The Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSL) participated for the first time in the Google Code-in contest, and we're pleased to report that the results of the contest were incredibly valuable for us. We had eight students actively working with us during the contest, from as far afield as Australia and Poland. Of these eight students, two have let us know they plan to keep working on projects with the OSL and one even let us know that he's hoping to attend Oregon State University so he can learn even more about open source and help out at the lab.
We had a total of 42 tasks completed, all improvements to Ganeti Web Manager, a homegrown project of the OSL. For those who aren't familiar with the project, it's a Django based web application that helps administrators better manage their Ganeti-based clusters. Our students completed a total of 42 tasks: 23 coding tasks, 18 user interface tasks, and one outreach task (logo design). We were especially excited that our students found several unknown bugs in our code base and proceeded to send us fixes for them. You can take a look at all of the tasks proposed by the Lab and all those completed by our students on the contest website.
As a result of participating in Google Code-in, several major features were implemented in Ganeti Web Manager, including:
•HTML5 VNC Support
•Creating a Status Dashboard for Administrators and Users
•Creating an Object Change Log
Of all these major features, creating the status dashboard was the most difficult of our tasks. We required a very concise layout for the feature and the student working on the task was not a native English speaker, but he did an outstanding job. In fact, if you'd like to get to know the student who worked on the dashboard, we've already published an interview with Piotr for your reading pleasure.
Overall, we were incredibly excited to be a part of Google Code-in and extremely pleased with our results. We certainly hope to continue mentoring for the contest, assuming Google chooses to run it once again. Many thanks to all of our students for their great work and many thanks to Google for doing awesome work to promote student involvement in open source! A full post about the OSL’s experience with Google Code-in is available on the OSL blog.
By Leslie Hawthorn, OSUOSL Open Source Outreach Manager
