Google Code-in 2015 ends in less than 24 hours. It s been a great journey.

I worke
d with Wikimedia Foundation this year. I ve been writing code for MediaWiki, the s
oftware that powers Wikipedia.org and many other high-traffic wikis.
What happened?
During GCI, I learnt a lot of new things, I completed many tasks, I filled and c
losed many bug reports and I added some cool features to the core software and s
ome of the available extensions, features that you will see in the close future
on Wikipedia and other wikis. It was the first time I met true scalable software
with a codebase summing almost one million lines of code. I met nice, talented
and hard-working people (well not literally met because everything happened on Inte
rnet Relay Chat); some of them were my official mentors for the tasks I claimed,
others were just people willing to help.
Enough about how great Wikimedia is. Let me say something about the contest itse
lf. I registered on the 11th of December, 4 days after the start. I claimed my f
irst task, a Beginner task which said Get on IRC and meet people . After my very fa
st task was approved, I claimed more, mainly coding tasks. I successfully comple
ted some difficult ones (like changing user interface, and changing core logic t
hat influences the entire software). I started to get more and more familiar wit
h the APIs, basically I started to know where to look and how to search for the
things I needed; then I was able to complete tasks faster and better. Yesterday
after I successfully completed my work and submitted the patch to Code Review, s
omething happened with the GCI website and my mentor was no longer able to appro
ve my task. Although it was 3 AM in San Francisco, the guys at Google fixed this
issue in a couple of hours and I got my task accepted.
Who are the guys that I worked with?
I want to thank TTO (a volunteer contributor which helped me even when he wasn t s
upposed to), Andre Klapper (the organization administrator who mentored me for s
ome of my tasks), Federico Leva (the guy who takes care of wikis internalization)
and many other WMF employees and volunteer contributors. I had a great time com
pleting tasks during the contest and I decided to keep contributing to MediaWiki
as volunteer.
Will I participate next year?
Shortly, yes, I will! Google Code-in is a great experience, because you get to c
ode real-life things and be one of the people that power some highly used piece
of software, like I did with MediaWiki. Google Code-in makes you feel important!
After the contest, you become a volunteer contributor and you can keep working.
So go ahead, get ready and register next year!