Hi, I am Yuriy Shnitkovskiy, on Wikimedia known as @Georggi and (Huh, finally blog created in school is really needed for something) I would love to share my experience on Google Code-In 2015 with you. Firstly I want to say "thank you" to all mentors of Wikimedia for your help and support, these 7 weeks of code madness(It was madness, especially import and export processes :D) weren't easy, but weren't as hard, as they could of been if you weren't there. So, enough emotions, let's go straight into it!:)
Google Code-In is the competition(Show me the person who doesn't want to fly to San Francisco for free unless..., khm, won't go to deep into that), but it didn't really feel like it was, we were working like a team, and different students worked on different categories, there aren't many events that I felt the same about team-work. Even though I participated in GCI last year too, I had a lot things to learn too: I went more deeply into Git, got into Vagrant(still, Apache is more flexible), got into actual code of core and fixed tons of import\export related issues there together with a help of TTO. I was taking so many PHP coding tasks that at some point, TTO had to make tasks for me(I am very thankful for doing that very fast). I actually missed a bigger variety of those. I was so often talking in IRC that after a few days after start(I joined contest literally in first minutes after it's start) that we started to talk about unrelated to GCI things, which I feel means that we were much closer together.
At the same time, there were a few problems that I experienced, like my HDD failing on
December 31(I was surprised that I fixed it in just 2 days), some mentors busy so they can't review my work, etc. But they were so insignificant, that it doesn't really matter, as they are just making as better, more prepared.
At the end, I want to say 'thank you' to all of Wikimedia mentors(Especially to This that and the other, Federico Leva(Nemo_bis), Florian Schmidt(FlorianSW) and many others) and google code-in helpers, which helped me with my shipping issue.
Overall, this was a great experience, I will definitely continue contributing and I am also looking forward to GCI 2016(And probably will switch to Google Summer of Code after that). I would suggest everyone trying themselves out in this, you don't actually need coding skills, some tasks here may be to draw something, or to write a documentation(Knowing programming languages is still good), so don't be lazy\shame, you can do it!
P.s. I wanted to create a video instead of a post, but found out, that I can't talk that good without stopping for thinking:).
Overall, this was a great experience, I will definitely continue contributing and I am also looking forward to GCI 2016(And probably will switch to Google Summer of Code after that). I would suggest everyone trying themselves out in this, you don't actually need coding skills, some tasks here may be to draw something, or to write a documentation(Knowing programming languages is still good), so don't be lazy\shame, you can do it!
P.s. I wanted to create a video instead of a post, but found out, that I can't talk that good without stopping for thinking:).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
