Google Code-In 2011 Accomplishments

Google's 2011 Code-In, which is a winter program similar to their Summer of Code, ended earlier this month with many contributions to some leading open-source projects.

While not as popular as Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In is an eight-week program that takes place each winter where Google organizes pre-university students to help out on various open-source projects. This year there were over 500 students working on 18 open-source projects for a period of up to eight weeks.

With the younger developer status and shorter contributions during the winter, the outcomes aren't generally as exciting as GSoC, which sometimes brings new state trackers, broken ambitions, and some interesting features, among other novel ideas. However, even still there's some useful work that came out of Google Code-In 2011. Below is a brief listing of some of the high-profile projects with details in full being available from the Google Code-In web-site.

GNOME: The GNOME Boxes virtualization application had multiple code tasks completed, from working on an initial web-site to populating the libosinfo database and reporting bugs. Various GNOME components also received help from these students in translating documentation to other languages. There were also random other work items like a bookmark editing dialog in the VInagre VNC viewer to updating developer tutorials.

KDE The KDE project also received some love in the form of documentation improvements, help in translating to other languages, bug triaging, creating demo data for a few KDE components, updating screenshots, and dozens of other work items were completed during GCI2011.

openSUSE: The students helping out the openSUSE Linux distribution worked on the Wiki, tested GNOME Shell on tablets, rewrote themes in HTML5, tested GNOME Shell Extensions, created video tutorials, and worked on wallpaper/artwork-designs for openSUSE 12.2.

PERL: The PERL developers mostly received translation help.

VideoLAN: The video project team received help closing bugs, adding regression tests, code clean-up help of varying levels of complexity, VLC skin designs, and other FFmpeg / libav work.

FreeBSD: The BSD crew was not left out and they got more documentation, web-site help, and updates to the FreeBSD handbook.

Haiku: Those seeking to re-implement BeOS also got some help from Google and the participating students. The work for Code-In 2011 with Haiku involved translation of documentation, localized screenshots for documentation, various application help, and API testing.