Google Code-in 2019 With CircuitVerse

Written by Josh Heng on Tuesday 21st January 2020

ExperienceCircuitVerseGoogleProgramming

This year, I participated in Google Code-in, an annual contest for 13 to 17 year-olds centred around developing open source projects. The organisation that I chose to work with was CircuitVerse, which was definitely the best organisation for me because of its fantastic community.

Disclaimer - I have been requested to write this blog post by CircuitVerse, however they have had no influence on the content of this article

Additional Links (Updated)

What is Google Code-in?

So what is Google Code-in? According to their website, it is a “global, online contest” for “pre-university students” which “introduces teenagers to the world of open source development.” Each open source organisation that takes part creates many tasks, which are solved by participants. Tasks range from actual coding to research and outreach tasks – there’s a huge variety. At the end of the two months that it runs for, the event closes and each organisation picks two finalists, two runners up and two winners. Google Code-in is actually celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, however this is the first time I've participated in it.

Helping CircuitVerse

I chose to help CircuitVerse on their three initiatives – their main simulator and website, their Interactive Book and their documentation. I completed 22 tasks overall, ranging from performing security audits on the simulator to creating a JavaScript search highlighter. I also actively helped in the community, reviewing pull requests on the GitHub repositories, finding issues and researching new features. CircuitVerse was a fantastic choice because of the great community surrounding it. We communicated on Slack and there were always people eager to help.

The downside, however, was the fact that the majority of the active mentors were based in India. The difference in time zone and the fact that many of them were also full time students meant that some queries and tasks took a while to be responded to, and there were not always that many tasks available to choose from. However, all the mentors did the best they could – some even stayed up until after midnight on the final days so they could review any new task responses that came through!

Conclusion

All in all, I think that Google Code-in was a hugely beneficial program for me, and CircuitVerse was the best organisation I could have chose. Thanks to everyone involved, and I would definitely recommend this to anyone else interested in taking part next year.

Edit - Grand Prize Winner!

I was chosen by CircuitVerse as one of the two Grand Prize Winners who will travel to the Google HQ in California later this year! Thanks again to them - I'm really looking forward to it!