Google Code-in 2013!

It was publicly published on the  that I am one of the grand prize winners of Google Code-in 2013. It was a lot of hard work, and it felt like a very long 50 days over Christmas and New Years, but I got there in the end.

What the Competition was like for me

For about the first 2/3 of the competition I was only doing a task every day or two, but then towards the end Torsten Rahn got my attention on IRC and I completed a bunch more work on the project and their Python bindings. I subsequently decided to switch to a nocturnal sleep pattern in which I woke up at roughly 6pm local time (GMT +10) and went to sleep around 9am local time. This worked a lot better for a lot of European mentors that were available for their night times (roughly 7-8 hours behind me). During my nocturnal nights I was able to get anywhere between 2 and 5 tasks done which pretty quickly put me neck and neck with Mikhail Ivchenko (who went by the nickname EgorMatirov during the competition). It seemed as though towards the end it was not just me that got a move on, but everyone, Snowman started doing a bunch more tasks, and so did Illya Kovalevsky (Mihail Ivchenko just kept up his insane pace he had already been doing).

So by then end of the competition the top 5 standings in terms of tasks completed were:
47 Mikhail Ivchenko
46 Benjamin Kaiser
38 Illya Kovalevskyy
37 ? snowman
20 Levente Kurusa

Now I have to give props to Levente, he joined rather late in the competition, but oh did he fly through the tasks, it must have been over only a couple of weeks he did all those 20 tasks.
For almost all the competition I worked on KDE, however closer to the start I did attempt a task on BRL-CAD. It didn't take long for me to realise however that the level of maths involved in solving some of those BRL-CAD tasks was way above my knowledge. I subsequently stuck to KDE.
One of the things this competition showed to me was just how easy it was to communicate with the project leaders (on ) on some of these open source projects, as well as contribute back to them (through the and directly once I received developer access

Tips

Here are some tips I would give to someone wanting to participate in Google Code-In:Marble