Google Code-In 2013

Hi, Habrahabr! I am a fifteen-year student of an ordinary school in Izhevsk. One day I came across a Google Code-In 2012 post - how was it? and thought: "It would be nice to try your hand and earn a T-shirt."

A small reference: Google Code-In is a competition for schoolchildren aged from 13 to 17 years.

So, how it was and what came of it (under the cut pictures):

Introduction

10 OpenSource organizations take part in the competition, this year were: KDE, Apertium, BRL-CAD,

Copyleft Games, Drupal, Haiku, RTEMS Project, Sahana Software Foundation, Sugar Labs, Wikimedia.

Each organization adds its tasks to the general list ; there are also separate lists for each organization (for example, for KDE ).

Taking part is easy.

To do this, you only need to persuade the parents to fill out the form with their consent and upload it along with the document confirming your school years when registering with Google Melange . Now it remains only to wait for the start of the competition and proceed to the selection of the task.

')

Tasks.

Since I already knew a little Qt, my choice fell on KDE. My first task was to make a link in the clickable dialog box, which took me 3 lines (if anyone is interested, here is the page of the task ). (Hooray, I earned a certificate of participation!).

Then it became more difficult, the second task was to expand the functionality of the player in Okular (KDE-shny document viewer), so that he could report on whether something is playing at the moment or not ( task ). (Only one task left before the T-shirt!).

During the third assignment, I implemented in Marble the storage of the OwnCloud password in KWallet (the assignment page ).

Hurray, I earned a t-shirt! So, if you look at the list of completed tasks? Hmm, strange ... I seem to be among the top five participants who have done the most tasks for KDE. What if...? The last year’s winner was the leader and the author of the namespace post that motivated me, I decided to try to become the second. And then it started ...



I spent all my free time in front of the computer, slept in moments of waiting for a response from the mentors, reluctantly dragged to school, abandoned my homework ... When everyone started the holidays, we hung out for hours on irc, but in the meantime I got a KDE developer account and broke into the leaders the number of tasks (during the final check, not only the quantity but also the quality of the tasks is assessed, but this was our only way to measure ourselves). The rivals were good too, except for me there were 4 strong players in KDE. It seems to me that if I had known before whom I would have to fight with, I would strongly doubt my success: Ilya Kovalevsky is the winner of last year; Benjamin Kaiser - entered the university at the age of 14, wrote 2 applications for the iPhone; Levente Kurusa - has 6 patches in the Linux kernel for 2014; there was still a snowman who did a lot of tasks, but about which I know practically nothing. :)



In the meantime, the tasks became more and more difficult, I added support for another routing service to Marble, worked on supporting KML tours, made a small contribution to KDE Frameworks 5.



And now, after 49 days and 47 completed assignments, the competition ends. I have the first place in the number of tasks done in KDE (this is not specifically taken into account anywhere, but it warms the soul) and, as I learned some time later, I won the main prize - a trip to California, to the main office of Google.

Trip.

April 13th. We flew to San Francisco, settled at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. In the evening - a small meeting with the rest of the winners and mentors. There were small contests so that we could meet and make friends, it was generally fun. Each of the winners was presented with a Samsung Chromebook and a heap of little things, there were a lot of t-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers, etc.



14th of April. We spent that day at the Mountain View office in Google, there was an award ceremony and many different lectures (although I hardly understood them). We drove to the Google Store, where we bought a bunch of souvenir stuff.





Rewarding



April 15th. In the morning we went to ride the Segways through the streets of San Francisco (instead, on our own, you could visit the Alcatraz prison). Then we visited the California Academy of Sciences, where we had an amazing tour. At the end of the day, apparently, in order to completely destroy the fragile children's consciousness, we were given an elegant walk on a yacht.



April 16th Farewell day at Google's San Francisco office. Mentors spoke with small stories about their projects, all (again) were given small gifts. Towards the end of the event, we ate delicious cakes.





Cakes



For the solemn speech we were handed over the Nexus 5 with a case and wireless charging. In general, there were many gifts:



Also, we received maps from Google with $ 350 for personal expenses (food, souvenirs, road) and Google Store maps with $ 200 for buying souvenirs.

Small tips and advice:

• If you do not set a goal to win the main prize, you can perform tasks for different organizations and gain experience. However, if you want to win, then I can recommend performing tasks for one organization and here is why: each organization chooses two (out of 20) winners, therefore a person who has completed 50 tasks for one has a greater chance of winning than a person who made 5 tasks for 10 organizations.
  
  
• Try to communicate more with mentors, via irc, email or Google Melange. Feel free to offer your ideas or ask for help. Mentors are very friendly and cheerful people, always ready to help.
  
  
• It is better to work on one project, it's easier to navigate in the code and you can rebuild your daily routine to adjust to the time zone of the mentor and sleep when it is not. (It is actually very convenient).
  
  

PS

I hope that next year more schoolchildren and mentors from Russia and the CIS countries will participate. This year there were only 10 schoolchildren from Russia (for comparison, from the USA - 102, of which 10 are winners). I wish you all success!