Google Code-In 2014

Hi, Habrahabr!

In this post, I’ll continue the tradition based on the Google Code series of contests. The other day, Google Code-In 2014 ended, in which I became the winner.

I will note that this year’s GCI assignments were offered by 12 organizations (their list can be found on the official website). According to the statistics of participants there were 665 (who completed at least the 1st task). Tasks each organization offered to perform under the supervision of mentors (in other words, examiners who specialize in a particular type of work). The competition lasts 7 weeks. This year it began on December 1, 2014 and ended on January 18, 2015. To participate, it is enough to fill in your details, sign the participant's document and send confirmation that you are a student.

Participants from the CIS:
This year the competition became more popular and quite a lot of our compatriots took part in it. From KDE, the winners were GCI 2012 winner Ilya Kovalevsky (by the way, my fellow countryman from Kiev) and 2013 GCI winner Mikhail Ivchenko (from Izhevsk, Russia). Also Sergey Popov, Danik Pastuschak became finalists. Among the participants of other organizations, it was Imran Tatriyev, Evgeny Shulgin (he took part in OpenMRS, by the way, who had quite high chances, was in the first place in the top, but won 2nd and 4th places). There was one girl from my organization, but it seems that she never passed a single assignment. And Alexey Savenkov, who became a finalist. These are the ones I know. Sure was more. By the way, who cares, here is a link to the overall rating .
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Introduction

My name is Stanislav Krivenko. I study at the Optical-Mechanical College of the KNU. Shevchenko in the city of Kiev on the programmer (what he was fond of, and decided to go there).

I learned about this competition from my dad, who read an article in one newspaper. I previously found information on this competition, but did not want to take part. I have been programming for 8 years, but during this period I have never nominated myself for olympiads or some kind of competitions. Therefore, this was my first competition, in which I decided from the first day to invest all my skills and go to the final. The choice fell on the organization Apertium.

I was not mistaken with the organization. Passed the task the very first of all and was surprised. It was the writing of the nouns scraper from the faroese language in a special format, while it was necessary to go through each page of the wiki dictionary and collect information on each word formation (endings, words that change in a specific time and case). It was written in python, which I did not know before the contest, so I had to learn a lot of new material. All tasks performed in this regard, alternately resting on manual processing of the text. At the end of December, I decided to go to victory and, having learned from the mentor about the tasks that are important for the organization, I was a little scared. I was offered to work on the Bison & Yacc system. Tasks were calculated from 5 to 7 days.

The program was written in C ++ using two parsers ( link ). 3 days was spent on collecting information and a general understanding of these parsers. Alas, the importance for the organization was that the mentors themselves were not familiar with these systems. The meaning of the task was to organize the work of the program even when receiving errors (working with Bison Error Token). I passed the task in 6 days. Then pulled on an even more difficult task. Using me as a written system, it was necessary to draw the construction of AST (abstract syntax tree). The task was calculated for 5 days, but it fell just on New Year's holidays, passed in 8.

Mentors are very friendly and help in many matters. The only thing, some quite carp, sometimes they may even require more than the task requires. But it mostly happened when I decided to go my own way, and not prepared (I was not used to working in open source projects, so for me at first it was easier to make my systems than to modify others).

Well, the trip is scheduled for the 7th of June. I plan to write a report after the trip.

Conclusion

GCI provides an opportunity to show their strength, while learning a lot of new things, meet new people and practice in performing open-source tasks. The popularity of the competition is growing. So, this year 3 Russian speakers won, and even more compatriots took part.

I wish everyone good luck, especially those who are interested in taking part in such competitions.