Google Code-In 2018 was my second year participating in Google Code-In. Without a doubt, I had a lot more fun this year. Google Code-In has helped me improve confidence in my coding abilities, meet new people, and work on incredibly exciting open source projects.
This year, I completed 36 tasks, contributing to repositories under coala.
Last year (2017), I was only able to get 5 tasks done, all with the Zulip organization. I had only heard of GCI the day it opened, and was completely unprepared like a fish out of water.
There were some extremely talented students at Zulip. That, combined with my lack of advanced Git skills, made it extremely hard for me to do more tasks. The ones that I did get through were a complete mess. I did, however, learn A LOT about version control in that one task, which was incredibly helpful, even until today.
(I originally planned to keep a weekly journal during GCI, but quickly fell out of habit. This was written back in early November)
I was able to get a much better start to GCI this year. So far, I've completed about 9 tasks. Most have been on the username-availability project. I've quite enjoyed it so far. Trying to get involved and see how I can improve the project more. Was quite surprised at the test suite that username-availability had; it's quite advanced. Hope to learn a few things from it.
So far, managing school with GCI has gone well. I complete my homework after school in a 2 hour sprint. I've recently realized that I can achieve this "sprint" by enforcing strict deadlines on myself; as if the work was due in a matter of hours. This simulates the "panic" and extreme pace of work that happens at school when something is due after lunch, and there are only 15 minutes until lunch ends. Homework should remain low as there are no exams in the foreseeable future.
Hoping to do more tasks with unit testing, databases, and using aspects of python that I haven't used before (generators and lambdas?).
Google Code-In 2018 was great in every regard. I found it incredibly rewarding. I learned about many new aspects of python, improved my coding standards, wrote a bunch of tests, and many other things. Throughout 2018, I didn't do as much coding as I would have liked, so doing Google Code-In most certainly made up for it.
It's so incredibly satisfying to contribute to open source projects and to have other people use your code. I'm hoping to contribute to some projects that I use too, now that I have more experience. I definitely challenged myself throughout these 7 weeks, and now that I look back, I've completed tasks and solved bugs that I didn't even think I was able to solve.
I'm incredibly grateful to have received assistance from the mentors, who have all worked incredibly hard to make this contest work. A big thanks to all the mentors and students!