Context

Google Code-in is a contest to introduce students (ages 13-17) to open source software development. Since 2010, 8,108 students from 107 countries have completed over 40,100 open source tasks Because Google Code-in is often the first experience many students have with open source, the contest is designed to make it easy for students to jump right in. I was one of the mentors in this first time for Fedora program. We had 125 students participating in Fedora and the top 3 students completed 26, 25 and 22 tasks each.

Every year Google invites the Grand-Prize winners and their parents, and a mentor to it’s headquarters in San Francisco, California for a 4 days trip. I was offered the opportunity to go and represent Fedora in the summit and meet these 2 brilliant folks in person. This report covers activities and other things that happened there.

Mentors

From coming up with variety of different level tasks to verifying tasks on time, it was an experience for all of us. Active and helpful group of mentors helped the students whenever required. There were cases when the assigned mentor got busy/unavailable, we were ready to step in and take care of the task. Thanks to proper communication, we were always able to review tasks on time.

We were 8 mentors (handling different kinds of tasks)

Winners

Margii and EchoDuck

Margii (left) – EchoDuck (Right) in Google Android park

Both our winners were amazing and did the tasks with great quality.  I am still surprised to see their work at such a young age.
Margii wants to contribute to Fedora Website and other Infra projects, and he is great with Python/Flask. EchoDuck is also interested in contributing to Fedora Infra and he is looking to get his hands dirty with Rust (coding wherever required, and packaging). It’s an action item on me to help them connect with right people so that they can start their contribution journey. I am also hoping to see them as GCI mentors or GSoC students in the future.

Day 1 (Reception)

We met other mentors/students/parents in hotel lobby at 5 pm and then left for Google San Francisco Office. We were welcomed with a lot of snacks and swag.
Best part was all the students receiving Pixel 3xl. The event was followed up by a dinner and we were dropped off back at the hotel.

Day 2 (Full Day at Google headquarters in Mountain View.)

This day was special since we were going to explore Googleplex and talk to Google Engineers at Google Cloud office. We were also offered $75 and $150 to mentors and students respectively to buy our choice of Google Merchandise. Students met  with Google employees of their home country and parted to have lunch with them. We had a line up of talks by great folks from Google.

  • Recruiting – Lauren Alpizar
  • Android OS: Ally Sillins
  • Cloud: Ryan Matsumoto
  • Chrome OS – Grant Grundler
  • Google Assistant – Daniel Myers
  • Google TensorFlow – Paige Bailey

We had Dinner at the same office and then head back to the hotel.

Day 3 (Fun Day in San Francisco)

Probably the day most of us would remember. We had option to select one of Segway tour or cable car tour. I selected the cable car and went to see around the whole city (Twin Peaks, Lands End, San Francisco City, Golden gate park, Golden gate bridge (also, walked across it))

There was a Yacht waiting for us at one of the piers. We embarked and cruised around the Alcatraz Island, Golden Gate bridge. We had dinner on the Yacht and since this day was a fun day, obviously all of us were tired.

Day 4 (Closing reception in Google SF office)

On the last day, we had to go the office a bit early. We had breakfast in the office itself followed by the award ceremony (to grand prize winners). We were given 4 minutes per org time to share something if we wished. A lot of students shared their experience with GCI. We had lunch after than and meanwhile a video crew was taking interview of people who signed up for it. We had left the office by 3pm after taking a lot of pictures in front of the San Francisco – Oakland bridge.

People who made this possible

Thanks to every student who participated. Everyone of you were amazing and I hope to see you all.
Thanks to Justin for being there when needed, facilitating with telegram group and IRC bridge, and keeping the conversation alive. A very special thanks to Bex for being the backbone of this and all other summer coding programs. Of course all the mentors, Thank you for giving all the time and I hope to be a part of this along with all of you in coming years.