Google Code-in 2019: A wrap up
What is Google Code-in? This is a worldwide, online event hosted by Google which begins around the end of every year lasts for roughly 50 days where students aged 13–17 can work with different open-source organisations to complete small tasks to get started on their coding journey and possibly become contributors to open source community.
Which organisation did you work with?
For this year, I decided to stick with OpenMRS, the organisation that I was a finalist for last year.
Tell us a bit about the organisation
OpenMRS is an open source application that was developed so that the users can design a customized medical records system without any major programming knowledge. From the team behind the app, “It is a common framework upon which medical informatics efforts in developing countries can be built.”
Interactions with the members of the organisation
I mainly communicated with the mentors on the Telegram group made for the events, where I even socialized with the other contestants. Talking to the other people of the team however was via the OpenMRS talk.
How was the journey?
Code-in 2019 was a memorable one, as I personally felt I outperformed myself from last year. I did 4 tasks more (3 at the time of writing, completed another one later), and did not do even a single beginner task this time. Thus, this put my final task count at 28. Besides that, I also found myself discussing the tasks with fellow students and guiding them on the Telegram group.
My main focus was on the coding tasks, but I also did a few designing and quality assurance tasks as well.
What did I learn?
I got a lot more skills in responsive web design, learnt quite a bit of Node.js, React and Go. I also learnt a bit about Android development, but did not do much on that since I was limited by my PC. Besides the tasks, I also tried to address the issues on their tracker but found out I could only do one
Notable Task mentions:
Going from the worst(but still worth showing hehe) to the best
- First task to be completed was a HTML design to thank the GCI students. Here’s what I did (it can be used as an example for responsive web design. How NOT to do it though)
- Then come the video tasks, since I’m not exactly the creative type
- A video about Computer Ergonomics
2. Another video about scrum
- Then come the designs which were sent as images
- A t-shirt designed for the participants
2. Twitter/Facebook cover image for OpenMRS and GSoC
3. An icon for the Nigeria Telemedicine app
- Some actual contributions ^_^
- A Wiki Page that shows the code quality of the platform
- Updated a readme (by a line hehehe)
- And the one which would’ve been the best but turned out to actually be useless, I tried to fix an inbuilt library which is not modified
- Went on to get a bit better at responsive web design, but still not perfect
- Coding tasks! Not many in number but definitely contributed the most in learning and efforts
- Making a React App
- GoLang App which acts as a backend for hospital computers
- Express App which is used to manage the products in a store
- And finally, a properly designed responsive webpage
Summing up
Overall it was a great learning experience. The last year that I will be participating in Google Code-in for me was definitely the best
