What is Google Code In?

Pre-university students ages 13 to 17 are invited to take part in Google Code-in: Google’s global, online contest introducing teenagers to the world of open source development.
With a wide variety of bite-sized tasks, it’s easy for beginners to jump in and get started no matter what skills they have.
Fedora participated in GCI 2018 and had a huge success. At the end of seven weeks, the org and the mentors choose winners who get a trip to Google HQ for GCI summit in June.
Our mentors helped , 125 participants with our top 5 finalists and winners completing 110+ tasks together and raising the total completed task count to 326.
Thanks to our Org Admins and Mentors especially Bex for his support. Congratulations, to all the winners. This year’s winners are listed here.

What Happened?

This time we had  tasks from setting up FAS account to writing Ansible Playbooks and Creating mDNS Client/Servers Demos to Kernel Regression Testing.
Our mentors had a very busy seven weeks interacting with mentees around the world. It was a great learning experience to poke around what
worked for us and how we can do better from next time.  Moving forward, we are thinking of helping out new mentees to get started with Fedora as regular contributors.
Fedora Classroom session will be proposed to help students who want to keep contributing after the contest ends.

Here’s what one of our winners had to say:

My name is Alex Marginean, I’m 17 years old and I participated this year at Google Code-in 2018 by completing 25 tasks from the Fedora organization.
I live in a small town from Romania but that didn’t stop me from participating at competitions because I love Computer Science and they help me a lot.

Being a participant at Google Code-in introduced me to the world of open source,
which was the best decision I made for myself because by creating or contributing to open source projects, I learned a lot of new helpful stuff.
The Fedora community is great because there are a lot of people who know all sorts of stuff in a lot of different areas.
Every time I got stuck there was either a student or a mentor in the Fedora group that was able to help me.
I realised that the contest wasn’t only about coding or making as much tasks as possible
but it is also about learning how to communicate with others.
This helped me a lot to improve my communication skills in the English language and
making new friends that also have same interests as me.
Now, after more than a month of hard work the knowledge I got built the starting of my career in Software Engineering.

I personally recommend anybody to take part at Google Code-in for the Fedora Organization
because there are some of the most friendliest and helpful mentors

Ongoings

  1. Even though GCI has ended, we would like to keep helping students to get started with contributions and keep expanding the number of new contributors.
    Also, helping students to apply for GSoC and Outreachy in the coming years.
  2. Expanding the mentor list as we would like to have people participating in every specturm of the project and not just limited to a certain section.
  3. Hosting regular meetings between Org admins and mentors to understand where we can improve.
  4. Planning tasks well in advance which gives a lot of time for us to refine as much as possible before it reaches the students.