Hey, guys!
My name is Illya. I am 13-14. During the GCI I got a huge experience in Software Development. Now I am KDE Developer and a part of the Marble dev. team!
Now, after the contest I want to tell a bit how it was for me. I don’t want to lie – I will tell you only the thruth. I develop applications with Qt during 1.5 year. It wasn’t interesting – I was developing IRC bots, IDEs, text editors, computional languages, etc. Do you know what was really interesting for me? It’s Google Code-In. When I heard about this contest I thought – “It’s time to visit Googleplex!” and started working. During the whole contest I was targeted on grand-prize.
So, now, when I described you my targets, I want to tell you a bit about how it was. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t easy. As far as I remember, there were 8-14 tasks I solved that had difficulty as 4-day task but were labeled as 2-day tasks. This is not important.
Mentors are awesome. Really! I was working on Marble, so during the GCI my mentors were Torsten Rahn and Dennis Nienhüser. They are the best mentors in the world! They were able to give an answer for any question I’ve asked in 10 minutes. It’s really awesome. In IRC you could see smth like: claimed-assigned-done-closed. Interval between claimed-assigned was ~40 seconds. They are really fast and cool!
About the tasks. As far as I know, tasks are grouped as “Code”, “Documentation”, “Research”, “UI” and “Unit Testing”. For instance, I love coding tasks and I hate documentation tasks :P. Why? Maybe ‘cause I love to develop things rather than talk about developed things.
By the way, I’ve completed 62 tasks for KDE. 62 tasks! Can you imaging that? For me it’s like an infinity! I got a lot of exp. while I was working on them. That was really cool and I can sleep more now. I was sleeping 7 hours during the GCI, now I can sleep 9-10 hours.
UPD: KDE will choose 2 grand-prizers up to 4th February (my birthday, btw) – until this date, that feeling won’t leave me…you know which feeling 😉
Happy coding,
Find your way and explore the world!
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE
