Google Code-In 2014

Hi, habrahabr!

In this post, I will continue the tradition based on the Google Code series of contests. The other day ended Google Code-In 2014 , in which I became the winner.

I note that in the GCI this year, 12 organizations proposed tasks (their list can be found on the official website). According to the statistics of the participants, there were 665 (who completed at least the 1st task). Each organization offered to carry out tasks under the supervision of mentors (in other words, inspectors who specialize in a certain type of work). The competition lasts 7 weeks. This year it began on December 1, 2014 and ended on January 18, 2015. To participate, just fill in your details, sign the participant’s document and send confirmation that you are a student.

Participants from the CIS:
This year the competition became more popular and quite a lot of our compatriots took part in it. From KDE, the winners were GCI 2012 medalist Ilya Kovalevsky (by the way, my fellow countryman, a Kiev resident) and GCI 2013 medalist Mikhail Ivchenko (from Izhevsk, Russia). Also finalists were Sergey Popov, Danik Pastuschak. Among the participants of other organizations, these were Imran Tatriev, Evgeny Shulgin (he took part in OpenMRS, by the way, who had rather high chances, was in first place in the top, but 2nd and 4th places won). There was one girl from my organization, but it seems that she did not pass a single task. And Alexey Savenkov, who became a finalist. These are the ones I know. I am sure there were more. By the way, who cares, here is a link to the overall rating .

Introduction

My name is Stanislav Krivenko. I study at the Optical-Mechanical College of KNU. Shevchenko in the city of Kiev as a programmer (what I was fond of, I decided to go there).

I learned about this competition from my dad, who read an article in a newspaper. Previously, I already found information on this competition, but did not want to participate. I have been programming for 8 years, but during this period I have never nominated myself for olympiads or any competitions. Therefore, this was my first competition, in which I decided from the first day to put all my skills and go to the finals. The choice fell on the organization of Apertium.

I was not mistaken with the organization. Passed the task the very first of all and was surprised. This was writing a scribe of nouns from the faroese language in a special format, and it was necessary to go through each page of the wiki dictionary and collect information on each word formation (endings, words that change in a certain time and case). It was written in python, which I did not know before the competition, so I had to learn a lot of new material. All the tasks performed in this regard, alternately resting on the manual processing of the text. Towards the end of December, I decided to go to victory and, having learned from the mentor about the tasks that are important for the organization, was a little scared. I was offered to work on the Bison & Yacc system. Tasks were calculated from 5 to 7 days.

The program was written in C ++ using two parsers ( link) 3 days were spent collecting information and an overview of these parsers. Alas, the importance for the organization was that the mentors themselves were not familiar with these systems. The meaning of the task was to organize the program even when errors were received (work with Bison Error Token). I passed the assignment in 6 days. Then he was drawn to an even more difficult task. Using my own written system, it was necessary to complete the construction of AST (abstract syntax tree). The task was calculated for 5 days, but it fell just on New Year's holidays, passed for 8.

Mentors are very friendly and help in many matters. The only thing is, some are pretty niggling, sometimes they may even require more than what the task requires. But this mainly happened when I decided to go my own way, and not prepared (I was not used to working in open source projects, so it was easier for me to build my systems at first than to modify others' ones).

Well, the trip is scheduled for June 7th. I plan to write a report after the trip.

Conclusion

GCI provides an opportunity to show their strength, while learning a lot of new things, meeting new people and practicing open-source tasks. The popularity of the contest is growing. So, this year 3 Russian speakers won, and even more compatriots took part.

I wish everyone good luck, especially those who are interested in participating in such competitions.