Some thoughts about last year

Last year at Google Code-in 2015 was incredible. I learnt a lot of new things, I met (well, virtually met) new people, nice people. I worked as hard as I could trying to win the contest of course.

It turned out my hard work was still not enough. I got some inside information, I was told I was the 4th among the participants. I was almost sure I would end up as a finalist (one of those in Top 5). Now… who wouldn’t be?

When the winners were announced, I wasn’t one of them. Apparently, for some people my work wasn’t good enough, nobody told me why or what wasn’t fine.

As I wrote in my previous post, I was very enthusiastic, I worked as much as I could, sometimes even 12 hours a day. I was working very fast and fixing bugs and solving tasks. The hard part? Waiting for a mentor for 48 hours to give a Code Review. While I was waiting for my mentors (who were either on vacation or had problems at school), others where getting almost instant code reviews and completing at least one task while I could do nothing but wait and ping people and… wait again.

What about this year?

To be honest, I lost almost all my enthusiasm, I knew a lot more things and I could solve tasks much faster however. I picked a hard task, which took me almost 13 days to solve. It was a task mentors wanted to take out of the contest as being too hard. Tasks were not really in my field this year so I could not solve too many, unfortunately.

This year, I am not actually planning on winning anything because it would not be realistic. I can be proud however for the work I did. I know these things will be there forever and it’s a big thing for me to have my name on such a project as MediaWiki.

I am going to make a few things public, and I hope nobody will be upset about this. I got some appreciation from two of my mentors which I am really proud of!

Thanks for the work you did so far, and I would really appreciate to see more work, even outside of GCI, from you! I really like your work! - Florian Schmidt

Victor has worked pretty hard on this task and as it feels like this task has gotten harder to resolve than initially thought, expected, planned (though that is nobody’s fault, it’s just another lesson in software development that such things can happen). Victor: Thanks a lot for your patience on this task that turned out more complex and longer than expected. - Andre Klapper

This was my last participation to Google Code-in as I turn 18 this year. It’s been a very good experience, brought me some intro to real-life programming and the world of programmers.

I have to thank everybody who helped me, gave me any piece of advice or simply gave me a +2 on a Gerrit patch.