How to find a project

Ask on Twitter! Post on Facebook. Email developers you know. Use all the communication channels you know :)

Talk to people, sit together with your pair, coaches and developers you know. Search the internet with them. Go to your local Ruby User group (or whatever language to work with). Do a mini lightning talk about your question!

• What are you interested in? Curious about? What makes you happy?
• What kind of stuff do your coaches know? What do they use and think could be better?

Also: It doesn't have to be just one project. You can also combine things, if that's a plan your team is convinced of. The goal is to get you in touch with the Open Source way of collaboration, work, life.

Btw any Open Source project is eligible. But there are some points to consider:

Can it be any language?

First of all, we will rank applications based on criteria that we believe will make sure that students will have the best chances to succeed with their projects. This also means that availability of good support is crucial.

Therefor, Ruby projects will have a somewhat higher chance: Since RailsGirls is rooted in the Ruby/Rails community you'd basically have access to the entire worldwide community of coaches and great support will be rather easy to find. If, on the other hand, your project is written in C/C++ or Smalltalk, then finding support will be much harder.

That doesn't mean you can't do it. You'd just need to present a convincing plan for how to get support. E.g. if you have a great team of Javascript coaches available and they can spend lots of time on it, then just go ahead and apply!

Can I start my own, new project?

You can start your own, new project, but finding existing projects has great benefits.

• Your project should be a "real" thing. If you start your own project then you should have a plan for how to keep it running. It shouldn't be something that you'd throw away after those 3 months, so it shouldn't be just a learning project.

• You shouldn't be alone working on this. Instead it should give you the typical experience of collaborating on open source work. "Open source" is not just about licenses and giving your work away for good. It is very much also a way of working together with likeminded, interested and nice people all over the world. So, if you start something new then there should be people interested in this. Ideally you'd be able to collaborate with others remotely.

• Working on something that already exists may give some constraints, but it also means that you can tap into a huge amount of experience of existing devs, existing users, etc. Starting a new project also means that you'd have to make lots of decisions. Joining an existing project is a much more simple thing to do. You'll get extra support more easily (usually there are communities around those projects) and your work will be much more likely recognized.

• Working on a well-known project (Rails, Rubinius, Sinatra, Travis CI) might be a little bit harder at first (so you might need some more patience and learn more). But it also gives you instant recognition and visibility. This may sound scary at first, but once you feel more comfortable with being visible it gives you a myriad of opportunities that you otherwise wouldn't even have thought about. Imagine you'd be the first RailsGirls student to actually commit something (even if very small) to Ruby on Rails, the entire Ruby community would know about you in no time. That opens up fantastic opportunities and chances. :)

So, in general we might recommend joining existing projects: it's easier, and your chances to be successful will be higher, but new projects aren't excluded. And if this is what you want to do, then go ahead and explain how you plan to make it a successful, fantastic 3 months in your application :)