Tools
For Rails Girls Summer of Code we are going to use the following tools.
We’ve picked IRC, GitHub and GoogleGroups, tools which are used very widely in the Ruby community, because:
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You’ll learn to use the tools that the community uses, so you’ll be in a great position to carry on after the program.
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It will be easy for you to connect with others. Your coaches and mentors will be familiar with these tools so it will be easy for them to give support.
Please be sure to make yourself familiar with these tools. Don’t hesitate to play with IRC and GitHub issues and try everything out.
Daily team log updates: Getting an overview
We’d like you to keep a log of short, daily status updates for your team, in a blog (from which we would need the URL). This can be any blog tool you like, but it should have an RSS or Atom feed. We will use this feed to aggregate all students’ updates in a central place.
Please be sure you have a simple blog set up where you can post a short summary and status update daily.
IRC for quick questions, remote support and fun
We will use an IRC channel for remote support, quick questions that you have
and just hanging out and having fun. We’d like you, your coaches and maybe
project maintainers to join this channel: #rgsoc-teams on irc.freenode.net.
Also feel free to join our organizers channel at #rgsoc on the same host.
Here is a short explanation from Ellen about how to use IRC.
Please note: In order to get the attention of a coach start your message to
the IRC channel by writing coaches: (including the colon). Get the attention
of an organizer by writing at organizers:.
Coaches and organizers will have highlight words set up for these terms, so their IRC client will notify them with an alert. If you don’t use these highlight words they might miss your questions for quite a while because they might be looking at another channel or even have the IRC client window in the background.
GitHub for to-dos and project specific discussions
GitHub is probably the most used common tool for developers today. Everybody knows and understands how to use it. It is not only fantastic for sharing code. GitHub issues also make one of the nicest places to discuss things (not only code!).
We recommend you use GitHub Issues as much as possible for keeping track of to-dos and having general discussions about your project.
Community mailing list for general questions
We will continue to use our community mailing-list to reach everyone involved at Rails Girls Summer of Code.
We recommend you post to this list for meta discussions and general questions about Rails Girls Summer of Code.
Email us for personal questions
If there should be anything you would not want to discuss publicly then send us an email to summer-of-code@railsgirls.com.
This email address forwards to our internal organizers mailinglist and only organizers have access to it.