Google Code-in, Take Two

Hello fellows! Another year, another season of Google Code-in. 😉 I’m yet again excited to announce that I’ve secured a position in the grand prize winners! (official announcement) I contributed to LimeSurvey, VideoLAN & OpenIntents over the period of 2 months this time.

What is Google Code-in and what does it have to do with me, again?

Google Code-in is basically a programming competition organized by Google for high school students within the ages 13-17. Open Source organizations appoint some mentors who create byte-sized tasks for the students. The tasks could be anything, ranging from programming to translations to documentation to research and so on.

Quick Statistics for this year

• 542 students from 56 countries
• 307 mentors from 51 countries
• An astounding number of 3,054 tasks done by the students, 449 being done by the top 10

Unlike last year, I’m 16 this year (obviously) and owing to awesome experience of the trip I had last year, I was already looking forward to it this year. 😀

What all did I do in it?

This year, I mainly contributed to the OSS organization LimeSurvey, which is a tool for creating surveys written in PHP. The tasks were mainly to port it to the Yii framework from CodeIgnitor due to licensing issues. I also did some OpenIntents tasks as I had acquired some Android Application Development experience too. In addition to that, I helped in finding libav (under VideoLAN) bugs and styling there doxygen docs. 🙂

I completed a total of 40 tasks, acquiring 116 points, which positioned me on the sixth place on the leaderboard (as compared to 112 points and 36 tasks last year getting me on the fifth). You can see the list of tasks done by me here.

And what all did I achieve?

1. Knowledge & expeience in abundance – This year, I had absolutely no experience with Limesurvey or Yii or concept of MVC for that matter. Nor did I know anything about libav or zzuf (thanks to Shitiz for getting me started with all of this). Plus, I only have had a little experience with Android. The two months have changed all of that, I’ve got to work on awesome pieces of softwares, collaborating with cool people and I look forward to contributing to the projects in the future too.
2. Trip to Google Headquarters, Mountain View, California!
3. A Google Code-in sticker & tee and 500 dollars (more details about the prizes here).

I would like to thank Google for organizing this competition, open source organizations for participating and the mentors who spent a lot of their time and energy in guiding the students. I’d also like to congratulate my fellow grand prize winners (see you soon in CA) and all the other students for being a part of the competition. Two of my classmates also participated this year – they did translation and documentation tasks (one did 15, and the other 12).

Adios! – G.