Google Code-In is a competition happening during November till the end of the winter break that encourages teens from the age of 13 to 17 to learn more about Open Source and contribute to it.
During Code-In students are collaborating and working on solving problems ranging from coding, documentation, training, outreach, research, quality assurance and user interface to help the organization they picked.
Last year it was my first year participating in Google Code-In and that year I made a lot of friends that we are staying in touch. Together we work on collaborating on Projects of our own, Help each other when we are stuck and express our opinions on Linux Distributions.
Sadly I’m not a winner to talk about it but two of my best friends are and I’m really proud of them and their contributions. Great work guys!
Anyways I decided to do an interview too and learn more about what they did during Code-In and tips I can get to go to the magical paradise called Googleplex. This year they are mentors and helping interested students like them to teach them more about Open Source and get them started contributing.
Evgeny Shulgin(@izaron) is the Russian winner of our Organization and he likes cupcakes. We talked to each other using Russian and I've learned more about his culture and Russia itself. He worked on CEA-708 support and fixing many bugs which forever will lie in the git logs of CCExtractor. Anyways let's get started.
- How was the trip?
The trip was just amazing, just as I expected from a ton of blog posts of different last years winners, in different languages. If you win, you can expect something... memorable, I would say :)
- How much time did you spent on Code-In. Did you close yourself in a room and worked like a vampire or did you give time for friends and family too?
Well, I spent a big amount of time, but this isn't a guarantee of winning the trip. You should do the right things, not just waste a lot of time. No, I didn't close myself in the room, I also was preparing to the last school year exams, I gave some time to relax, and so on. But it adds nervousness when someone clearly has much more free time.
- During Code-In you were the person that choose the hard tasks. What was one of the favorite one of yours to work on.
One of the most interesting tasks was about CEA-708 (the standard of closed captioning in digital television in North America and Korea), where I had to read through the document with 100-200 pages and fix a ton of bugs and realize some missing functions. Also I had fun adding some subtitle decoders and encoders, like SubStation Alpha and WebVTT Finally, it was hard, but still interesting - I updated Tesseract version to >4.0.0 (it is used in some modules of the program) and it increased the quality of work and decreased the time of work on the average
- After Code-In ended did you stick to contributing to Open Source. Have you been to any events, hackathons, competitinos or did you take a break?
Yes, after GCI I made a bit of patches to some interesting organizations like Gnome, and it was not bad, you can also try if you want to. In general, I had participated in competitions before GCI 2016 - for example I spent a ton of time for algorithmic competitions and participated in GCI 2014 and 2013.
- Have you worked on any interesting projects after GCI and can we see them :-)
I have seen some interesting projects, but I can't say that I have worked on them, just playing around
- Anyways what will you remember most of Code-In. Did you learn anything interesting.
I will remember the fun that I got during solving hard tasks, it was a bizzare experience
- Final Question: What are some tips you are going to recommend to an idiot like me?
There are a lot of tips about GCI from around the Internet, the main tip is quality > quantity :)
Alex Bratosin(@toomanybugs) is from Romania and he helped me solve many competitive programming problems when I got stuck. We couldn’t stop talking during GCI and having some crazy imaginations about the trip to the Googleplex. We should also probably write a book about our conversations and publish it. Anyway Alex worked on improving DVB support and fixing many critical things about CCExtractor.
- How was the trip?
The trip was great; lots and lots of cool people, presentations, and swag. We got to see the SF offices and the Googleplex! Not to mention we went on a SF segway tour and on a yacht around Golden Gate Bridge! We learned a ton of things about Open Source, such as its goal, its past and future, and how each of us can make it grow.
- How much time did you spent on Code-In. Did you close yourself in a room and worked like a vampire or did you give time for friends and family too?
I spent all of my free time to work on GCI. Sometimes I'd even read code at school.
- You worked on DVB support can you tell me more about what you did?
DVB subtitle extraction was broken (by that I mean the timestamps were in another dimension). Moreover, I also fixed Teletext timing and multiprogram for both DVB and Teletext :)
- After Code-In ended did you stick to contributing to Open Source. Have you been to any events, hackathons, competitinos or did you take a break?
Of course I continued contributing to OS :) I also went to GDD Europe in September.
- Have you worked on any interesting projects after GCI and can we see them :-)
Yes, but they currently classified 😈
- Anyways what will you remember most of Code-In. Did you learn anything interesting.
Yes, GCi first of all gave me a tremendous amount of experience. I learned how to work in a team project, use github, make something work under deadline and so on.
- Final Question: What are some tips you are going to recommend to an idiot like me?
Yeah, work hard, stop complaining, and be perseverant
They both also have a talk given during the trip. So if you are interested check it out on YouTube.
Thank you Alex and Evgeny for doing this interview! It was interesting learning more about your experiences and talking to you guys again.
Also thank you for reading :)