July 02, 2013 posted by Matthew Sporleder

Google Code-In (GCi) is a project like Google Summer Of Code (GSoC), but for younger students. While GSoC is aimed at university students, i.e. for people usually of age 19 or older, GCi wants to recruit pupils for Open Source projects.

When applying for participation, every project had to create a large number of potentially small tasks for students. A task was meant to be two hours of work of an experienced developer, and feasible to be done by a person 13 to 18 years old. Google selected ten participating organisations (this time, NetBSD was the only BSD participating) to insert their tasks into Google Melange (the platform which is used for managing GCi and GSoC).

Then, the students registered at Google Melange, chose a project they wanted to work on, and claimed tasks to do. There were many chats in the NetBSD code channel for students coming in and asking questions about their tasks.

After GCi was over, every organisation had to choose their two favourite students who did the best work. For NetBSD, the choice was difficult, as there were more than two students doing great work, but in the end we chose Mingzhe Wang and Matthew Bauer. These two "grand price winners" were given a trip to Mountain View to visit the Google headquarters and meet with other GCi price winners.

You can see the results on the corresponding wiki page

There were 89 finished tasks, ranging from research tasks (document how other projects manage their documentation), creating howtos, trying out software on NetBSD, writing code (ATF tests and Markdown converters and more), writing manpages and documentation, fixing bugs and converting documentation from the website to the wiki.

Overall, it was a nice experience for NetBSD. On the one hand, some real work was done (for many of them, integration is still pending). On the other hand, it was a stressful time for the NetBSD mentors supervising the students and helping them on their tasks. Especially, we had to learn many lessons (you will find them on the wiki page for GCi 2012), but next time, we will do much better. We will try to apply again next year, but we will need a large bunch of new possible tasks to be chosen again.

So if you think you have a task which doesn't require great prior knowledge, and is solvable within two hours by an experienced developer, but also by a 13-18 year old within finite time, feel free to contact us with an outline, or write it directly to the wiki page for Code-In in the NetBSD wiki.