Google Code-In — A competition for teenage geeks

Google Code-in is a competion organized by Google every year for 13 to 17-year-olds. It is mainly about coding and contributing to open source but you can make your way through even if you’re good at designing, documenting or testing. The main idea is that you contribute your skills along with others to make a product that can be used by anyone for free.

I’m a 17-year-old high school kid trying to teach myself everything software from the internet and using my skills to create impact and build great products for the world to use. I participated in Google Code-In (GCI) in 2018 and would love to share the fabulous experience with you.

This competition primarily focuses on one thing and that is ‘open source’. Open source is the term given to the content that is completely available to you from bones to flesh for free and is developed by a group of talented people all over the world out of their own will. A lot of software companies these days are launching such open source products and developers around the globe contribute to it.

I knew what open source was before participating in GCI but I had a lot of questions about it like: How does it all work? Why do people even do it? Is it really that useful?

How does open source work?

Being a novice self-taught developer, I had the idea of how the software applications go from code to product but it was hard to imagine how different people having different skill sets and different ways of solving problems can contribute together to a project over the internet not having a complete idea about it and still get things working perfectly fine. Common don't you think it will be a complete mess?

Well, things go pretty smoothly. An individual developer or a team launch a new project on an open source platform like Github along with some instructions for contributions and info about the project and developers around the world suggest edits and add code with new features to it using a version control system(VCS). The project owner(the team or the individual developer) reviews the contributions and merges it into the main project using the VCS if it's good enough.

Why develop open source software? Is it useful?

The demand for new and innovative software is increasing at a rate never seen before. Often such software is very complex and requires a large number of developers to work on it.

Open source is the solution to this problem because fortunately, we’ve got a lot of kind developers on this planet who love to spend time their time on developing amazing software to make the world a better place without always expecting something in return.

Another awesome thing about open source is that it ensures quality and encourages innovation. The process of suggesting-reviewing-merging only allows the best to be added to the project. Since it is available to everyone, people can experiment with it and try adding new and innovative features. They can even spot bugs and contribute fixes them eventually improving quality.

Teenagers it's your chance!

With a large amount of coding tutorials available on the internet, passionate teens manage to learn key aspects of software development but due to lack of experience, they do not know how to get professional with their skills.

Google Code-in is the perfect place to get some real open source experience because here you select to work on different projects by different communities along with others of your age group. You have the freedom to choose the project and the community you want to work with. The work required in the projects is divided into small tasks which you can claim and there are mentors in every community ready to guide you through your first open source experience and help you in any task. The best part is you also find a lot of friends having the same interests and skills as you which are otherwise difficult to find. You also get a certificate and a T-shirt for completing at least 3 tasks and a hoodie along with a trip to Google HQ in the USA if you win!

In Google Code-In 2018, I worked with a community called JBoss on 2 android projects and 1 angular project. The experience was eternal because for more than a month I was doing what I love and something different from the usual high school life. JBoss community has got AMAZING mentors who are ever ready to help wherever you are stuck. The logo animation above is the one I designed for a task in of the projects.

One thing that I truly loved and enjoyed while working with the JBoss community was the spirit of learning, in both the participating students and mentors.

I’m a self-taught Android developer and aspire to become an Entrepreneur. This GCI gave me the experience of how professional open source works. I got to know about this competition too late at the age of 17 since I cannot participate in it again. I will miss this experience.

Let’s connect and build great things together! Catch me on Instagram @harshhc5

Thanks to some amazing mentors Harshit Dwivedi, Divyansh Kulshreshtha, Priyanka Jain, Nikita Dhiman for the awesome experience.