My Experience while Participating in GCI 2019 ⚙
Some flowers bloom in broad daylight and some does the same at midnight, all for different reasons 😉. This was said by Siddharth Sinha aka myself for no reason at all, so nvm what you just read because it shouldn’t matter for the rest of the blog 😛.
Google Code-in 2019–20 was my second year where I participated in this open source based competition under FOSSASIA for both of the years. Just to make sure we all are on the same page let me just give a little brief about GCI.
Google Code-in (GCI) is an annual programming competition hosted by Google LLC that allows pre-university students to complete tasks specified by various, partnering open source organizations. The contest was originally the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, but in 2010, the format was modified into its current state. Students that complete tasks win certificates and T-shirts. Each organization also selects two grand prize award winners who will earn a trip to Google’s Headquarters located in Mountain View, California.
This description was definitely written by me not just copied for Wikipedia 😁
How did I get to know about GCI in the first place?
I first started programming about 4 years before this article is being written and the word “open-source” was not present in any of my dictionary as of that time. Fast forward to 2018, I had heard about a competition which google hosted for pre-university students, obviously under the weight of my curiosity I searched about it and found it interesting. Do note, that time I had just used GitHub but never contributed to it or used any version control system.
How was the first year and how did I land into FOSSASIA for the organization?
At first when the GCI 2018 started I had no idea what to do, it was being like a chicken without a head 🤣. I had already researched about the organization I would take part as a student, and that wasn’t that easy, I had two options
- Take an organization which does the same thing as you do, so you can be efficient at doing tasks. (this is one of those things any sensible person who wants to win will do) 😎
- Take an organization which doesn't have the types of projects that you might have experience on. (this is one of those situations where you knowingly walk in the dark near an edge of a cliff) And me being the stupidest person took this path 😜
Reading the 2nd choice might have made you think, “that’s not a very good idea when it comes to competitions” right? Well my logic behind this decision was… I AM NOT GOING TO WIN FIRST YEAR OR RATHER NOT FOCUS ON THAT BUT LEARN WEB DEV… because before this place I didn’t even know who to write a basic JavaScript code or CSS file. That led to me choosing FOSSASIA. While FOSSASIA isn’t really web focused organization by far stretch but has many to say the least.
That how I came into contact with FOSSASIA. By the end of GCI 2018 I was very well aware of how VCS works, I became fluent with web languages and frameworks like React, Angular (I learnt about angular in my spare time) and Electron. I also learnt about how collaboration works in large teams as we did ton of changes at a time for gci18 site etc.
About GCI 19 and how do I feel about it?
This year, I went on and joined FOSSASIA because I was comfortable with. I will update this section when the event is over
Open source Projects and technologies I am interested in?
There are a couple of projects where I would like to get my hands dirty on and some of them I found out in FOSSASIA, Those being
- PSLab Hardware and PSLab Firmware 😍
- Susi.ai (Server) and Susi.ai (react webapp)
And others from different repositories which I use constantly
- Visual Studio Code
- Tensorflow
- Blender
- Open AI gym
- Github Desktop (electron Based)
How do I get in touch with the community?
This question actually varies from organization to project, as I worked in Microsoft Private Auto ML project, which was open source for a limited people (I was one of them until I had to leave) they used gitter as FOSSASIA does but some have different discussion forums etc.
Thanks for reading 😀 With 💖 by Siddharth