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Use of Google Code In for Drupal Development

Google Code-In is a program to get 13-18 year olds involved in open source and get the most out of them. This is Google's contest to introduce younger students to many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible and attracts them.

Author: Dharmesh Talaviya
Date: Feb 20, 2012 - 4:29:03 AM

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Google Code-In is a program to get 13-18 year olds involved in open source and get the most out of them. This is Google's contest to introduce younger students to many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible and attracts them. Drupal Development is widely popular but to make it more popular amongst youngsters code-in is introduced. Offshore Drupal developers prefer these technology as it offers many rich features and benefits for various web developments.

It runs from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012. Students all over India are invited to produce a variety of open source codes, documentations, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:

Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code

Simple:

• Write JUnit test case for SlovakVesRule
• Make sentence tokenizer based on SRX for French, Italian, Malayalam, Swedish, Lithuanian

Medium:

• Modularize Language Tool for OpenOffice.org & Web Start version
• Add spell checking
• Emacs integration
• Write 15 rules
• Improve the XML syntax

Hard:

• Add rule / false friends (online) editor

Documentation: Tasks related to creating or editing documents

Simple:

• Add documentation for at least 20 rules.

Medium:

• Write the English, Polish, French, Chinese, Dutch help page for the Libre Office extension.

Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing

Simple:

• Create a new icon & logo, sticker design for LT.
• Create a fan page on a social network.

Medium:

• Create a nice video that shows LT in action.

Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality

Simple:

• Clean up rule descriptions so that they coherently contain the error or the rule.
• Spell checks the rules in your language to see if there are no typos left
• Find and fix a bug in Language Tool.
• Find overlapping rules in the rule set for a language.

Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions

Simple:

• Find a list of most common errors in a language supported by Language Tool but not yet found by Language Tool. Propose an idea for a rule that might catch such an error.

Medium:

• Find a new, non-trivial use for Language Tool. Describe it on the wiki.

Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more

• Make a screen cast that shows how to setup Language Tool from SVN in Eclipse.
• Create a page for new language maintainers that would explain how to start working on a language.

Translation: Tasks related to localization

• Translate GUI to Malayalam.
• Update the Lithuanian, Catalan, Italian translation.

User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Easy:

• Create a prototype of the web interface for LT.

Medium:

• Change the simple GUI of Language Tool so that it is more usable.
• Create a prototype of the wizard to create new rules for people that do not know the formalism.

Advantages:

• Encourages students aged 13-17 to get involved with open source projects
• Google's sponsorship means participants that didn't seek us out on their own.
• Good PR.
• Probably good output from tasks of the student.

Disadvantages:

• Majority of student participants not qualified for tasks, and no screening process. All tasks are open to any student.
• Time zone issues create additional pressure when response times are estimated within hours.
• It's over the winter holidays again, from Nov 21 - Jan 16. This means It will coincide with US Thanksgiving, the last-minute push and ultimate release of 3.3, core team meet up (week of Dec 12), Christmas, New Year's and all the other regional/cultural/religious holidays that our contributors may celebrate. You can say it that's a lot of time conflicts.
• We have to pre-create the full task list, so they are all up at once; this means we could get all of them claimed at the same time
• Tasks are of easy/medium/hard levels as well as all of these categories: Code, Documentation, Outreach, Quality Assurance, Research, Training, Translation, and User Interface.
• All the mentors from last year gave the program negative feedback because of the turnaround time pressure, quality of student work and the holiday timing.

Well now we have seen the advantages and disadvantages of Google code-in but Drupal development India is very famous all over the world because of it’s highly quality services. Offshore Drupal developers from all over the country provide top quality and affordable Drupal services.

For More Info: - Drupal Development India | Offshore Drupal Developers

View all articles by Dharmesh Talaviya

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