Meet the 2016 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns

Google Summer of Code 2016 is officially underway. GSOC is now in its 12th year and we’re proud to be participating in GSOC once again for the third time as the Mifos Initiative and the fifth year overall. This year was our most selective year ever with an acceptance rate of 6.08%. We received 115 proposals and had to choose amongst many exceptional candidates to allocate our seven slots. Selecting our top candidates that balanced with the highest priority needs of our community was a difficult process but we’re delighted to be working with a stellar team of interns from three continents who will be working on mobile apps, our community app, and new modules and integrations.

On the mobile front, Vishwajeet will be building out our first client-facing app – an Android self-service banking app. Rajan will be evolving our Android field operations app to Version 3.0. Our community app won’t be recognizable after this summer with Duplex working on refactoring and re-skinning it, Mohit adding in browser-based offline access and Adhyan adding in actionable notifications and status alerts. On top of the Fineract platform, Daniel will be adding in a module for mobile money integration and Nikhil working on credit bureau integration.

Given we had to be so selective and turn away so many candidates who had impressive applications and meaningful contributions, we’re pushing to run our own Mifos Summer of Code in parallel. We are launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to provide stipends to the students we couldn’t choose but have high-priority projects along with seasoned mentors ready to guide them. Stay tuned for more on Mifos Summer of Code.

Our Google Summer of Code students started their first day of coding on Monday so please welcome them and send a word of encouragement to our mailing lists. As we do each year, here’s a brief intro on each of our interns and stay tuned for a follow-up post with some fun facts on each of them.

Duplex Kamdjou

Duplex is a Masters Student in Software Engineering at the University Buea in Cameroon He is passionate and skilled in User Experience Design (UX) using modern web technologies and languages like JavaScript, AngularJS, HTML5, CSS3, Twitter Bootstrap and Node Package Manager (npm), Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Sass and Less. In his more than two years experience with AngularJS, he has built web apps for real-time event management, online shopping, static websites for customers and was a regional finalist for the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2014. He’s familiar with contributing to open source having successfully graduated as a 2015 GSOC intern with Apache ODE.

We knew that Duplex was the right intern for this crucial project to refactor our Community App and revamp the user experience. He has in-depth knowledge of the latest frameworks and languages, a passion for creating amazing user experiences, and existing experience with Mifos X through one of our partners, Skylabase. Under the wise mentorship of Pranjal Goswami and Gaurav Saini, he’ll be taking our Community App, the primary interface for Mifos X ,and taking it to the next level. On the refactoring side, he’ll be updating to AngularJS 1.5, introducing on-demand loading to improve performance, migrating stylesheets to Sass, and upgrading all the plug-ins. On the UX side, he’ll be implementing a new skin for the app and rethinking and improving core workflows and page layouts.

Mohit Bajoria

Mohit Bajoria is a second year Bachelor’s of Technology in Computer Science student at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University. He aspires to be an entrepreneur that utilizes the awesome world of internet and AI to create a futuristic system. Mohit has gained exposure to web development and open source through his university-level contributions including contributions made to Pyhon-Pedia. Despite only a couple years experience with AngularJS and just beginning to learn Java, Mohit impressed us with the overall quality of his contributions and his level of enthusiasm in taking on numerous tasks during the evaluation period. He also demonstrated his ability to collaborate effectively in an open source community, selflessly always making himself available to answer other’s question.

Mohit’s foundation as a web developer and his willingness to learn new languages and frameworks made him an ideal candidate for our browser-based offline access project. Browser-based offline support at times of intermittent connectivity has been a request of the community since the earliest days of the Mifos Initiative. Mohit will be leverage the offline capabilities of HTML5 to make our Community App accessible offline for the most critical procedures. This project will help us reach the last mile to those institutions working in rural areas that could benefit from our software but aren’t fully connected. Mohit will be working under mentorship of Gaurav Saini with Pranjal as his backup.

Adhyan Srivastava

Adhyan is a 3rd year computer engineering student at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, India. Solving real world problems fascinates him and there’s no greater feeling he gets than building products that people love to use. Mifos is the perfect project for him as he is passionate about changing the lives of people on a large scale. This has driven him to immerse himself in different platforms and web-based technologies to become a well-rounded developer. Adhyan has experience in JavaScript frameworks like Knockout and AngularJS as well as optimizing web pages for smooth running under any conditions. He has also done extensive code review as a reviewer at Udacity and developed Android apps through a scholarship from Google and Tata trusts.

Adhyan’s discipline across multiple front-end languages and his ability to get quickly up to speed on the Mifos/Fineract back-end made him a nice fit for our Actionable Notifications and Status Alerts. For the longest time, our platform has needed to be more activity-driven and Adhyan will enable that extending the APIs in the platform to generate notification and alerts based on events and activities that have occurred. These notifications will be queued up and can be delivered to staff or clients via the Community App or mobile apps to be acted upon. Adhyan will be working directly under the mentorship of Pranjal with backup mentorship from Gaurav.

Vishwajeet Srivastava

Vishwajeet Srivastava is a third year Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science student at the LNM Institute of Information Technology in Jaipur, India. Vishwajeet is an avid tech enthusiast who wants to develop products, specifically mobile applications, that can help millions of people in their day to day life. He’s been developing on Java for more than 2 years and focusing on building Android applications for the past year. He’s been an active contributor to a number of open source projects including FOSSASIA, OpenMRS, and KDE. He’s already worked on more than a dozen Android projects focusing on medical records, file transfers, university admissions counselling, and a social network for cricket fans We’re lucky to have Vishwajeet as an intern as his varied experiences, his strong design sense, and his passion for our social mission will make him a great intern.

Vishwajeet will be building out the first Android client banking app for the community leveraging the new self-service APIs. The design and mockups that Vishwajeet has worked on look beautiful thus far. Partners and Financial Institutions will have a clean and simple yet powerful app which provides a personalized user experience for the client to view and transact with their own accounts from the palm of their hand. They’ll be able to log in and authenticate themselves, view their accounts and transaction history, make repayments or deposits and initiate transfers between their accounts and other members. This app lays the foundation for the future of mobile financial services for our clients and is a critical contribution. Vishwajeet will by guided by Ishan Khanna, GSOC alum, as his primary mentor and Swapnil as his backup mentor.

Rajan Maurya

Rajan is a 3rd year student of B.Tech Information Technology and Mathematical Innovations at Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi. He’s been developing on Android for two years and has built extensive knowledge of the latest libraries, frameworks, and APIs. He was selected by Tata Trust and Google India as a recipient of the Udacity Android Developer Nanodegree Program scholarship. His portfolio of work includes building solutions for bulk SMS, political blogs, and cultural festivals. Rajan is a both a consumer of and contributor to open source having worked on the Apache Taverna Android app.  

Rajan will be taking the recently refactored and redesigned Android Field Operations App from Version 2.0 to Version 3.0. In the evaluation period, Rajan impressed us with his proficiency and expertise in Android, contributing 5 pull requests and providing his insight on the architecture. The main scope of the project is to implement application-wide offline content availability, optimize the workflows and user experience, and implement new functionalities like the collection sheet. Apart from this, Rajan will be continuing the refactoring of the app , reorganizing it to follow a MVP (model view presenter) architecture and implementing better code coverage of the app. Rajan will be working under the mentorship of Ishan Khanna and Satya Narayaan.

Daniel Carlson

Daniel is currently in his third year of Computer Engineering studies at the Faculty of Engineering and Technology, University of Buea Southwest Region of Cameroon. Daniel has experience with JavaScript, MySQL, and Java – his work with the Mifos community as an intern at Skylabase in Cameroon has been his first foray into open source software development and his prepared him well for this role. He’s worked on both the platform as well as a self-service mobile app so has a good working knowledge of the Fineract APIs.

As an African user of mobile money, Daniel has firsthand knowledge of how mobile money works and the transformative impact it can have on the unbanked and helping to eliminate poverty. Daniel will be focusing on integrating the Fineract platform with the mobile money APis for Orange Money and MTN Mobile Money but will be making the integration module generic enough such that other mobile money APIs from other regions can be plugged in. This integration will also financial institutions to seamlessly integrate mobile money for repayments, savings deposits, and transfers to other clients  as well as providing a client-facing interface for clients to do the same. Daniel will be working under the close mentorship of Antony Omeri and Ayuk Etta.

Nikhil Pawar

Nikhil is pursuing his Master’s in Software Engineering and Database Systems at the University of Texas at Arlington.  His love for coding began in second grade as he learned Logo and how to draw basic geometric figures. He has honed his skills as a Java developer while earning his Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering at the University of Mumbai in 2013 and through his experience in the financial services sector and beyond. As a certified investment banking IT professional, Nikhil worked for nearly two and a half years as a Product Analyst at Goldensource, an enterprise data management company. There he worked with large clients such as Deutsche Bank, Charles Schwab, and the Australian Stock Exchange.

Despite getting this hands-on banking and financial services experience, this wasn’t challenging enough for Nikhil and he wanted to be working on solving real world problems that are hindering society’s progress. In his spare time, he’s combined his passion for social change with his interest in open source by building solutions for citizen-led transparency and reporting of government corruption as well as the Hassle Free Toll Naka project to enable real-time payment and tracking highway tolls via mobile phone.

Nikhil’s unquenchable thirst for a challenge and his passion for a mission made him the right candidate for a complex project like the credit bureau integration. Nikhil will be focusing on credit bureau integration in India with the goal of making the framework generic to support any credit bureau integration. Nikhil’s Risk Calibration Module will provide out of the box functionality to report credit histories from Mifos into the local credit bureau and the automatic fetching of client credit history from the credit bureau. This project will lay the foundation for a full risk calibration module enabling credit risking against eligibility criteria as well as evolving this into a full-fledged open source credit bureau housing all the information captured in Mifos. Nikhil will be guided by Nayan Ambali as his primary mentor with backup support from Ashok Auty and James Dailey.