fluent with some of the lingo or even the language itself? Can you speak as a non-developer in the position you're in? It's a lot of smiling and nodding. Yes, I understand what you mean. Fake it till you make it though right yes i think that's true and and you figure out that

all the other people around you don't know so much that you would think they know they they have to google themselves and i'm always like that's my day-to-day right there honestly so that's like come on i have this problem or constantine or whatever and and and it says this and i i expect them to to apparently know and to just know by this minute how they can help me or how they can solve this and they're like yeah i really don't know so they're like the docs can you go to the docs please yes something like that we all read the documents uh every day yeah totally so um yeah but that's actually what struck me the most is like okay everybody's kind of no it's not fake it until you make it but it's like investigate until you like exactly learn what it is and and that's actually what i really love about programming is

that you uh you programming is that you see something that you don't understand and then you work on it until you get it fixed. And then there's such a rush of excitement for me every time that I got something right. It's a constant journey, right? It's a constant journey. It never changes.

That's what I love also about, I guess, programming is one side of it but just like building for the web building software period whether it's design or development ux uh ui all all the pieces of building software to me is pretty well because you never stop learning and jared you can probably even jump in here on this because you teach um right now rails class at interface there in omaha nebraska so that's kind of neat because you probably knew a lot when you went in but you know a lot more now because you got to teach it right yeah and actually one of the the things that i tell the students kind

of day one is that uh you know one of the secrets of of software development and building for the web is that there aren't any know-it-alls. Even the experts aren't expert because there's a constantly changing environment and there's tons of nuance, evolving best practices. So a lot of the intimidation is just thinking everybody else knows way more. And, of course, when you just get started, they do know way more. But you see somebody who's a so-called expert and who can build for the web, and they're looking at the docs and they're Googling answers and they can't remember the, you know, the exact syntax of the API. And that's kind of an empowering thought. Um, seeing somebody who is, um, been

in the business still having to do things that you're having to do as a beginner. Um, we're all, we all kind of live there. Yeah. So what's your perspective on, I guess, you'd mentioned that you're about two years into being a developer. Is that right? Yeah, that's about right. So what is your, have you gone through, were you one of the participants of the first Rails Girls Summer Code? Or what is, you know, what's your angle to this? No, actually, I wasn't a participant. I was helping out Anika mainly with some PR and communication stuff.

I think one of the reasons that I could actually do that is when I started learning programming, I thought it was very important to listen to all kinds of podcasts like yours or like Ruby Rogues, for instance. And while listening to such podcasts, I would pause every time that I didn't understand what they were talking about or I didn't understand a term, and I would look it up and get familiar with this term. And I noticed that after a few months, I have to pause a lot less than I used to do before because you just learn along the way.

I've done some talks on learning programming and how you can teach programming in a better way. And this is definitely one of them. Have them listen to as much as they can get their hands on possibly and have them figure out, you know. It's partly talk to talk, but while talking to talk, you learn a lot. Yeah.

I feel like the sooner you can just kind of jump in and get your hands dirty so to speak and i think that's what the beauty might be for uh the summer of code is that and maybe you can correct me if i'm wrong but it seemed like it seems like it's pretty focused on um obviously women but um open to to everyone not just not. But as you said before, Anika, the lens is focused on women, but open to all. But mostly on those that are coming in fresh, coming in new, probably even coming with some inhibitions about, can I do it? Is it possible? All these other intimidations, I think, the deep unknown kind of gives us. But would you say that Rails Girls Summer Code

is mainly focused at beginners or intermediate? What level are you really, is the aim? Well, as a beginner, it's probably a little bit too hard to actually contribute to an existing open source project or to actually kick off your own. So we recommend that you've been learning around like six months at least programming so like um for example if you have joined a race coach beginner workshop and then just like started your study group and met

um every week or whatever and and just kept on learning because that's that's a little bit that's like the important thing that you never let go and that you are a little bit familiar with the structures of whatever language you want to program in let's say it's probably ruby so that you are familiar with with the basic things and maybe already know how to use git and stuff so yeah so that's probably the the basic level we're looking at of course we we're happy to make exceptions if there are some other criteria that are met and yeah then it goes up for the level. I think we have this year some computer science students who have been studying computer science for some time but haven't been able to get into open source.

Or yeah, it actually means different things. Like studying computer science doesn't mean you're actually programming because it looks so different from, I don't know, country to country or even from city to city to university, what you're actually learning in your university. And for one story I like very much is about that woman who said, yeah, okay, I study computer science,

but only since Rails Girls I really have fun at it and I understand it and i am i dare to ask questions and um yeah so um we have a lot of levels uh that that people can jump in and raise questions of code but yeah probably a total beginner will have probably a hard time doing three months full-time coding so some some uh i guess community involvement either watching doing uh observing something will definitely help let's let's maybe um i want to mention this too just for those who maybe come into this conversation maybe behind the curve a little bit so you've've got Rails Girls, which is a meetup.

And I'm just going based on the details here on the page. But it's worldwide meetups in your local cities that are focused on helping women learn Ruby on Rails, educational meetups, events, all that. But on top of that, you have Rails Girl Summer Co., which is this summertime thing that essentially, I think last year it might have been a little different, but this year you've got 20 students coming in, totally focusing on open source,

and essentially spending three months living and breathing Ruby on Rails in open source. Does that about sum up what Summer Code is all about? Mm-hmm. I think it's not. If somebody wants to program in Java or PHP, that depends on the project. But I'm not sure.

I think this year we'll probably have a lot of Ruby on Rails projects as well. But, yeah, that's pretty much what Vice Customer of Code is about. So just from the name, I assumed it would be like people trying to contribute back to the Ruby on Rails framework. But it sounds like it's just any open source that you want to, do you pitch it? Do you have to have a specific goal in mind? How do you actually do the whole three-month process um as a student yeah as a student okay uh well you have to apply and we have some we ask a lot of mentors or people who have open source projects okay um to um to collect these ideas and proposals in a repository and so to give the students

an idea of what they can contribute to and a lot of students have own ideas of what they want to build and of course it depends on their on their skill level if they they can if they're able to do this and if they have the support of coaches and mentors to actually pull this off but um yeah so one story would be you look at the repository then you find oh wow bundler sounds nice i want to contribute to that and then you get in touch with a with a mentor who proposed this and he will help you or she will help you figure out a project plan. Floor keeping it straight. Yeah, you learn something while talking about it.

Yes, so you would actually then work out a project plan, what your goals would be in these three months. And since you have to apply two months before the program starts or even two and a half months for some project, that means that they actually changed a lot for some newer projects or something. So sometimes you can't predict anything, but to give just a structure on what your plans would be and what your goals. And it's really essential that you work together with a mentor who's actually running this project because they know this

and can actually see what is needed, what would be a contribution to the community, what would be the best thing to work on. So Rails Girls is a global movement, but it's all local workshops and meetups. Is Rails Girls Summer of code completely online or is there a locality do it to fly off to a faraway location and code or are you just involved online that'd be cool um that would be really cool i just had the image of iceland

no um it's international uh so anybody can apply actually a lot of organizers are berlin located so that was where the confusion last year came from if it was a berlin program or whatever but we had students and teams from all over the world last year and this year so we're just asking that you that you find local support wherever you are as much as you can. Because being a newcomer to open source and working remotely with coaches or pairs might be a harsh situation. So we found it's best if you have a strong local support, like with companies, for example. This year we have companies that said,

yeah, sure, you can work here, and we actually have some coaches. You can ping all the time. That's nice. That's super cool, and that worked last year really well with SoundCloud, and this year we have, for example, six Wunderkinder.

Six Wunderkinder. I don't know how to say it in English. The people that make Wunderlist. Wunderlist, exactly. Thank you. For example, or Rebased in Poland, or some other amazing companies that help the students have a local structure. I think last year... I'm sorry, go ahead, Floor. I think last year and this year we had the same sort of confusion that there were some people from Australia that would love to join,

but were confused by the name because for them it's not summer. Yes, and it's not only Australia, right? There's some other continent where they said, yeah, it's pretty cold right here. I don't think Alaska ever gets summer. Just speaking for a U.S. state that's not actually in the continental U.S. Right. I don't think it's ever summer there. And when it is, it's still winter.

So there you go. Let's pause the show for just a minute and give a shout out to our sponsors, CodeShip. CodeShip is a hosted continuous deployment service that just works. You can easily set up continuous integration for your app in just a few minutes and automatically deploy when all your tests pass. CodeShip has great support for lots of languages, test frameworks, as well as notification services and they easily integrate with github bitbucket and can deploy to cloud services like roku aws nojitsu google app engine or even your own servers you can get started today with their free plan it takes just three minutes head to codeship.io and one more thing to mention for our members our awesome members by the way you can save between $284 and $2,994 on your first year with CodeShip.

So make sure you take advantage of that. Head to thechangelog.com slash benefits to learn more and redeem that benefit. If you're not a member, don't worry. It's just $20 a year, and you can support us to support open source, and we certainly appreciate that for sure. Once again, go to to codeship.io um i i am noticing though uh a short while back i'm still kind of keeping up with some recent events but just a few days ago you you mentioned on the rails girl summer code blog that they're

you're announced the the first seven teams you mentioned projects like diaspora padrino and several other kind of neat uh ruby rails based projects several coaches that are prominent and open source and have kind of been there and kind of helped pave the way um carrie miller's a name i'm seeing just quickly in the list. Eric Michaels, Ober, previous on the changelog, and a couple others. But I tried to link over to the apply page just to kind of get an example of what you were asking about. And I think just to maybe separate some of the confusion, it sounds like it's a team. So you kind of have to do some self-organizing prior to applying and maybe a little bit of research on which project. And also making a note for listeners, if you're going to the link, applications are closed right now.

So it seems like we're a little too close to the finish line to talk about applying this year, but next year, obviously, hopefully things come back. But what are the, I guess all that to say well you know what are the details around um making up your team applying what are some of the questions that were asked when applying that you kind of look at as criteria was the project selected was it the people you know what was it that got you you know that made you a team and got you through the application process? Oh, that is super different in the category. But I think the basic one is that you have to have a pair. So we figured that two is the best number on this, so you can actually help you

some hours a day in the beginning and in the end that depends sure you will get a lot more done by yourself but that's pretty important that you have one or more coaches i think one team had six or something that actually depends on if you're at a company that said yeah sure you have you can have our coaches 24 7 um yeah but the what was your question the questions i'm thinking of like i'm thinking like the application process. And now just hearing some of those details you mentioned, now I'm thinking about, you know, it's three months long. You know, Jared's question asked about whether it was local or kind of worldwide,

which it's worldwide and there's no real location for it. And even some of it will take place, you know place just primarily online for a lot of people getting involved. So now I'm thinking of what happens when I'm lost, I'm in the woods. What kind of support structures do you have in place? What did you learn from last year that's changed for this year to make completion and making being part of a team easier and just not getting lost? Do you want me to answer that one? Yes.

I thought so. So first of all, they all have a mentor for their project, right? And then there is one or more coaches that will help them out that were already predefined. And then, so last year we had a remote help desk in IRC where everyone could just log in and help people out if they wanted to. Yeah, that's pretty neat. This year we'll go with Campfire to make it a little bit easier for the students because we noticed last year that IRC has a quite steep learning curve, apparently, for people just starting out.

And we'll be partnering up with a few companies that I cannot name yet, but we will really quickly, that will help us man the help desk for a longer period of time because there's the different time zones and sometimes there were not enough people online to help help students out when they had a problem so we'll try and have have three coaches in there at all times so that you know people are actually you they can actually go there with all of their questions i think that's very important and we're determined to make this better this year year yeah and um if you're lost not in a programming kind of way or learning way um but have problems with your i don't know family or teammate or get bullied from a coach or

member any problem you might have we have i'm i'm really glad and really happy that we are having, this year we have a trust committee, and that actually consists of members that are involved in the organization. I think it's Sven and me that you can turn to with all your problems. And we have, I think, three or four external people. Four, yes. That are not involved in the organization so that they can stay impartial and can mediate between the students

or the coaches or whoever turns to them with their problems and their organization so they can help you figure out any kind of problems you might have and yeah so that we can make sure everybody feels comfortable and not I don't know, we want to have a safe space and we'll work towards that.

And I think with a trust committee, that's a big step to make or to help people feel as comfortable as they might feel in such a program. Yeah, I guess you're right because, can get lost on a couple different levels. One, you can lose just motivation. Maybe you're in the fringes, either self-inflicted or you mentioned the trust part of it where you might be getting bullied or harassed. Who knows what could potentially happen? But then you could also be on a learning

curve a little lost and needing some of the guidance and obviously having a strong team with strong leaders is going to be you know helpful helpful to that so that's that's neat to have that in place especially the real-time communication too around like campfire or rc last year because i was just thinking like man when you get in the middle of this, I know how I feel sometimes with projects. I tend to be an island, just self-induced anyways. And so when I get lost, the only person I really have to cling to is Jared and Andrew, obviously. But a little closer to the heart is my wife. So I've kind of got my own personal support structure that I kind of leverage and cling to.

I just wondered what y'all are doing for this during that three months. But another topic I think is important to talk about is I guess the crowdfunding. Did y'all do crowdfunding last year too, or is this a new thing this year? And can you kind of speak to, you know, having not only corporate sponsors, but I guess those who contribute and those who are part of the community giving their own personal dollars to support the cause and essentially fundraise to pay for, I guess, what do you call that? What's the word for that? The scholarships. Yeah, the word gapped me for a second, but scholarships. So, I mean, you've got 19 scholarships, $80,000 raise right now.

What's the background here on this? Yeah, so last year it was a crowdfunding campaign as well. So, yeah, this was always achieved by the community. And we have, of course, some strong leaders as companies who are giving a lot of money, like GitHub or Google Open Source. Yeah, Flora was very heavily involved with this this year, so you probably can name some other wonderful companies. But also, of course, individual donors.

And this year we even have an app where you can nudge your family and friends to give more money, which is pretty awesome. But yeah, maybe Floor, you can tell a bit about that. Yeah, I think what's very exciting is the crowdfunding part about it if I speak for myself for instance so I gave of course I gave some money and I gave some money as well last year and for me my motivation is really that when I just entered the Ruby world everyone was so so nice and so welcoming, and everyone wanted to help me.

And I found the Rails Girls guide so helpful and the event so helpful that I just really wanted to give back. And what we hear from a lot of people backing this project is that they similarly also want to give back to the community. I think that's what drives the crowdfunding campaign so well. Go ahead. Yeah, and the connection like last year, since Sven Fuchs was so heavily involved here,

like all the people that loved Travis CI and the work that they did and the involvement they had in the community, actually, he nudged them all, I guess, like pulling all-nighters, and got a lot of awesome feedback, and that's how it worked last year, and this year we have a lot of people that are, of course,

saying, oh, yeah, I did it last year, I want to do it this year again, because this is such a great cause, and this is where I'm always so in awe, and think, wow, this is such a great cause and this is where I'm always so in awe and think wow this is such a great community so I was going to ask it looks like just tons of support looking just at the sponsorship page and how much money has been able to raise is really awesome how much does it cost to send a team through or a student what does the each student get for the three months and then I'm follow-up question, curious if cost of living

and those kind of things are factored into that at all. That's a really good question. So we calculate $5,000 per student. Okay. And that's with some buffer for the courses the dollar might have or the euro or wherever you are that you're getting the money so this important and yeah and we actually are asking the students to calculate the cost themselves and and we ask them what they can live off. We say, okay, we can pay you 1.5 thousand US dollars

a month, but you can live off. Oh yeah, you're right, sorry. Mathematica. I was correcting it, but she was running. I got our calculators out. I'm getting my calculator out right now. Okay, no. And so we say, okay, 1.5 is yours if you want it, but we didn't do any calculation for any kind of country or living costs

because I think that depends hugely on what your private or your situation looks like. If you're a single mom or if you're like heavily supported by a family that can actually differ a lot so we ask students themselves to tell us how much money they need and then we um we can this is new this year so we can actually if they say okay here you can have 100 or 200 euros back. We can give that back to the Red Sky Summer of Code crowdfunding campaign and maybe be able to fund another team spot because we are now short of two team spots and we can use any money.

So, yeah. So you're trying to get together 20 students and that would be 10 teams? Mm-hmm, yes. And you're sitting on eight, right? Yes. You have eight funded funded you're looking for funding for two more um so everybody donates sponsorship is it just donate just go to the website right is there anything harder than that no maybe maybe you should repeat it's just that

easy give us money sure what's the website again? Reyescustomerofcode.org Slash campaign. Slash campaign. Yes. If you want to. Or you can go to reyescustomerofcode.org and click on the donate now button. 80,000 total has been raised so far. As Jared kind of recapped what Jared said, you got eight teams funded currently.

You got two more teams waiting to get fully funded that's i'm guessing you know ten thousand dollars more for going on the average of five thousand um um five thousand per team so i mean this is a success was it so you mentioned last year was um you also crowdfunded last year as well did did you have a similar outcome or was it less or better? How does it fare, I guess, in comparison to last year? Last year was faster. I think last year was faster, yes. Was it less or more money?

Yeah, it was just faster that the companies uh jumped on board i think maybe this year the companies i don't know have some kind of for some companies we came too late they said okay they had to like calculate their budget uh already and stuff i don't know how this worked last year maybe they were smaller and didn't do the calculation uh part But, yeah, I don't know. But we have some companies lining up, I guess, that we're still waiting to hear from. These are the infamous ones that Forha just mentioned that you can't mention but can kind of mention?

No, I think she was thinking about the companies that are involved with helping us support this. Oh, okay. Sorry. I can hint that they're already a sponsor. You can check it out for yourself. Come on, a teaser campaign, Annika. Let's pause the show for just a minute and give a shout out to our sponsor, TopTal. You've probably heard me mention TopTal several times over the last couple months if you've been a long-time listener of the show.

But we've been working with TopTal for quite a while now, and we thought it would make some sense to circle back and talk to some of the listeners who've applied to TopTal and have actually been accepted. Because only 2-3% of the engineers who apply make it past their strict elite engineer process and one of them is a awesome fan an awesome listener daniel lauzon he is in ottawa canada a long time fan a long time listener on the changelog and he's he's now living the dream as an elite engineer at toptown i say living the dream because he's now able to have 100% control of the types of projects and the technologies he's working on, even as well as the rate he wants to charge. Daniel earns 100% of his income as a TopTile engineer,

and he wanted me to pass on his seal of approval, so to speak, of the TopTile experience. And for those of you out there who are freelancing right now or you would like to test out freelancing or even try out a kind of a no-risk freelance-like project where you maintain your full-time position, you have to check out TopTile. If you think you have what it takes,

head to toptile.com slash developers to get started and tell them the changelog sent you. Floor, you mentioned that you're a long-time listener, and Anikon, I'm sure that you're becoming a long-time listener, but do either of you by any chance follow some of the content that Beverly Nelson has been putting up on the changelog around learning? She's got a real passion. She does a lot of stuff with Rails Bridge.

I think she just ran a course at Ancient City Ruby. Really, really deep passion for teaching Ruby on Rails. And she's got such a heart for the beginner level. I just totally am impressed and in awe of her patience for it. But have either of you caught up with any of her recent posts? I think one of the most recent ones that was really a good post was regular expressions without fear. And she kind of gives this dissection of different resources, regex for fun and, you know, some

common kind of early problems to solve around it. But I guess it's kind of a long question to ask you. Have you caught up with any of the learning content on the channel? We try to keep this more regular, like once a week. So I'm just curious. Yeah, everything that lands into my reader. So I read everything. Did you tweet about it?

That's the question. That's a good question. Was there an animated GIF? I have actually a call to action for it. That's a good question. Was there an animated GIF? It's actually a call to action for it. It's not a question. I see. I see. Did you tweet about it?

Reading and tweeting is two different things. I feel such pressure. There is a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure. Well, you're in the bar with that animated GIF, so now you just have to keep producing GIFs of that quality all day, every day, and it should be okay. Gosh.

I've never seen that one either, and when I saw it, I was like, that's super awesome. I love that. I guess I'm not sure if there's any additional topics that we can kind of cover around Summer Code. If there's anything we left out, let us know. If not, I want to talk a bit about Travis Foundation and just in general the mission around supporting and propping up open source. Obviously, that's been our focus here at the Change Log for several years years now so kind of close to our heart but is there

anything else we need to cover that we haven't covered on summer code that we need to i don't know did you say that everyone can donate now everyone can donate now we haven't mentioned it everyone can donate okay if you're listening to this go to rails girls summer of code.org slash campaign uh i think you're suggesting a 75 donation but i think it's you can donate whatever you want like 20 bucks do more do more do the exact amount you can totally do more if you don't have any hard feelings about that no problem whatsoever and if you're whatsoever. And if you're a company listening to this, if you're a developer working at a company that can

be a sponsor, take this to either yourself if you're a decision maker or your boss or your team leader or whomever and get some support. There's lots of great support here for Rails Go Summer Code and I know the change law we gave

we gave a little bit of money as well because man we love you guys so. Yay for the change law! So yes if you didn't get that go and donate right now please and now on to Travis Foundation. So I know I mentioned earlier that I've been working with Matias for a while now. Travis CI is a partner with the Change Law. That means that they work with us to just make sure that our member base. So we have a member base that supports the Change Law as well. And so if you're not a member, you can become a member now by going to the changelog.com membership.

And it's just $20 a year. And with that, you support us to support Open Source. In addition to that, we work with corporate partners like Travis CI to basically give a nice discount to our paid members for their services. And as part of that, I've been working with Matias for a bit and have wanted to have y'all on the show to talk about Travis Foundation. And I didn't even know until inviting Anika to come on the show to talk about Rails Girls Summer Code that she runs Travis Foundation. So that's kind of neat. But it's an initiative run by Travis CI because they care about open source. But I think one of your

current things you're doing now is rails girl summer code but you've got other things in the pipe to work on so kind of give us an overview of what travis foundation is and then maybe what some of the mission is yeah i think travis foundation is a way for the travis ci team to give something back to the community because they have been born out of the open source community they've they've run a crowdfunding campaign as well and were able to build Travis CI with this so this is their way of actually saying thank you and and contributing back so I think the tagline just speaks for for itself it's like making open source or even better and um that's like a broad thing or like a super huge goal to have but

basically we want to support projects that we think are of value to the community and for this we started with open source grants where we support people working on awesome open source projects that are with which depends or or grants as we call it like we did rvm and organized the the grant for them, which was paid by Paymill. And now, like simultaneously to Summer of Code, we are doing CocoaPods. We're supporting them. And the company behind this is SoundCloud,

who are paying the grant for CocoaPods. And we are like the connector in this. So we actually, we're looking at projects or people writing us emails and saying hey I have this and that project I'm working on it and I I can't do it just in my free time anymore I would I would love to do this full time but I need some money for this so we look look at the project and then select the ones that we think are really cool and would be of great value to the community and then we look for a company that actually fits with this project and then we pair them up and organize the whole thing. So this is

one thing we do with these open source grants. Then, of course, the Red Cross Summer of Code. We organized it last year and our main organizer this year again. And that actually takes a lot of my time. So, yeah, everything else is, no, I can totally handle everything else. And then we want to foster diversity in open source as well. And for that, we are already working together with some conferences and planning on doing this more to, for example, get more women on stage or make the conference more family friendly. Or how to reach out to a more diverse audience or something like that.

Questions that you mentioned earlier are kind of getting more and more important in the scene. And we want to help people work towards that. And they can actually approach us and ask us, hey, I want to do this and that, and I don't know how to do this. Or should we have a code of conduct? Or what is a code of conduct? Or something like this. And there are already some great resources out there. Like Ashley Dryden does a lot of things that i admire and she put together some

awesome stuff and we have other women putting up tutorials like how to give a talk and stuff or how to uh not be anxious to enter right community where you're a minority so um yeah that, that's kind of what we aim for. And we're still, of course, it's really, really young. I think we launched the foundation end of last year. We are open to other ideas or projects we should support or work together with. Well, I think the grants part is a unique thing, and obviously a specific approach with diversity in tech, I think it's an audacious goal anyways to foster diversity.

But in addition to that, you've got friends of the show, RVM. Michael Papis runs that project now. Wayne Segwin was once on the show back in the day when he had, I guess, not really first started it, but earlier in the RVM history. So you'd mentioned open source grants. I guess the question I have around that is it seems like there's some sort of application process. I think you mentioned SoundCloud in there somewhere, and you mentioned a project that they are working on that's open source. Can you talk about, you know, maybe, you know, Travis Foundation's, I guess, the focus on obviously giving out grants, but, you know, when does it happen? Is it kind of

organized? How do you go about it? Is it just like, get in touch and let us know your woes, and we'll see if we can give you some money what's the how does that work yeah i would love to say here's the apply button but uh now there's actually no um application process you have to go through or or some criteria you have to met i think we discuss every project as it comes in or every project that we get aware of. And I think all this might be a really cool project for the Open Source Grants.

Of course, in the future, this will get a little bit more detailed and there probably will be an application process. But for now, this is pretty much shoot us an email and let us know, and then probably I'll have a Skype call with you since time is an issue. So I'm running the foundation, and Konstantin Haase is the CEO, and Sven Fuchs is heavily involved but we are all like super tied in so we can't have like 10 projects running

or 10 grants running so I think for this year we will have all in all we will have three so we had RVM, CocoaPods is running right now and we have one lined up that we will do the end of the year that was the one i thought i heard you say it was soundcloud and cocoapods

yes so it sounds like it's a small batch um and the application process isn't quite rigid it's more like send us an email tell us your story and we'll see how we can support that because i gotta imagine right now there's a lot of listeners. We get way more email, way more pings on our GitHub repo that we set up for tracking issues, basically. If you're a listener, you can go to github.com slash the change log slash ping and submit an issue and tell us about your project. There is a list. We do have a small bootstrapped, you know, small team, I guess, Jared, right? Like me, you and a couple other people, basically me, Andrew, Alex, those are pretty much the common around the change all these days.

But I gotta imagine there's going to be a lot of people listening to this show thinking, hmm, Travelsvis foundation money to do my project should i go to get it should i go to no i'm afraid no i'm afraid to open my mad program no no awesome uh shoot us an email we're happy about every cool project worst case scenario i mean you can always start uh know, maybe an email list or maybe a regular post on the Change Law that talks about some of the cool projects that you all are funding. Because, you know, honestly, with the Change Law, there's no real, I don't know, Jerry, what do you think? I mean, there's no real direct pattern to our content. We just try to do whatever we can to promote open source. Whatever we can to promote its usefulness,

its community. You know, my life is better in so many ways because of open source, not just because of the software itself, but because of the people and the way that my life has been touched not only by this show, but the blog and, you know,

relationships with those that come on the show and every, which way you can think of. I mean, the ripple effect is, is massive, but you know, and it's awesome that Travis is doing way you can think of. I mean, the ripple effect is massive, but, you know, and it's awesome that Travis is doing this. Yeah, seeing, I mean, we focus a lot on open source sustainability

as we see, you know, many people get involved with open source and then, you know, it's hard to keep that going as it becomes less fun and more burden over time, especially when success brings that upon you, surprisingly even. So seeing stuff like corporations doing these grants, I had not heard of Travis Foundation previously.

It'd be awesome to have those kind of stories be told on the changelog. Absolutely. So we'd be happy to highlight it. Yeah. I guess back into that, Jared, is you mentioned corporations giving and Travis Foundation. So Travis Foundation is a 501c3. So it is a nonprofit, right? I think we're working on it. Yeah. Okay. So it's in the process, worst case scenario. But where does Travis Foundation get its money to

fund these grants? Is it through Travis CI? I'm sure Travis CI has got to give a decent penny into this. But then what is the efforts on the back side of this to raise more funds to make these grants possible? That's why we are working together with for example, PayMill or SoundCloud. They actually give the money to fund the grants and reorganize

this. And Travis CI obviously is giving a little money and paying me to do this all to organize this i'll tell you right here right now on the show and the listeners be ready for it but we want to do more to help facilitate whatever we can around this whether it's a post on the changelog obviously this show here helps highlight it quite a bit as well but we want to do whatever we can to either help you establish relationship

with corporate partners or promote any new new grants that are being funded like i had no idea that rvm was getting funded through travis foundation and that's that's awesome like michael does a we actually the last not the last show 121 but one episode 120 we had postmodern on we got to talk a little bit of shop around changing Ruby and Unix paradigms of is it CHRuby, is it CHRoot, or is it ChangeRoot? So all sorts of fun stuff around that. But we're fans of those softwares, and it's neat to see them get funded and continue to live on too. Cool. Thank you. No, I guess no real direct questions on that one, but we are getting close to our time.

Jared, is there anything else around Travis that we can talk about before we tail off the call? I don't think so. I'm just excited to see more grants like this going to open source. I think it's going to be awesome. So I'm excited that they're kind of heading it up. And it sounds like other corporations can reach out to – well, how do other corporations get involved? Just hit the contact form on foundation.travisci.org or what's the call to action there? Yes. Yes. Just go to the website.

Yes. And then there is a contact button. Then everything will work out magically. Everything will work out magically. So for you – It's the beginning is a contact button. Then everything will work out magically. Everything will work out magically. It's the beginning of a wonderful story. Floor, you work at 89s, right? Yes, I do. Sorry, there's a little bit of latency, so I keep stepping over Jared and Annika, so I'm sorry about that, guys.

No worries. Floor, you work at 89s, and we've been talking quite a bit about Rails Girl Summer Code, and you're heavily involved there. But you're not involved in Travis Foundation. Is that right? That's all right. Yeah. You know, just since we haven't heard you for a bit, what is your perspective on Travis Foundation? Like, what excites you, someone that's two years into programming, someone that's speaking and organizing and leading and teaching software development.

What are your thoughts on, you know, what Travis Foundation is doing for open source? Okay, so I guess first off, working for Anynice actually enables me to work on Rails Growth Summer of Code one day a week. So that's pretty cool. That's awesome. Yes. day a week so that's pretty cool that's awesome yes and then second yeah i actually worked with the travis foundation and anika pretty closely organizing the conferences and they definitely helped me back up the cause of you know having more female speakers on board and reaching out to a more diverse audience and i'm very excited about that. I learned a lot from Anika and from the Travis Foundation how they handle this. So that's great. So you're a supporter. Thumbs up, right?

Definitely. Definitely. All right. Cool. Well, we have some common questions we ask at the tail end of the show. They're fun questions sometimes, but the first question I'll give to Anika and we generally ask it as a programming hero, but the person doesn't have to be a programmer. It could be just a hero. I don't say the word just lightly, but it could be a hero, someone who's influenced you, someone who's encouraged you, someone who's helped lead you, whomever. So who is your hero or programming hero Hanako um yeah that's a really really tough um question because I want to name so many people oh I can name three break the rules okay I'm gonna break the rules and I'm gonna be super cheesy but I'm gonna say

one of my heroes is floor and um we've never had a hero on this show at the same time by the way it's really encouraging to see what she's been pulling off how she's organizing conferences and Rails Girls workshops and not and not goes crazy and still is super

super supportive with everything. And we have been working together for not even a year yet and become friends even. And that's, I don't know, and I've seen what she works on and how she does it. And I'm amazed. And always when I'm standing in front of a question like, oh, okay, should I go to this conference?

Should I dare? Should I go to this meetup? I always think, okay, yes, I should do it because Flora is doing this also. What would Flora do? We need bracelets. That is awesome. She inspired a lot of my putting myself out there. So, yes. a lot of my putting myself out there so yes and another woman like I was Lena Herrmann that's a

German developer and I got to know her I think when she was a single mom and she worked at a company that I knew and she was actually a coach of the first Wales Girls Workshop in Berlin that I actually was attending of. And because I knew that she was going to be there, I applied. I thought, okay, okay, if she's there, I already know somebody and this is not going to be so super awkward. And she actually supported me and said, yeah, you should really apply. And she was there when we then started resgers berlin and

is there now for resgers summer of code and helping with a with a selection committee and she has she has more than one kid i don't i don't know how much but she's pulling it off and as a as a as a mom i think that's that even gives you I don't know how many super extra points for even like doing volunteer work. I think that we all don't have a family yet, or at least that I can speak of myself. I don't have a family yet, so I can't imagine how hard it must be to do this next to your family work. I see how hard it is for me to keep this up and keep up volunteer work. And yeah, so she's definitely a hero that I look up to and I want to be her in whenever I'm a mom. Any more? You got just two? I'm just messing with you. I got just two. I got just messing with you I got just two I got just two

these two are okay Flora how about you programming or non-programming hero okay I get really awkward around my heroes so

I would say my heroes are and especially my programming heroes are the people that help me get started learning programming

those are uh sebastian who's been on the show before with justine talking about open karma uh he helped me a lot in the beginning um tony who was my former co-worker um and andreas they helped me a lot getting started with programming um furthermore like a real big hero was definitely Afdi Grim. I read all of his books and they inspired me and taught me a lot. And then we were speaking at the same conference at our camp last year. And I just remember, you know, I saw him walking in and I was so, I must have acted like a fool because I get really weird when this kind of thing happened. Same sort of thing happened when I met Matt from WordPress

or Automatic. I actually had met him a few times before and we had talked before, so I could have just walked up to him and say something normal. Instead, I walk by and scream something like, yay, WordPress, and he screams something back like, yay. It's very embarrassing, and this tends to happen a lot. It's funny what you do when you meet your hero. This is your hero, and instead of being cool, you're embarrassed. you embarrass yourself that's i hate that yeah this happens especially funny maybe it's better not to have

maybe it's better not to have heroes yeah i was gonna say especially funny when with like internet based you know people you look up to because they're not exactly used to being known you know in real life for things like if you ran up to brad pitt and you're like you're my hero he hears that a hundred times a day right but you know like abdi grim like he's at a conference and i'm sure from his perspective it's it's probably a bit uh it's probably equally awkward for somebody to treat him as if you know they're at a brad pitt level um that has to be a fun experience. Avdi is a Brad Pitt. Definitely. We love Avdi too at the changelog. Just because we're talking about him, he's also, I guess, not him directly, but Ruby Tapas is a partner with the changelog. So we've got several developer tools and services as well as learning resources. and that's one of them. So if you're learning Ruby and you're learning Ruby with Avdi, we have a way through our membership.

You can save a little bit of money and still give Avdi the business. But I want to tell just a short story about myself. I think it's kind of funny because most people know me by my voice. And my wife gets to experience this a couple times and only because we're talking about this kind of odd moments but i'll share the other perspective is i'll be at a conference which i don't go to too many conferences often i'm just just not that involved in conferences for for whatever reason but um people will hear my voice and they'll turn around and they'll say is is that Adam Stack?

Because they know me as my Twitter handle, I guess. That's just kind of how people go about business. But it's always funny because I'm like, you hear my voice and you know who I am. That's always the funny part. Let's see. What else? Other questions we have is, I guess if Andrew were here, he'd be yelling me right now because call to arms at first, but let's talk about call to arms. I know we've kind of talked quite a bit about Rails Girl Summer of Code, Travis Foundation.

We're all excited about, um, you know, the fruits of, of this effort and what it's going, where it's going to go but you know today you know when people are listening to this show you know within the next week to two weeks besides donating which obviously is a huge call to arms but say that again if that's it um you know what is the call to arms for you know either uh summer of code or travis foundation and you can individually answer or uh choose your floor okay should I go first okay so we probably can't say that enough that we want you to donate

this is definitely a call to action but also if you can't or are not willing to give money or don't have so much money to give we are always looking for supporters that can help us in the organization part because that's all volunteer work or the coaches part. Like we said, we are going to have a help desk, a remote help desk.

So if you're a programmer and say, yeah, okay, I can hang around, camp for some hours, do it, awesome, just shoot us an email and just get involved in Ritz-Gazem of Code. It's a whole community project and, yeah, this is a call out to the community. Also, Annika, correct me. Do you feel the same? Of course I feel the same. Annika, you have to correct me if I'm wrong but do we have it like if someone wants to help out with

with a help desk if they register via their team set can they you know say that they want to be in the help desk because I know that last year that was the case sure yeah you can say you can check the box remote code or help desk code awesome so then people just have to go to teams.railsgirls summerofcode.org and register as a help desk that would be awesome help desk or oh and maybe um if you're a conference organizer and you definitely want to have some great Rails Girls Somewhere of Code students in your audience and giving a lightning talk about Rails Girls Somewhere of Code

well you're very welcome to give away some free tickets to them and maybe even help them with their travels and stay absolutely I know Codefront.io is happening right now we just gave away some tickets

I thought it was today that's why Iio is happening right now. We just gave away some tickets. Oh, I thought it was today. That's why I'm in Vienna right now. Oh, there you go. So you'll be there. We were giving away some tickets there. So is there any lightning talks going on there for Rosecoast Summer Code? Well, there is a lightning talk track, and there will be someone, probably me, talking about Rosecoast Summer Code.

So, yeah. I'm a member of the team so I can definitely do this it's a really good conference definitely, I'm looking forward to this and I guess the last one is if you weren't I guess running Travis Foundation and leading that or if you weren't organizing Rails Girls Summer Code

or participating we'll let you go one at a time but what would you be doing if you weren't organizing Rails, Grails, Summer Code or participating, we'll let you go one at a time, but what would you be doing if you weren't writing Ruby or doing the organization of these awesome efforts? Anika, we'll let you go first. Like for money? What would I do for money? Yeah, like, well, I guess, you know, what would you do? Yeah, if you weren't doing that, what else would you be doing? Like, would you be, you study linguistics, and looking back at your profile, how do you say that, linguistics and gender studies. So I'd imagine probably something in that range, right?

Or maybe not. Yeah, maybe not, because when I finished studying gender studies, I said, oh, no way I'm going to work in this field. That's too harsh. No, yeah, I would probably be writing a lot and doing my own thing. I've been dreaming about starting a co-working space forever and have a little cafe there. So that's probably where I would be. You and I should talk because I've had a similar desire,

but I'm not in a place where that would be possible. So I just keep it a dream. You've had a dream as well. Oh, okay. Yeah, let's talk. I actually wanted to make it a coffee. I mean, that's kind of cliche though, right? Coffee shop and co-working space.

It's been done before, but I kind of wanted to put a little twist on it. And I got a feeling that Dan Benjamin is one day going to take this idea and run with it and do it better than I'll ever do it. But here's the idea is that I wanted to- Don't say it out loud. Yeah, don't share. You can can just we should start a secret club and then we'll make some great co-working space i shouldn't tell anybody you want to know tell us the twist after

we after we stop the call okay fine i'll tell the callers only if you're listening to this and you absolutely have to know just email me adam at changelog.com. Everybody's really frustrated. He's going to say it, but he's not going to do it. Man. What about you, Floor? If you weren't writing Ruby, if you weren't attending all the conferences and coaching and organizing all that you do, what would you be doing if you weren't doing that? So actually, I graduated as a graphics designer

at art school in the Netherlands. And then I changed to doing a lot of sort of community management work. And then I changed to becoming a programmer. I think I have enough changes in my life so far. And I'm still getting used to this whole, you know, programming and doing a lot for the developer community, which I enjoy a lot. I also really found my way in this whole tech world writing technical documentation.

I love doing this. I love writing issues. People think I'm crazy for this, but I really love doing all documentation stuff. So I think I actually found my place already. Nice. So you're doing what you would be doing then. So if you weren't doing this, you would be trying to find a way to do what you're doing. I'd be crying all the time.

Well, at least you're honest. That is cool. Yeah, you know, writing docs and issues are not my forte. I don't mind doing them when I have to, but I do have to commend you on having a passion for that because that's unique. Now you can always ping Floor. Yeah, totally. Why don't I speak for the entire team here at The Change Law when I say that it's been a pleasure to have you both on the show this week. The work you're doing is super important, and Rails Girl Summer Code, Travis Foundation, we want to be a part of that future so

we want to support you however we can uh this year next year in the years to come so whatever we can ever do to support you in in both of those missions or even personally just just let us know reach out you have a friend now um and i also want to give a shout out to our sponsors. The sponsors of the show are Ninefold, CodeShip, and TopTal. And we love their support. They're absolutely great to us. CodeShip and TopTal happen to be partners as well as sponsors.

And that means that they're supporting us on the longterm. They're investing in the future of the change. We'll have to make sure that we're always here doing the work we're doing to support open source. And we thank them for that. Ninefold, we hope to have as a partner in the future of the change law to make sure that we're always here um doing the work we're doing to support open source and we thank them for that ninefold we hope to have as a partner in the future as well um we'll hope that uh to come but they're awesome companies we absolutely love their support uh and couldn't uh couldn't do this without them so um we do have an awesome show lined up next week chad whittaker the founder of GetUp, is going to be on the show. Should be a fantastic conversation if you're not using GetUp or whatnot to

kind of crowdfund your work in open source or whatever you're doing. The people you inspire. GetUp.com is a cool thing. So next week, tune into that. Until then, let's say goodbye. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. Bye. you