Abishek V. Ashok is dreaming big these days.

The 17-year-old computer science student from SNDP Higher Secondary School, Udayamperoor, is among the 12 grand prize winners from India in the Google Code-in 2017, a contest held globally to introduce pre-university students aged between 13 and 17 to open source software development.

Third time lucky

He had participated in the contest twice in the past but turned lucky third time around.

Abishek, who lives in Panangad, was among the 1,000-odd students roped in by FOSSASIA, an organisation from Asia engaged in developing open source software, as part of the contest. He was asked to complete 93 coding tasks in 49 days between November and January this year.

“Three days were given to complete tasks while seven days were given for more advanced ones. Many of these tasks required me to spend sleepless nights in preparations before actually coming up with the code,” said Abishek who claims to be the first ever grand prize winner from Kerala in the globally renowned contest. He says writing code to convert a bunch of images in the SVG (scalable vector graphics) file format to the PDF (portable document) format as the most challenging of his tasks.

All the completed tasks were submitted by FOSSASIA to Google Code-in team who vetted it and announced him as a Google Code-in Grand Prize Winner. “I now plan to pursue computer science in IIT or even MIT,” said Abishek who fell in love with technology and computers at a very young age.

He is now awaiting a visa for flying to the Google headquarters in the U.S. to accept the award and attend a few seminars next month.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Kochi / by M.P. Praveen / Kochi – May 22nd, 2018