This year was PublicLab's first participation in Google Code-in as a sub-org under FOSSASIA. It was a pleasure being a part of it as a mentor on behalf of PublicLab. I am sharing my experience in this post with all the new things I got to know.

Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development. Since this involved mainly High School students this is a special program to encourage young minds to open source. We have reached many such high schools who have contributed to our codebase during this period.

I worked as a GSoC 2016 student under PublicLab in its Expanded Q & A Project. So I was familiar with the community and the codebase of plots2 the repository of the publiclab.org website. Jeff helped me put up the ideas for the Google Code-in Tasks and we made a good amount of tasks. The contest started from November 28, 2016 and ended on Januray 16, 2017. Here are some of the stats for PublicLab Tasks under FOSSASIA

Tasks Published : 17 with one Task having 100 instance count, one task with 15 instance count and others with single instance count. Total no of Tasks completed: 26 (contains multiple instance count). No of students taking up PublicLab tasks: 20

This are fairly good stats considering our first time in Google Code-in. We had 7 students contributing to plots2 repository in 10 different issues.

We made some outreach on Using Transifex as a translation platform and got 4 research notes with some good demonstrations on how to use the Transifex platform. I have updated the translation wiki page with one of the videos. We also got many strings translated in the process which we will be using to translate the publiclab website in other languages very soon.

We also had students working on Building a foldable paper spectrometer and we got a very good response in this task. We even got a research note from one of the students. Hong Phuc, the founder of FOSSASIA organised workshops with students working on these spectrometers and had them submitting this task. A great effort indeed!

I also got to interact with the FOSSASIA community and reviewing some of their Tasks. It was really great working with some amazing people. I got to contribute to the FOSSASIA GCI 2016 website and also helped @Abhi2424shek in his GCI project of making an image checker gem. It really liked the Project.

I got to learn some new things like implementing Bots to make PR reviews from the FOSSASIA GCI website. Danger is a good way to implement this by creating a Dangerfile which follows the Ruby language. I recently incorporated this in the plots2 codebase in PR #1217. Also learnt a bit about coala.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to plots2 . You all are awesome! I got to meet some really good students who are diving into Open Source from this young age. An applause to them!

@yukiisbored and @oanarosca became the grand prize winners from FOSSASIA. @yukiisbored also contributed to plots2. He solved the issue of unique view counts.

Thanks to Hong Phuc, Mario and the FOSSASIA community for giving us this great oppurtunity. It was really good working with them!