Google Code-In 2017: My Story

Weeks before GCI (Google Code-In) even started, I keep debating with myself whether to join GCI 2017 or not. I was a GCI 2016 participant and my experience with it was not so good. It was kinda a traumatic experience for me.

Long story short, I decided to join. The first thing I have to do is chose an organization I'm interested in. I already knew which organization I'd contribute to, even before I joined; Zulip.

But joining GCI more than a week late (I had some internet problems) ruins my plan. Zulip is a huge community. There sure were a lot of participants. That means I have to do a lot of tasks in order to, well, win? I never expect myself to be a finalist, let alone winning, but I want to push myself to the limit. The competition would be too tough for me, so I prefer to chose other organization.

I scroll through the available organizations and observe them. Surprisingly, a few organizations caught my eyes. OpenWISP, LiquidGalaxy, and CloudCV, to name a few. I feel like I was sorta qualified for them. Not only that, they're all new organizations! A good thing to forget my past, GCI 2016.

I choose CloudCV as the organization I want to work with. I chose it because it's related to Machine Learning, a thing that I've been interested in for the past several months. Perfect.

CloudCV is a young open source organization which builds some platforms for AI and/or Machine Learning. The goal of CloudCV is to make AI research more reproducible. CloudCV has 3 main projects, EvalAI, Origami, and Fabrik.

Fabrik's page

CloudCV's task choices, however, were so limited. At one point, it even only had 7 tasks choices (not counting the beginner tasks)! I mostly give my contributions to Fabrik, such as adding neural network models to its model zoo. Adding a model to Fabrik's model zoo was like a gambling game for me. When you're lucky, it was so easy you feel like you've done nothing. But other times it's really hard I feel like I want to give up.

The first thing I have to do when I want to add a new model to Fabrik is to find a neural network model. At this time of writing, Fabrik only supports 3 frameworks, Caffe, Keras, and Tensorflow. However, Fabrik still has some problems with tensorflow models. I don't have any experience with Caffe so I prefer to go with keras.

After cloning a model I want to add, I have to make sure that the model works perfectly. Some models work well in keras 2, while some others don't. Some works in tensorflow 1.4.1, some don't, etcetera. After running the model smoothly, I have to make a JSON file from it. Then, I have to make sure that Fabrik supports the layers in the model.

Sometimes Fabrik throw me an error and I have to find another model. If Fabrik keeps throwing errors, I have to change the model I want to import, and start working from zero again. Repeat.

In this blog post, I've listed some models I've tried to add to Fabrik. There's more to it though. Right now I have a collection of more than 20 different neural networks models, only because I keep getting errors on most models I tried! Almost all of them use keras as their framework.

Another thing I did was finding AI challenges on the internet. I already know one website; kaggle! But this task makes me even more creative and I scoured the internet for every possible AI challenge I can find. Some of them can be found here.

I also made some graphics for CloudCV:

A logo for Origami

An illustration for Fabrik

I enjoyed working with CloudCV. I like the atmosphere, the community, the nice and helping people, and pretty much everything, even the timezones. Most students in other organization usually have problems with a huge time zone difference with their mentors and ended up being awake all night long. In CloudCV, I was thankful to have mentors whose timezones were close to mine.

One thing that bugs me a little is that CloudCV only had a few mentors. I counted all the mentors whose name appeared on the task pages, and there were only 9 mentors!

A random screenshot of my terminal

Working with CloudCV gave me the experience about programming in the real world. Programming isn't all about coding. Sometimes when you find a problem, you gotta solve it yourself because StackOverflow doesn't have all the answer. Setting up a development environment is the hardest of all. Package versions aren't just numbers, but it plays an important role in a project.

In the future, I hope to contribute more to CloudCV whenever I have enough time.

I got into the leaderboard and I'm pretty happy with that. Thank you to everyone who has helped me through contributing to CloudCV, including my family, other students, and of course, and my mentors. Thanks for dealing with my dumb questions and dealing with me in general.

ps: if you want to ask me questions about GCI, feel free to, I'd be happy to answer.