The beginning of Google Code-In 2017
Firstly, if you don’t know what’s Google Code-In — it’s an online contest for 13–17 year old pre-university students which aims to introduce open source software development to us by giving the opportunity to work with real open source organizations.
How does it work? There is 25 (for 2017 edition) organizations. Each organization creates tasks which students should work on. Everyone can choose what they like and claim the task. Once they’ve done it, they mark the task as a “Submitted for review” and wait for the organization’s mentor to approve it (or reject; then you have to correct what’s wrong).
Right before the GCI I had two projects which I was involved in. First of them was a piece of software that would display tiles with data such as time, weather, students’ timetables, newsfeed etc. in our school buildings so that one responsible person (or more thanks to user management!) can show to students immediately information about replacements, upcoming events, etc. I was developing it with two friends from school who are also programming. From the technical side it had to consist of frontend being the tiles itself and the backend being the admin panel for responsible people and API delivering to the frontend. Frontends used to be ran on Raspberry Pi 0 Ws. Unfortunately our plan to also display esport plays fail, because this Pi could run Twitch at 0,2fps… at lowest settings possible… so big dissapointment.
In the meantime of doing mentioned project I had an idea on how to collect money for domain&hosting stuff for my community, Nastoletni Programiści. I wanted to sell official mugs of our community and store or spend all profit as a community’s money. For upcoming expenses. And I wanted to sell that but also to have a nice panel for management of the orders. You know what I’m going to say. I began developing backend for the order management stuff with other person developing the frontend using Vue. It was meant to be one evening project for both of us but it ended up at 66 commits in 12 days wide timespan… What to say more. And at the end of the end I ended up using Allegro (selling website) for that thing. What a waste of time :(
I returned to the school dashboard project, almost finished it (it stays almost finished now too, but don’t tell anyone) and here it comes. The big 28th of November date.
I almost finished the project on the afternoon of November 28th, the day the GCI begins. In the evening I claimed the very first task being the improvement in Android application, Kiwix. After some time I’ve done it, submitted and got accepted. The same thing happend with another one task. And another one.
I got the flow of doing the stuff. I was (and I am, even now, at this moment) active on IRC (those guys are really nice!).
Next days passed and all I was doing was going to school and when I finally got home, the first thing I was doing was to open IRC and look into my email if there is any update on my patch.
When I was doing these Android-related tasks, I strongly felt the benefit of my attendance in an internship which I was at. I had one project there which involved Android, I basically developed a fragment using Play services, but — what’s even better — I’ve got some experience with Android! And based on my experience I have to say that Google’s official Getting started sucks, sucks so much. Udemy’s Ud851 free course is incomparisonably better than Google’s one.
I really liked committing myself to a community where I’m not the only one actually developing stuff. I hope that even after GCI I’ll be able to contribute somehow to the opensource.
More articles about GCI coming soon!
