GSoC ’14: A mid-term experience

Working with strangers spread all over the world can be a double-edged sword. You’ll face the “Time Zone Pain”, barriers in communication, and cultural pitfalls. On the other hand you’ll meet like minded geeks that share the same passion, coding for good – making the world a better place.

The Mifos community offered me the possibility to mentor a project for this years Google Summer of Code. It took me one light-second to agree. I love to share my experience and knowledge with others and I was lucky to find my counterpart with Rishabh. He is a 3rd year undergraduate student from Jammu in India.

During the last 6 weeks he is like a sponge absorbing everything, advancing his knowledge on a daily basis and increasing his coding skills like I never expected. We communicate at least once a day and we start to become friends. We not only talk about our project, we talk about our families, circumstances in life and even our plans for the weekend.

We started with weekly code reviews right from the beginning and I try to push him carefully in the right direction (what ever right means). With every new step we take he dives into software engineering a bit more and it’s fun to see how this changes his way of thinking.

He becomes more self assured with every line of code he writes, understanding the need to be focused and solve an issue without over-engineering it. Retrofitting isn’t a bad thing, it’s a tool to question yourself again and again.

I’m thankful to be able to mentor for Mifos and I’m very pleased that I found a like minded geek who gives me the possibility to grow myself. Thanks to the community and

Thank you Rishabh, stay the way you are.