Reflecting on Google Code-in 2018

Google Code-in (GCI), our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development, wrapped up last December with impressive numbers: 3,124 students from 77 countries completed an impressive 15,323 tasks!

These students spent 7 weeks working online with 27 open source organizations, writing code, writing and editing documentation, designing UI elements and logos, conducting research, developing videos teaching others about open source software, as well as finding (and fixing!) hundreds of bugs.

Overview

• 2,164 students completed three or more tasks (earning a Google Code-in 2018 t-shirt)
• 17% of students were girls
• 23% of the participants from the USA were girls
• 79% of students were first time participants in GCI
• We saw very large increases in the number of students from Austria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Taiwan

Student Age

Participating Schools

Students from 1,673 schools competed in this year’s contest. Many students learn about GCI from their friends or teachers and continue to spread the word to their classmates. This year the 5 schools with the most students completing tasks in the contest were:

School Name	Number of Student Participants	Country
Dunman High School	110	Singapore
Indus E.M High School	73	India
Sacred Heart Convent Senior Secondary School	69	India
Amity International School Sec-46 Gurgaon	36	India
Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan Vidyashram Pratap Nagar	27	India

Countries

We are pleased to have 9 countries with first time Winners and Finalists. Winners from Georgia, Macedonia, Philippines, South Africa and Spain, and Finalists from Israel, Luxembourg, Nepal and Pakistan.

The chart below displays the 10 countries with the most students completing at least 1 task.

What's Next

In June we will welcome all 54 grand prize winners to the San Francisco Bay Area for a fun-filled trip. The trip includes the opportunity for students to meet with one of the mentors they worked with during the contest. Students will also take part in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, tours of the Google campuses and a fun day exploring San Francisco.

We are thrilled that Google Code-in was so popular this year. We hope to continue to grow and expand this contest in the future to introduce even more teenagers to the world of open source software development.

Thank you again to the heroes of this program: the 789 mentors from 57 countries that guided students through the program and welcomed them into their open source communities.

By Saranya Sampat, Google Open Source

iOS Accessibility Scanner Framework

At Google, we are committed to accessibility and are constantly looking for ways to improve our development process to discover, debug and fix accessibility issues. Today we are excited to announce a new open source project: Accessibility Scanner for iOS (or GSCXScanner as we lovingly call it). This is a developer tool that can assist in locating and fixing accessibility issues while an app is being developed.

App development can be a time consuming process, especially when it involves human testers. Sometimes, as in the case with accessibility testing, they are necessary. A developer can write automated tests to perform some accessibility checks, but GSCXScanner takes this one step further. When a new feature is being developed, often there are several iterations of code changes, building, launching and trying out the new feature. It is faster and easier to fix accessibility issues with the feature if they can be detected during this phase when the developer is working with the new feature.

GSCXScanner lives in your app process and can perform accessibility checks on the UI currently on the screen simply with the touch of a button. The scanner’s UI which is overlaid on the app can be moved around so you can use your app normally and trigger a scan only when you need it. Also, it uses GTXiLib, a library of iOS accessibility checks to scan your app, and you can author your own GTX checks and have them run along with scanner’s default checks.

Using the scanner does not eliminate the need for manual testing or automated tests, these are must haves for delivering quality products. But GCSXScanner can speed up the development process by showing issues in app during development.

Help us improve GSCXScanner by suggesting a feature or better yet, writing one.

By Sid Janga, Central Accessibility Team

Introducing the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the new home for Tekton, Jenkins, Jenkins X and Spinnaker

We're excited to announce that Google is a founding member of the newly formed Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Continuous delivery (CD) is a critical part of modern software development and DevOps practices, and we're excited to collaborate in a vendor-neutral foundation with other industry leaders.

We're also thrilled to announce the contribution of two projects as part of our membership: Tekton, and in collaboration with Netflix, Spinnaker. These donations will enter alongside Jenkins and Jenkins X, providing an exciting portfolio of projects for the CDF to expand upon.

Continuous Delivery Foundation

Currently, the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool landscape is highly fragmented. As companies migrate to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure, tooling decisions become increasingly complicated and difficult. DevOps practitioners constantly seek guidance on software delivery best practices and how to secure their software supply chains but gathering this information can be difficult. Enter the CDF.

The CDF is about more than just code. Modern application development brings new challenges around security and compliance. This foundation will work to define the practices and guidelines that, together with tooling, will help application developers everywhere deliver better and more secure software at speed.

At a foundation level, the CDF will help make CI/CD tooling easier. And at a project level, Tekton helps address complexity problems at their core. We will team up with the open source community and industry leaders to design and build the critical pieces common to CI/CD systems.

Tekton

Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems. It provides a flexible, extensible workflow that accommodates deployment to Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, mobile or even emerging use cases.

The project’s goal is to provide industry specifications for pipelines, workflows, source code access and other primitives. It modernizes the continuous delivery control plane by leveraging all of the built-in scaling, reliability, and extensibility advantages of Kubernetes, and moves software deployment logic there. Tekton was initially built as a part of Knative, but given its stand-alone power, and ability to deploy to a variety of targets, we’ve decided to separate its functionality out into a new project.

Today, Tekton includes primitives for pipeline definition, source code access, artifact management, and test execution. The project roadmap includes adding support for results and event triggering in the coming months. We also plan to work with CI/CD vendors to build out an ecosystem of components that will allow you to use Tekton with existing tools like Jenkins X, Knative and others.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform originally created by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google. It is typically used in organizations at scale, where DevOps teams support multiple development teams, and has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams and in millions of deployments.

Spinnaker is a multi-component system that conceptually aligns with Tekton, and that includes many features important to making continuous delivery reliable, including support for advanced deployment strategies, and Kayenta, an open source canary analysis service.

Given Google’s significant contributions to both Tekton and Spinnaker, we’re very pleased to see them become part of the same foundation. Spinnaker’s large user community has a great deal of experience in the continuous delivery domain, and joining the CDF provides a great opportunity to share that expertise with the broader community.

Next Steps

To learn more about the CDF, listen to this week's Kubernetes Podcast from Google, where the guest is Tracy Miranda, Director of Open Source Community from our partner CloudBees.

If you'd like to participate in the future of Tekton, Spinnaker, or the CDF, please join us in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20th at the Continuous Delivery Summit ahead of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, as there will be many opportunities to get involved and become a part of the community.

We look forward to working with the continuous delivery community on shaping the next wave of CI/CD innovations, alignments, and improvements, no matter where your applications are delivered to.

By Dan Lorenc and Kim Lewandowski, DevOps at Google Cloud