The Haiku community is developing a new operating system for personal computing. They were one of the twelve organizations who mentored students during Google Code-in 2014, our contest introducing 13 to 17 year old students to working in open source communities. Today, Scott McCreary reflects on the achievements of students who participated with Haiku.
2014 was the fifth year for Google Code-in (GCI) and also Haiku’s fifth year participating. This was the first year where we offered beginner tasks designed to give students an easy way to get started. These tasks introduced students to booting and using Haiku, compiling Haiku, and using Haikuporter to build a package from a recipe file.
149 students completed at least one task with us this year and 36 students completed at least three tasks with us to earn a GCI t-shirt. Six students completed over 20 tasks each in a bid to become grand prize winners. Each mentoring organization selected two grand prize winners and three finalists. Our finalists were Augustin Cavalier, Markus Himmel and Chirayu Desai. (Chirayu was also a GCI 2013 winner with RTEMS.) Our winners were Josef Gajdusek and Puck Meerburg.
After getting started with beginner tasks, many students moved on to tasks which added improvements to Haiku or fixed bugs. Students contributed to HaikuWeather, SuperFreeCell, BookmarkConvert, and our CatKey editor. Many HaikuPorter recipes were added and updated, making it easier to bring existing software into Haiku. Several tickets were resolved, new GUI controls were created, new screensavers were added, and several apps were updated to make use of Layout Manager. In total, students completed a staggering 435 tasks for Haiku during the contest.
GCI grand prize winners are invited to San Francisco for an award trip. Last year, I had the pleasure of attending as a mentor along with our 2013 winners. This year, the winners selected Adrien Destugues (a former Google Summer of Code student, now one of our most active contributors) as the mentor they’d like to meet on the trip. I’m excited for the great time they’ll have!
I'd like to thank the 17 Haiku mentors and all 149 students who took part in GCI with Haiku this year. Also, a special thanks to our community members who were on IRC to help students during the contest. Finally, a shout-out to Stephanie Taylor and the rest of the team at Google for running Google Code-in and selecting Haiku to participate.
By Scott McCreary, Haiku GCI mentor
