Wrapping up Google Code-in 2015

The Google Code-in is pretty much over for this time, and we’ve had a blast in our first year with the competition in MetaBrainz with a total of 116 students completing tasks. In the end we had to pick five finalists from these, and two of these as our grand prize winners getting a trip to the Googleplex in June. It was a really, really tough decision, as we have had an amazing roster of students for our first year. In the end we picked Ohm Patel (US) and Caroline Gschwend (US) as our grand prize winners, closely followed by Stanisław Szcześniak (Poland), Divya Prakash Mittal (India), and Nurul Ariessa Norramli (Malaysia). Congratulations and thank you to all of you, as well as all our other students! We’ve been very excited to work with you and look forwards to seeing you again before, during, and after coming Google Code-ins as well! :)

Indian student Rayne presenting MusicBrainz to her classmates.

In all we had 275 tasks completed during the Google Code-in. These tasks were divided among the various MetaBrainz projects as well as a few for beets. We ended up having 29 tasks done for BookBrainz, 124(!) tasks for CritiqueBrainz, 95 tasks for MusicBrainz, 1 task for Cover Art Archive, 6 tasks for MusicBrainz Picard, 3 tasks for beets, and 17 generic or MetaBrainz related tasks.

Some examples of the tasks that were done include:

Finalist Nurul Ariessa Norramli’s MetaBrainz infographic.

• A couple of YouTube introduction/tutorial videos. There are a couple more we didn’t make available yet, but a huge thanks to Caroline and JefftheBest for creating these!
• An extensive addition to BookBrainz‘ test suite made by Stanisław (see the BookBrainz February 2016 Release blog post for more details)
• A new userscript for importing Facebook events to MusicBrainz made by Ohm
• A new AcousticBrainz plugin for beets made by Ohm
• “CaliBBre“, a new BookBrainz plugin for Calibre made by Stanisław
• A MusicBrainz.org OAuth2 plugin for Discourse made by Ohm
• 2 pages were added to MetaBrainz.org: one for listing the MetaBrainz team and one for listing all our projects (both done by Caroline)
• 3 infographics were made to describe how the MetaBrainz projects relate to each other (see gallery below)
• 7 classroom presentations were held, spreading the word about open source, MetaBrainz, and MusicBrainz to young students around the world (pictures from a few of these in the gallery below)
• 11 releases were added to MusicBrainz with all recordings additionally analysed for and submitted to AcoustID and AcousticBrainz
• 111 reviews were written for and added to CritiqueBrainz
• And a number of patches were written for Picard, MusicBrainz, CritiqueBrainz, and possibly more. :)

In all, I’m really darn happy with the outcome of this Google Code-in and how some of our finalists continue to be active on IRC and help out. Stanisław is continuing work on BookBrainz, including having started writing a Python library for BB’s API/web service, and Caroline is currently working on a new icon set for the MusicBrainz.org redesign that can currently be seen at beta.MusicBrainz.org.

Again, congratulations to our winners and finalists, and THANK YOU! to all of the students having worked on tasks for MetaBrainz. It’s really been an amazing ride and we’re definitely looking forward to our next foray into Google Code-in!