Meet the 2013 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns

Google Summer of Code is one of the most exciting times for an open source project and community. It’s a chance to inject new energy into a project and help build the next generation of coders and tech entrepreneurs that are ready to contribute to HFOSS.

Anuruddha Premalal is a final year undergraduate majoring in the field of Electronic and Telecommunication engineering from University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka.  Anuruddha has a great deal of experience developing applications at both the hardware and software level using Java.  Through his internship at Einsights, a startup in Singapore and his participation in the MIT AITI summer program he’s acquired strong hands-on experience developing web applications with Spring MVC, Hibernate, MongoDB and jQuery and mobile applications with Android, USSD, and SMS.

In the 5 weeks that Anuruddha has been a part of our community, he’s demonstrated this prowess across these programming language and his passion for building something from the ground up and making it a huge success. Having already nearly finished his original project of server-side pagination, he’ll be taking on multi-tenant caching and additional back-end platform-level tasks that we’ll throw at him. We have paired Anuruddha with Gurpreet Luthra from ThoughtWorks’ Humanitarian Software Program as his mentor. Gurpreet is a diligent and disciplined open source veteran that I’m certain will challenge and further enhance the strengths of Anuruddha throughout the summer.

Yanna Wu, hailing from Shanghai, China, will be beginning her Master’s in Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA this fall. She completed her undergraduate studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and spent the past year as a professional mobile software engineer.  Yanna brings to us a strong financial background because she actually spent her first two years pursuing a career in finance before switching over to software engineering. Despite this late start,  throughout her internships and studies she’s gained experience working with Java, JSP, Spring, MySQL, and Android. She’s demonstrated her strong proficiency in these languages by the multiple code contributions she submitted over the past several weeks.

We are quite fortunate for Yanna’s shift in career path; it’s given her in-depth domain knowledge that is rare to find in a Google Summer of Code intern. She in fact has experience working with the XBRL taxonomy which made her a perfect candidate for our project to integrate with the XBRL taxonomy that the MIX Market is aiming to standardize the financial inclusion sector on. Having helped financial institutes in China customize and visualize their XBRL taxonomy as part of her final undergraduate project, she’s ready to swoop right in to help MFIs automate their reporting through a common data source.  Yanna will be working under the leadership of Kojo Gambrah who’s now based in Sngapore and is eager to share his expert knowledge on business intelligence and reporting with Yanna.  When Yanna’s not coding, she’s passionate about gaming, design, and music, dreaming about one day making it big and performing on Broadway.

Andreas Weigel is entering his final year of undergraduate studies at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.  He started coding in 2005 when he realize how fun it was to help people, simplify processes, and build new functionalities by developing applications. Andreas worked for two years at FZI – The Research Centedr for Information Technology in Karlsruhe and another two years at Synyx. There he’s gained experience in Java, MySQL, Spring, and Hibernate. You can see some his work he’s done on the back-end of a community event platform – https://events.kavantgar.de/em. In his personal time, he’s also developed proficiency in front-end development with JS, JQuery, HTML and CSS. This has been evident in the contributions he’s made on four different tickets so far.

Avik Ganguly is a third year student pursuing his Bachelor’s of Engineering in Information Science & Engineering in Bangalore. Avik had “his first taste of enterprise beans” while interning at Tata CMC. He also built the front and back-end of a car-rental portal while working at 5Axis now known as Mobsketch. Along with his studies and participation in coding competitions, he’s gained experience in Java, Android, Javascript, PHP, and MySQL. Throughout the GSoC application period, Avik has overwhelmed us with his enthusiasm and participation and eagerness to learn during community meetings as well as the strong effort he put in fixing a number of issues, including some lovely beautification of the Mifos X login page.

Having seen firsthand the poverty across India, Avik was drawn to the project by how impressed he was with Grameen Koota’s organized way of fighting poverty. He is psyched for the chance to be part of having a direct impact on the welfare of society. We know we needed a strong mentor to pair Avik with to harness his energy and commitment to the project; with that in mind we’ve paired with him Udai Gupta, a seasoned veteran of GSoC as both a student and a mentor. Udai will be leading Avik on the creation of an initial data import tool. This tool will make it substantially easier for small MFIs to go live on Mifos X through a set of pre-formatted Excel templates to import their initial data. Avik likes to work through the night so be prepared to see lots of him at all hours on IRC.