🏆Grand Prize Winner, GCI 2018

How it all began.

It all started with my high-school computer teacher telling me about an alumnus, Gautam Gupta, who had won the Google Code-in 2010 and 2011. Being a computer enthusiast myself, I decided to check it out. Seeing the amazing opportunities it provided, I registered right away for the 2016 edition and then a year later for the 2017 edition. I completed a total of 13 tasks in 2016 and 71 tasks in 2017- the third highest number of tasks completed for one organization that year. These 2 years have been a rather emotional journey and I’m grateful to the amazing mentors of SCoRe, my parents and Google, for providing this quintessential opportunity to get introduced to the world of the open source right from high school.

Code-in 2016

Completely new to this kind of a contest and GitHub, I had no idea about the functioning of open source projects and how multiple people can contribute to the same project. Moreover, I only knew front-end web development and photoshop, so the number of tasks I could do were limited. I chose to work for the SCoRe organization because of the interesting and the numerous number of tasks it had available for participants to try. I participated enthusiastically for about 2 weeks but then my interest diminished but somehow I pulled myself and in the last week I managed to complete a few more tasks to get my total number up to 13. For this, I got an official Google T-shirt, a pen and a laptop sticker.

The Official T-shirt was a big motivator for me. It got me determined to do better next time, not only in terms of the number of tasks but also in terms of the quality of my work. Throughout the year, I worked on expanding my knowledge. I dived into the backend for web applications, Android and iOS app development as well as competitive programming using both Java and Python. These skills really helped me in the 2017 edition.

Code-in 2017

This year was absolutely amazing! When about 25 hours were left to claim a task, the Gitter org-chatroom was flooded with messages from the participants. We all had mixed emotions… GCI was coming to an end. However, this meant that those of us who still wished to contribute could finally start submitting their work, not as GCI Participants but as actually interested collaborators. Working on 71 tasks in itself was a big achievement for me. With each task that I claimed, I challenged myself to perform better. I criticized my own work, only to push myself and break my boundaries.

The projects I contributed to.

Git: I got to learn a lot about the coder’s abode- Github. Creating feature branches, cherry-picking commits, creating PRs and Issues. I was so fascinated by the amazing functionalities of it that I moved my own project to Github- Practikality.

Out of all the tasks I did for different projects, Bassa tasks were the highest! Simply because it is so amazing! I helped create the entire installation process (YES. It was so satisfying). I also identified a vital incorrect login issue, fixed the broken badges, created video tutorials and wrote multiple wikis. In fact, out of the 7 wikis on the Bassa repository, 4 have been written by me. I even helped a few of my fellow participants in setting up Bassa. I plan on contributing to this project in the future as well
View it on Github

Kute

The idea that this app is built upon is truly one in a million. In case you want to hear my views on it, check out my blog post on the app. I contributed to this project by setting it up and creating a PR after taking care of missing resources, redesigning Sign-un UI and updating the documentation. I even created a cute splash screen for Kute (haha, see what I did there?)
View it on Github

Soundcom

I created two versions of Splash Screen for this beautiful app, as well as redesigned the main activity. Even though there was no task for it, I separately added animations to the Main Activity to make it look more appealing
View it on Github

Dronesym

The logo I created for this was actually one of my best works in graphic designing back then. Furthermore, I researched and tested alternatives to Firebase real-time database, then wrote a synopsis which included details about my personal usage experiences, ratings on the basis of four different criteria and tutorial links to implement the systems.
View it on Github

Dengue Stop

This was the first React Native app that I ran, and the process surely wasn’t simple. But to help my fellow participants, I added a how-to-setup guide to its wiki and even created an issue regarding certain UI problems in it.
View it on Github

D4D

I created a logo for this following the Google Material Design guidelines, added a favicon to the app and a lot of other stuff which was basically related to web development, my area of expertise! I had a lot of fun doing tasks for this one since they were closely related to web
View it on Github

Massa

This is again one of the projects in which I’d like to contribute after GCI simply because of the amazing purpose it will serve. I even created Mockups for it which two of the mentors I showed them to really liked, so I’ll be implementing it in actual after GCI ends
View it on Github

Others

I did some other stuff too, but I can’t write them all as the post will then be really long :P (you can message me on gitter if you want to know about anything, I’ll be more than happy to help). But in overall, I contributed to almost all of the latest SCoRe projects, some names which I haven’t mentioned include Eloc, Cloudlibz, Stackle, Gocloud, etc.
View SCoRe organization on Github

How were the mentors?

My first two weeks went without much interaction with the mentors and co-participants as I was not aware of the Gitter channel, but once I found it, I’ve been active and have helped a lot of other participants. Some of the most lovely mentors I met were Bhathiya sir, Deniz sir, Malith sir, Akarshani ma’am, Rumesh sir, Tharindu sir and Pasan sir.
But one mentor who gets a special shoutout for always being there for me (and yeah, he’s the one who I became really great friends with) is Mr. Milindu Sanoj Kumarage. He’s always ready to help, be it odd hours like 2 or 3 in the morning or peak hours like 5 or 6 in the evening, if you message him, he’ll get back to you and with the most helpful and logical reply you can think of. Thank you sir, for if you had not been there, working on tasks would have been difficult for not only me but a lot of other participants as well.
View their Gitter Channel

Some Co-participants

So, I met a lot of co-participants this year and some of them interacted with me on personal chats. Here’s a shoutout to some amazing people.

• Raghav Puri: I hope you join Practikality bud!
• Moses Paul R: You stalked me almost everywhere and that scared me a little.
• Adhyan Dhull: Criticising the Indian Education system was a good talk man.
• Others like kmehant (woot-woot, the co-gpw), KalyanC also made their presence known :)

Lastly, What I learned/will learn

I obviously learned a lot while doing tasks, here’s a list I compiled of the things I have to look more into throughout 2018.

• Git
• React Native
• Angular JS
• Protractor
• Node
• Machine Learning
• Debugging
• Jekyll
• and much more!

My last task :)

My 71st task was to create an issue for the Stackle. Since it was my last task, I took it as a challenge as decided to do something out of the box! I focused on improving the user interface of the home page of Stackle to make the user experience of using Stackle better. Here is an image of the previous homepage (top), and the one I made (bottom).

Tips to co-participants

I’m a participant as well with two years of experience in Code-in, so I’ve managed to jot down a few tips to perform well. I’ll just like to recommend you all to not only focus on the number of tasks you do but also on the quality of your submission. Remember- quality over quantity. Pay attention to what you’re doing instead of only completing tasks for the sake of it. For example- I completed a task in which we had to cherry pick commits. In the changes grabbed from this commit, there was a secret map which contained a strange string. On decoding it with ‘Base64’, I found that it was actually a shortened link for a secretly committed file which read ‘Everything is a lie. Nothing is here, nothing was here.’. The nothing was here clause got me to check out the revisions tab and I saw that there was a separate binary string which later decoded to another link with dots and dashes in the end. I already know Morse code so I decoded it on my own and was finally able to open the link to a google form which had been made by SCoRe. This task is just an example of the easter eggs that the mentors can put in tasks to test out if you’re really paying attention to what you’re doing.
It’s also necessary to interact with other participants and the mentors, in order to ensure healthy competition and to get to know about the different projects. “Create. Innovate. Execute.” -following this procedure will definitely help you on your journey. Moreover, try being the troubleshooter for your organization by helping out anyone who faces a problem. Let us all learn and code together!

Well, if you’ve read this far, Congratulations!

Haha, this was a long one, but I feel so good after writing it all out. GCI is great. Special thanks to Google for organizing such programs which make children learn more about technology. God Bless SCoRe, its mentors, the participants, and of course, America :)