Edit: I’m one of the winners of the contest!

Google Code-in is a contest for students between 13-17 with the finality of introduce them in the world of free software development. This is my experience taking part as student in this year’s edition.

I discovered the Google Code-in Contest thanks to the Google Open Source Blog. I didn’t know this contest before. I was disappointed when I saw that some free software organizations (like KDE) were not present. I use KDE Plasma in my desktop and it could be a great opportunity.

Let’s go

I registered for the contest the first day and I took a look to the tasks. I saw many task that use Python, my favorite programming language. Great! 🙂 As I read in previous year student’s blog posts, you should choose an organization to have more chances to win. I saw that Wikimedia had many Python-related tasks, and some of them use Django (a python framework to build web applications), which I use in my projects. So I chose Wikimedia as the organization to work with.

The first task that I chose was to refractor a small project to be compatible with the Python PEP-8 code style guidelines. The most difficult part of the task was to setup the development environment. This was my first contact with Martin Urbanec, with I did most of the tasks.

The contest

I had a problem with one of my task I needed to ask for help. I decided that it was a good moment to try IRC. Mentors were usually available to help everyone with their problems. Since then I’am usually in the #wikimedia-dev channel. One of the most annoying parts of that channel is that there’s a bot which post every message in Phabricator. Luckily, I found a way to hide its messages. Maybe other people have it hided.

I did most of my tasks during my Christmas holidays. At least I didn’t be bored 🙂. The last three weeks were the most difficult, because of school homework and less free time.

I didn’t like to choose easy tasks only to increase my task number. So I’ve chosen preferably more hard task to have more chances to win. After all, we were in a contest where everyone wanted to ~~win a trip to Google headquarters~~ learn how to contribute to free software projects.

One of my favorite parts of the contest is that people usually can help you if you need. Special thanks to all the mentors from Wikimedia that I’ve seen more active in the channel: Martin, Étienne, Gopa and Andre (sorry if I’ve missed someone).

Students were very nice and I really like talk with them. Regards to IAmNetx, tassu, RishabhL, Crutishnyk, NicholasG04 and many others.

Post contest

I’d like to continue contributing to Tracker, the application with I’ve worked more. It needs some visual redesign and performance improvements, which I like a lot to work in. During the contest, I also created some task that I’d like to work on when I have time.

tasks.length

It’s a tabbu to say the number of completed tasks during the contest, but it finished, so here you are: