Participating in Google Code-In 2013

A few weeks ago I saw in a about their program called Google Code-In, a program for 13-17 y/o students to participate on open source projects and win cool prizes. Because I am still 17 until May 2014, this would be my last chance to participate. I checked out which organisations there were, and some of them had some really cool tasks with BRL-CAD, Haiku, and KDE sticking out to me. But I ended up going for KDE tasks because I love Linux and KDE is an awesome project in itself.

I have since done tasks including:

adding/changing the functionality of the KDevelop python plugin
adding functionality to Marble
creating tutorials for the Marble python bindings
creating documentation videos of KWin effects and KDE applications
adding functionality to Trojitá

And I am sure there will be many more to come.
I have really enjoyed working on these tasks, as it gives me the satisfaction of knowing that I am contributing back to part of the larger Linux community (reminds me of an comic I once saw about computer updates where the Windows user says "I hate this", the Mac user says "I love this" and the Linux user says "I built this"). It has also helped me realise that some of these KDE applications are really useful (especially KDevelop when it comes to C++ work).
One of the most interesting parts about my working on these KDE tasks, is that my experience is in HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and SQL. And almost all the KDE tasks are in C++, so I have had to think back to the learning I have done on C/C++ in the past and get familiar with the syntax along with the Qt framework. Which once again overall has been great fun.
blog post from Google