Star Contributor of the Month for February – SunGard

Each month we’re going to honor one of our top volunteer contributors from around the world. Volunteers commit countless hours of their time, energy, and knowledge into building and extending the Mifos platform to make it accessible to microfinance institutions serving the poor. For the month of Feburary, we’re showcasing the entire team at SunGard Technology Services in Bangalore, India who have been working closely with the Mifos team for the past year helping to strengthen the core Mifos platform, dramatically increase the performance of Mifos for our customers, and providing direct implementation services to our community.

SunGard Technology Services – Bangalore, India

SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies, serving more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. Their SunGard Technology Services unit provides full software development lifecycle support for SunGard’s products across the financial systems, higher education and public sector businesses. Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with SunGard on a number of key technology projects. Over the next year we look forward to a deeper engagement with a dedicated full-time team at SunGard to help extend scalability in Mifos to support millions of clients.

Contributions:

• Scalability improvements for Grameen Koota including database schema enhancements and improvements to collection sheet entry module to improve speed of processing for thousands of transactions.
• Performance Testing for Mifos 1.4 Release which provided a controlled lab environment where Mifos could be stressed to simulate heavy production load scenarios. This testing led to measurable improvements to collection sheet entry, loan creation, and client creation.
• Reproducing a long standing Collection Sheet issue in the performance testing lab and providing a means for testing and validating those fixes.
• Enhancements including client age validation and additional client family details to better support delivery of microinsurance services at Grameen Koota
• Technical consulting work supporting Mifos community customers including data migration and building reports for Adhikar in Orissa, India.

Here’s a bit more on the entire team including Parthasarathy, Aravind, Chandan, Rajesh, Raghavendra, Rajesh, Maheswari and Lakshmi, Sreevani, Prabaharanand Prachi:

Parthasarathy T

Educated to be a mechanical engineer, but chose to be a software engineer. 8+ years of coding most of them in one or other of the languages that compiles inside MS Visual Studio. Current passions: content management, workflows and RIA.

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: J2EE, Hibernate, MySQL, Performance Engineering

Parthasarathy’s Impact: “I believe our performance fixes for GK and our work at Adhikar helped them scale faster and serve more poor. I believe our impact/role is kind of indirect (we enable MFIs to run efficiently and they in turn help more) – hoping to identify the MFIs that will have the maximum impact on the society and channel SunGard’s efforts/energy towards helping them succeed.”

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos: “The satisfaction of being able to do something useful to the society with whatever skill set we have.”

Advice for others in the Community: “The technologies we use, the processes we follow are just the means to solve client problems, not the end. We should focus on the latter.”

Fun Facts about Parthasarathy

Favorite Food: Dosa

Favorite Open Source Project: Mifos

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: I would prefer travelling back to the past – can set certain things right 🙂

Interesting fact/tidbit: “An incurable cricket-addict. Formed a team in ’92 to compete in a local tournament only to get thrashed (our team scored 34 chasing 200 odd) – realized that the best place for me in cricket is in front of the TV box or in the stands.”

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Aravind Deivendran – Software Engineer and Project Lead at SunGard with 7 years experience.

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Project management, Java/J2EE development, testing, release management

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos: “Self satisfaction, new learning and interaction with diversified kinds of people.

Fun Facts about Aravind:

Favorite Food: Continental

Favorite Open Source Project: Mifos

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: Istanbul, where east and west meet.

You can catch Aravind on almost every social network: Twitter | Facebook | Google | LinkedIn

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Chandan Rao – Software Engineer for past 8 months, previously undergraduate student at National Institute of Technology, Surathkal

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Java, C++, Windows, Unix

Chandan’s Impact: “Through mifos I understood microfinance. I can see why it is required and how it is helping everybody. I hope to utilize my skills in making Mifos more customizable, more efficient and more useful.

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos: “This is one of the few projects that is free and that reaches the grassroots of our society and that makes a difference in the lives of millions of people.”

Advice for others in the Community: “Keep up the good work.”

Fun Facts about Chandan:

Favorite Food: Indian

Favorite Open Source Project: Firefox

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: Ladakh

Interesting fact/tidbit : Chandan has read every book written by Terry Pratchett

Visit Chandan’s LinkedIn profile to learn more about him.

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Raghavendra Bhandari – Software Engineer at SunGard with Masters Degree in Computer Science

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Java, Jsp, Servlets, Struts, Hibernate, Mysql, JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Raghavendra’s Impact: Worked on finding Collection sheet entry bugs, and found the open source testing tool for doing the performance test.

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos: “It’s very nice to work with mifos, because it’s an open source project and especially built for social work.”

Advice for others in the Community: “Best is to prepare the proper documents of Mifos work, so that the new mifosian’s can easily understand.”

Fun Facts about Raghavendra

Favorite Food: Lemon Rice

Favorite Open Source Project: Java

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: Kanyakumari

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Rajesh Kollam – Senior Software Engineer at SunGard with a Masters Degree in Computer Science

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Java, Struts, Hibernate, JavaScript, Maven, SVN, Portlets

Rajesh’s Impact: “Worked on finding Collection sheet entry bug, and also worked on collecting family details of the client.”

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos: “Satisfaction, my work is going to be used by many people and this is my first chance to contribute to an open source project.”

Advice for others in the Community: “Try to have a proper documentation on whatever we develop.”

Fun Facts about Rajesh

Favorite Food: South India dishes

Favorite Open Source Project: All Apache Projects

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: To Mauritius, maybe

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: Kanyakumari

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Sreevani Nagendran – Technical Architect at SunGard

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Design and development in Application software; Programming languages proficiency in Java/J2EE, Python, ExtJs, C++, VC++/COM, C; Good Knowledge in UML,OOPS and Design Patterns, SQL and DICOM; Agile- SCRUM methodology

Sreevani’s Impact: “Effectively guided the design for Jasper reports, Database Archival, solved showstoppers for the insurance enhancement(s).”

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos: “It gives a good feeling when one can give back to the society.”

Fun Facts about Sreevani

Favorite Food: Vegetarian food

Favorite Open Source Project: Python

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: Switzerland

Interest fact/tidbit: “Not many would have just a day difference between one’s wedding anniversary and birthday!”

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Prabaharan Gopalan – Software Engineer at SunGard with 3 years IT experience

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Java, JPA and Flex

Prabaharan’s Impact: “Worked on performance enhancement for the Meeting Schedule Batch Job. Improved performance by a factor of 36 times.”

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos: “Challenging.”

Fun Facts about Prabaharan

Favorite Food: “Anything edible!”

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: “My native place.”

Interesting fact/tidbit: Prabaharan is an industrial biotechonologist by education who had known only a single programming language till he joined SunGard.

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Lakshmi Simha – Technical Lead at SunGard with 9 years experience

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Database expertise

Lakshmi’s Impact: “Worked on SQL tuning, Index creations for improvement in performance making it so that the MFI clients’ requests are processed quickly.”

Currently Working On: Omni Core Development

What’s rewarding about working on the Mifos: “You can see your work impacting somebody.”

Fun Facts about Lakshmi

Favorite Food: Chinese

Favorite Open Source Project: Mifos

If I could travel to one place in the world, it would be: Peru