The trip to Google was one of the most memorable and happiest moments of my life. I got to meet all the intelligent high-school coders from around the world, meet all the amazing Googlers and learn from them, receive a beautiful (but heavy ) trophy, have a lunch at Charlie’s Cafe at Google HQ, hack around the Google buildings, clicking pictures in photography-prohibited areas (well, kidding ), getting the Google Goodies (which included bottles, chocolates, pens, notebooks, books, stickers, big android plushie aka bugdroid, souvenirs, shirts, jackets and a blanket), buying Google Schwag (mouse, torch, key chain, USB port hub and other geeky stuff), having wonderful dinners at restaurants, touring the California Academy of Sciences and riding those cool Segways. It all amounted to be a whole ton of fun and enjoyment, but wouldn’t of course not have been possible without the efforts and hard work of Carol, Stephanie and the whole Google team, to which I salute!

A picture says a thousand words and, I have ~150 pictures uploaded on Picasa. That amounts to 150,000 words! OMG! Here is a slideshow of all of the pics that I took.

I’ve tried to put all my thoughts into this single post, so you might find it a bit long, filled with a lot of emoticons.

What is Google Code-in? And what does it have to do with me?

Ctrl+C & Ctrl+Ving (the thing which I’m best at) from Google Code-in’s FAQ:

Following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code™ program, Google is holding a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young people to participate in open source. We will work with open source organizations, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research.

Coming back to what it has to do with me, I’m a pre-university student enrolled in a high school and 15 years old. Did I just say 15, yes I did!

I mainly participated in this competition because (and got to know about it when) the organisation WordPress announced that it was participating in this competition – and as I’m very much familiar with their code base and especially bbPress‘s (because it has been almost more than a year since I’ve been developing on it), I looked forward to this, participated in the competition and finally acquired a good rank.

And what all did I do in it?

Coding tasks for the bbPress project (and having a lot of fun doing that and bugging John James Jacoby, my mentor, all the time ) and some translation tasks. As far as I remember, I was the only one (except 1 or 2 – who did a task each) who took up bbPress tasks. So, I feel a bit proud of myself that other people found it difficult – I know, my assumption might be wrong ). You may search bbPress Changesets for “props to GautamGupta via GCI” on the bbPress Trac itself (while logged in) or go here to see the list of tasks done by me.

And what all did I achieve?

1. Knowledge – Really, I didn’t know all the things I did at first and didn’t have that pace which I acquired later – I tried, I did and I learnt new things.
2. Experience – The experience working under a the cool mentor John James Jacoby.
3. Trip to Google Headquarters, Mountain View, California as I came in the top 10!
4. 500 USD and a Google T-shirt (more details about the prizes here).
5. And as a I mentioned earlier, I got the 5^th rank out of the participating 360 students (view rankings) by acquiring 112 points from 34 tasks though I had expected myself to come in the top 4 (first three were way ahead), I couldn’t because of my school work etc.

What will I do now?

1. The first thing on my to-do is writing some tutorial blog posts, of the things I did in the tasks. Done: #1, more to come.
2. Complete the last task which I wasn’t able to due to time restrictions – forum reply counts. Done.
3. Contribute more. Doing. (Forever)
4. Test out NetBeans (on JJJ’s recommendation). maybelater. Probably, will wait till it has proper Trac/SVN support – didn’t work for me, or I was too lazy to not read the docs properly. Started using it on my Mac.
5. Complete my school work which has got a lot pending. Done.
6. And sleep. Done.

* The list of official winners would be announced on 14 Feb 2011, but it would be based on the rank list and I’m pretty much sure that it would remain the same or at least I’d be in there. The winners have been announced.

Someone asked Matt about bbPress. Matt confessed that he dove into bbPress. He admitted that he became a little burnt out on it. bbPress will undoubtedly be tied closer to WordPress. The future of bbPress will be a really awesome plugin. He even admitted that right now, it would be better off to use another plugin rather than bbPress. Matt said he just needs a little more time before he dives into bbPress again. The bbPress community was a bit rough around the edges and the flame war that ensued forced Matt to break away for a bit.

(Source – WPTavern)

The above is an extract from a post on WPTavern, on which _ck_ commented about the issues, BackPress bloat etc., to which Matt replied back in his comment, also mentioning that bbPress.org 2.0 was underway.

The new theme is designed by Sam Bauers (see this topic), it was designed a while back but has been put up now only.

Here are some screenshots comparing the before and after design:

bbPress Forums (Old Look)

bbPress Forums (New Look)

bbPress Forum Topic (New Look)

Personally, I am very happy to see this development taking place and the bbPress community gaining back its momentum along with a major contributor of bbPress – _ck_. I hope this continues and never ends.