Meet A Delhiite Who Won Google Code-In Contest Twice!

Gautam Gupta, a 16-year-old boy, is currently involved in WordPress, bbPress and LimeSurvey. He enjoys writing plug-ins and contributes to the core.   

 

Scene 1: The National Employability Report 2011, prepared by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, says only 17.45 per cent of the engineers roped in by the IT sector are employable nationally.

Scene 2: A 16-year-old Delhi boy wins Google's Code-In contest twice.

These two situations are rather contradictory in nature and show the two extremes of the Indian technology world. But they both are true. In a nation like India where such employability reports grab the headlines, a boy like Gautam Gupta knows how to make a mark of his own when it comes to world-class competitions like Google Code-in.  

Google Code-in is an online programming competition organised by Google for high school students in the 13-17 age group. The contest is held over a period of around two months. Open source organisations appoint some mentors who create byte-sized tasks for the students. The tasks could be anything ranging from programming, translations, documentation, research and so on. For the first task that the students complete, they get a t-shirt. For completing every three tasks, they get a hundred dollars. The maximum amount they can receive is 500 dollars. Based on the number of tasks the student completes and the difficulty of the tasks, the students are ranked. The top ten are then invited to visit the Google headquarters, also known as Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Gupta has won the contest twice.

Speaking about his achievements, the teenager said, “It all started with a tweet that was about this competition, linking to a blog post which stated that an open source organisation, WordPress would be participating in a programming competition organised by Google. Such coding competitions for high school students are rare so I thought of being a part of it. When I first participated in the Google Code-in I was 15 years old and in IX grade. I had always been trying to find international level competitions for children of my age group and younger, in which they could get a chance to show off their talent in the world of programming, and Google Code-in was exactly that!”

Gupta's journey with open source began in 2008 when he was introduced to WordPress and bbPress. He continued, “That was the time when I had already acquired a year's experience with PHP and used to write small scripts. I tried porting a social bookmarking plugin for WordPress named SexyBookmarks to bbPress and released it as Social It in 2009. Then I wrote more plug-ins and eventually started contributing to the core and have been doing that since then, with exams playing the role of speed-breakers.”

He participated in the competition for the first time in 2010. Recalling his first time experience with the contest, Gupta said, “The first time the competition was held, I went straight to work the first day and started contributing to the all new bbPress plug-in for WordPress. bbPress basically allows to run forums on a website. My first task was to allow users to mark topics as favourites, then I did other tasks like handling errors, topic subscriptions, profile pages, topic stickies and so on. I remember continuously coding for around 16 hours by the end of the competition.” Being one of the 10 winners was more of an experience for the youngster. With age on his side, Gupta decided to be a part of that event again in the following year.

He added, “In 2011, I was already looking forward to it. This time, I mainly contributed to the OSS organisation LimeSurvey, which is a tool for creating surveys. The tasks were mainly to port it to the Yii framework from CodeIgnitor due to licensing issues. I also did some OpenIntents tasks as I had acquired some Android Application development experience too. In addition to that, I helped in finding libav bugs. As things turned out, I completed a total of 40 tasks, acquiring 116 points, which positioned me on the sixth place on the leaderboard.”

BUT... the journey was not as easy as it appeared to be. The boy had to face some virgin challenges, but could move out of them with flying colours. Talking about the challenges, Gupta said, “I was completely unfamiliar with the open source projects I was going to work with during the competition. I had absolutely no experience with Limesurvey or Yii, nor did I know anything about libav or zzuf. All I had was a little experience with Android. This contest changed all of that. I got an opportunity to work on awesome pieces of software and collaborating with cool people. Another challenge was time particularly when I participated for the second time. Since it was 10th standard, I was busy with the activities and tests happening in schools. But when you're passionate about something, you achieve it.”

Gupta is now passionate about open source technologies. He tries his hands on WordPress and Linux the most. The freedom of open source technologies impresses the lad. “I like to attend meetups. I recently attended DevFestX at Google Gurgaon, where I got to meet many open source lovers and know about new and interesting technologies. Open source exposure in school is rare, but I like to open source anything that I make,” he explained.

Gupta is currently involved in WordPress, bbPress and LimeSurvey. He enjoys writing plug-ins and contributes to the core.