“I wrote my first program when I was eight years old”
16-year-old winner of Google’s global contest Stanislav Kryvenko was a guest of The Day
Ukraine continues to be a source of young talents for the entire world. This was confirmed once again at the recent Google Code-in 2014 contest. Among 24 winners from around the world, two prizes went to boys from Ukraine: 16-year-old Stanislav Kryvenko and tenth-grader Illia Kovalevsky, both from Kyiv.
The Google Code-in is a contest in open source software development for pre-university students (ages 13-17) from around the world. The source code of such software is freely available for reviewing, studying, and modifying. Thus, the user can improve the open program, use its code to create new programs or fix their bugs.
The Day talked to a winner of the Google Code-in 2014, 16-year-old second-year student of Optical and Mechanical College of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Stanislav Kryvenko. This boy will join other winners at Google’s main headquarters in Mountain View (California, USA) for four days in early June. This trip will see the young programmers attending the awards ceremony, meeting with Google’s engineers and spending a whole day in San Francisco; they will also be able to find new friends with similar interests.
During the seven-week-long contest, 658 students did 3,236 projects. Its participants coded, added new features to programs, fixed bugs, created documentation, developed logos, and found new and interesting ways to show other students the exciting coding process.
Kryvenko did 26 projects. “The simplest of them, which I did at the beginning, dealt with scrappers. They are based on programs that receive information from various online resources and save it as a special format file. There were also various data processing projects. The most challenging projects involved making a text analyzer,” the boy told us.
All his projects dealt with needs of one company, called Apertium, which works on machine translation. He explained that doing so allowed the contestant to improve their chances of obtaining victory. “There is nothing in the rules to prevent one from doing projects for different companies, but when it comes to winning, it is best to focus on one company,” Kryvenko explained. While working, he said, all participants and instructors used the same program to discuss issues in English.
Remarkably, the boy mastered all the basics of programming on his own. “For me, the school and the college brought fundamental knowledge which supplemented my practical skills. Basically, these two combine to give the overall result,” he explained.
Kryvenko wrote his first program when he was eight years old. “What I liked about it most was my ability to create some new things, to organize myself, to succeed, rather than just play outside or draw,” he told us.
Kryvenko spends about five to six hours a day on programming now. Besides, his spare time hobbies include drawing, and, for a year already, playing the keyboard instruments. However, he is not composing any music of his own so far, unlike the programming situation. “It happened that I had too much free time on my hands, and daily programming is a very tedious job. I needed something to occupy myself,” he told us. Kryvenko’s favorite composers include Ludwig van Beethoven.
The winner of the Google Code-in 2014 plans to study at one of Kyiv universities in the future as well as to create a company that will provide cloud computing services. “These are services provided to Internet users. If people need some services, like editing, translation or conversion, they can get them online, obviating the need to install these programs on their computers,” Kryvenko explained.
