Google Code In 2014

The Google Code-in is a programme to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. Over the last four years there have been 1575 students from 78 countries that completed tasks in the online contest. It runs from December 1, 2014 to January 19, 2015.

For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development. The role of this page is to collect "bite sized" tasks on the Boost C++ Libraries for participating students to complete. Students gain real world experience working on an open source project and can put the skills they have been learning in the classroom to use in a open source project that can touch millions of lives.

The tasks are grouped into the following categories:

1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation or Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
3. Outreach or Research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Tasks generally take students 3-5 hours to complete. Students earn one point for each task completed. Students will receive a certificate for completing one task and can earn a tee shirt when they complete three tasks. At the end of the contest each of the open source organizations will name five (5) students as their finalists and these finalists will also earn a hooded sweatshirt. From their five (5) finalists, each organization will name two (2) grand prize winners for their organization based on the students' comprehensive body of work. The grand prize winners will receive a trip to Google's Mountain View, California, USA headquarters for themselves and a parent or legal guardian for an awards ceremony, an opportunity to meet with Google engineers, and have a fun day in the San Francisco sun.

Google Code In Ideas Instructions:

Please add your idea below in the following format:

• Estimated hours: ? hours
  Categories: Whichever one or more of (i) code (ii) documentation/training (iii) outreach/research (iv) Quality Assurance (v) User Interface
  Boost libraries involved: Name these here
  Boost community members willing to check the work performed: List these here
  Description of the task

Tasks should be chosen to be short with very well defined outcomes - it should be obvious to all when a task is done correctly or not. You should expect a majority of students to have no ability to program in C++, so try to restrict tasks to documentation, testing, working on the Boost website, designing graphics or icons, writing essays, blogs or videos about Boost libraries, that sort of thing. Do however throw in a few tasks for the more technically competent, such as helping to verify bugs sent to the issue tracker still occur against trunk, or even refactoring which is entirely mechanical but just a little too hard for file find regex and replace to do.

​You find this list of past ideas for other projects of use to think about Boost project ideas.

Google Code In Ideas:

• Estimated hours: 3-5 hours
  Categories: Documentation
  Boost libraries involved: Boost.Thread
  Boost community members willing to check the work performed: Niall Douglas
  The documentation at http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_57_0/doc/html/thread.html has unfortunately become out of step with the source code. For every instance in the documentation where it claims that a macro has some default value, check whether this is or is not true in the source code, and fixing the documentation where it is wrong, sending us either a report of the defects or ideally a patch or pull request with the fixes already done. Tip: you can search the documentation for macros easily by searching the text for BOOST_THREAD_ with case sensitivity.

• Estimated hours: 3-5 hours
  Categories: Outreach
  Boost libraries involved: All
  Boost community members willing to check the work performed: Niall Douglas
  We currently have no instructional videos on the Boost website telling people how to install a development ready edition of Boost for Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Apple Mac OS X. At least three videos should exist taking users through the installation steps, and these videos added to the Boost website.

• Estimated hours: 3 hours
  Categories: Quality Assurance
  Boost libraries involved: Boost.Thread
  Boost community members willing to check the work performed: Niall Douglas
  Check five bug reports from ​https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/report/51 for validity with the latest trunk version of Boost.Thread, reporting as a comment on the issue whether you successfully replicated the bug or did not. You should only choose bug reports which supply an example piece of code demonstrating the problem, and only bug reports where someone else has not already verified the bug report.

• Estimated hours: 5 hours
  Categories: Documentation
  Boost libraries involved: Boost.Conversion
  Boost community members willing to check the work performed: Antony Polukhin
  The documentation at http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_57_0/libs/conversion/cast.htm was written long ago in HTML and now looks out of style. This documentation must be rewritten using QuickBook.

• Estimated hours: 3-5 hours
  Categories: Minor code improvements
  Applicants count: 1-5
  Boost libraries involved: Almost all
  Boost community members willing to check the work performed: Antony Polukhin
  We have a page that reports minor issues in libraries ​http://boost.cowic.de/rc/docs-inspect-develop.html. Minor issues like 'tab is used instead of 4 whitespaces', 'copyright is missing' or 'license is missing' could be fixed by pre-university students. Fixing about 150-300 'tabs' or 35-50 'copyright' problems would be a good help for the Boost community.

• Estimated hours: 4 hours
  Categories: Tutorials
  Applicants count: 1-3
  Boost libraries involved: Almost all
  Boost community members willing to check the work performed: Antony Polukhin
  It is 2014 outside, more than 10 years passed since first release of Boost. There are many video lectures, translations, presentations and free Boost books all around the Internet. Here's an idea: search for publications and make a list of references to such materials with short descriptions and libraries it is using. This will make it much simpler for library maintainers to add a page '3rd party docs and examples'.