Haiku's GCI 2015 winners

In February the roughly two months long Google Code-In (GCI) period came to an end. See the results of all participating organizations at the GCI site. As always, it’s been a strenuous time for students and mentors alike. Of course, it was a very productive one, too.

Unfortunately, statistics are not easily to come by. Amusing, really, considering we’re dealing with Google here… :).
While the number of students who were seriously aiming to win the grand price — a trip to the Google headquarters in Mountainview, California for the first two — was relatively low, there were over 50 students that made first contact with Haiku by successfully finishing a handful of beginner tasks. Those were for example: running Haiku in a VM, installing Haikuporter to build a package or, more difficult but also more rewarding, working through DarkWyrm’s two Haiku-centric coding lessons (1 and 2).

Here’s the ranking of those students that went above and beyond, as it was determined with a vote by our mentors:

1. Victor Tolpegin
2. Hannah Pan
3. Markus Himmel
4. Adrián Arroyo Calle
5. Stephanie Fu
6. lich
7. Gareth Poole
8. Abogical

Our top students were busy doing a slew of partly very challenging tasks. Besides fixing and creating dozens of recipes to port new applications and libraries, they also fixed and extended existing native software like Pe, PecoRename, BeGet, BePDF, ArmyKnife, MeV, NetSurf, fRiSS, haikuporter and more.

Some brand new applications were developed as well: Tipster displays Haiku usability tips in a window or as Replicant on the desktop. HaikuPlot shows/edits plots generated by gnuplot. Both were done by our grand prize winner Victor (ValeT). He also developed a website to collect and display hardware configurations tested by Haiku users. Let’s hope it will be deployed soon.

For Hannah and Markus it turned out to be a neck-and-neck race for second place. Both showed their versatility by doing very diverse tasks. From doing a t-shirt design, to fixing bugs, extending applications and creating recipes to presenting Haiku at their school (see Markus' video at youtube).

We asked our two winners for comment, but so far only heard back from Victor:

“I think my favorite task during GCI was working on the Hardware Database application. It was very difficult and I’m still working on it, but it was definitely a lot of fun. I also really liked working on Tipster and HaikuPlot, because they helped me learn C/C++ and introduced me to the Haiku API.”

Hannah — or any other students or mentors for that matter — please feel free to leave a comment to this news item.

So, congratulations and thanks to all our hard working students and their mentors, and especially Scott McCreary who once again shouldered the burden of administrating Haiku’s GCI participation.

We hope to see some of our students continue to contribute to Haiku and maybe even work on Haiku at Google’s Summer of Code someday!