Join us in officially welcoming our class of interns for 2024. We have the pleasure of working with 18 interns across Google Summer of Code and Code for GovTech. This year Google of Summer of Code is celebrating its 20th year and marks our 12th year of participation overall and 9th year directly as the Mifos Initiative with eleven interns chosen. We are participating for the first time in the Code for GovTech Dedicated Mentoring Program which is now entering its third year being led by Samagra Governance. We have been able to select seven interns through this program which aims to cultivate a community of coders that can build and contribute to global Digital Public Goods.  We are blessed to once again be working with the cream of the crop of burgeoning open source contributors as we had to be highly selective in choosing our eleven interns for GSOC amongst more than sixty applicants and our seven C4GT interns from dozens of applicants as well. This year we have 16 contributors from India and for the first time, two contributors from Egypt. 

While our ultimate aim is build the next generation of open source contributors and lay the bedrock and foundation for the future of our community with new maintainers and committers, as usual, the projects proposed by our mentors and applied to by our interns will add immense value across all of our codebases and projects.

Google Summer of Code

For Google Summer of Code, we will have four interns working on mobile development, three interns on web and front-end development, three interns on artificial intelligence and machine learning related projects, and one on the Apache Fineract platform.

On the mobile front, our interns will be primarily focused on cross-cutting changes across the various applications to upgrade core dependencies, migrate to Jetpack Compose, evolve towards multimodal architectures, enable cross-platform development through Kotlin Multiplatform and consume common layers like our UI library, SDK, and soon-to-be-developed self-service middleware layer. In addition we will refine the overall user experience and deepen payment integration support especially for use cases like G2P. Rajan Maurya leads our team of mentors including Avinash Vijayvargiya, Chirag Gupta who will be guiding our mobile interns. Pratyush Singh and Aditya Kumdale will be heading up efforts to improve our mobile wallet, specifically for G2P use cases, Avneet Singh will be championing efforts around our Mifos Mobile mobile banking app and Aditya Gupta working on our Android Client and SDK.

On the web development front our team of mentors include Jose Alberto Hernandez, Bharath Gowda, and previous interns, Ramveer Singh and Radha Thakare. Pushpendra Singh and Vikash Prem Sharma will be focused on and designing and implementing a micro frontend proof of concept to the improve the scalability, maintainability and ease of developing new user experiences while Omar Nabile will lead efforts to continue enhancing our web app for greater performance and a better user experience.

This year we have a deeper focus on AI with multiple projects including Parth Kaushal continuing to refine and enhance the accuracy of our machine learning credit scorecard module under the mentorship of Victor Romero and Nasser, Akshat Sharma working on a brand new bank statement analysis module for creditworthiness led by Jeremy Engelbrecht, and Shubham Pal under the leadership of David Higgins and Chaitanya Nuthalapati exploring the power of generative AI to create a chatbot and self-support mechanism to help users and implementers better access our documentation and lessons learned over all the years.  Last but not least, Zeyad Nasef, will be helping to improve the maintainability and overall code quality of Fineract by  introducing type-safety at the REST API layer under the mentorship of Aleks Vidakovic and Sanyam and Rahul Goel. 

Code for GovTech

For Code for GovTech, we have a diverse array of projects all related to our emerging digital public goods to fuel digital public infrastructure that advances the adoption of instant inclusive payment systems and enables effective last-mile G2P distribution. Tom Daly leads our team of mentors including Elijah Okello, Courage Angeh, Nelly Kiboi, and Victor Romero stewarding several projects related to DevOps and deployability of our DPGs. These projects include Abhinav Kumar working on our next iteration of Mojafos, DPI as a Service, streamlining the deployment of Mifos/Fineract, Payment Hub EE and Mojaloop.  Yash Sharma will be working on Implementing a Kubernetes Operator for Mifos X/Fineract to improve its deployment and Devesh Pandey will be working on a performance testing tool for Mifos Payment Hub EE.

On the mobile front, we have two projects: enhancements to our mobile wallet led by Akash Meruva under the mentorship of Rajan Maurya and Avinaash Vijayvargiya and Palak Meshra working on the next version of our PISP/3PPI/Open Banking Fintech App being mentored by Karim Jindani along with Azeem Yaseen and Tifail Gadit.  

Ratnesh Mishra will be spearheading efforts around evolving our Mojaloop Connector in PH-EE to work with Mojaloop vNext. He is mentored by Elijah Okello alongside Tom Daly, Nelly Kiboi, Victor Romero and Courage Angeh. Dipan Dhali rounds out our C4GT projects focusing on the front-end with continued enhancements to our Operations Web app for Payment Hub EE under the stewardship of Alberto Hernandez, Karim Jindani, Azeem Yaseen and Tufail Gadit.

Thank you once again to Google for selecting us to participate in Summer of Code and for Samagra Governance for its leadership of the C4GT program. Thank you to all the mentors for all their guidance so far and continuing to lead our interns throughout the summer. 

Please join us at our Town Hall Meeting this Friday June 21 at 1530 GMT via Zoom where we will formally introduce all our interns.

 

Mobile Apps – Mifos X 

Pratyush Singh – India Mobile Wallet Enhancements Mentors:  Rajan Maurya, Chirag Gupta

Aditya Kumdale – India  Mobile Wallet Enhancements Mentors: Rajan Maurya, Chirag Gupta

Avneet Singh – India Mifos Mobile Enhancements  Mentors: Rajan Maurya, Avinash Vijayvargiya,

Aditya Gupta – India Android Client & SDK Enhancements Mentors: Avinash Vijayvargiya, Rajan Maurya

 

Mifos X Web Apps

Pushpendra Kumar – India  Micro Frontends Proof of Concept Mentors: Jose Alberto Hernandez, Radha Thakare

Omar Nabil – Egypt Web App Enhancements Mentors: Bharath Gowda, Ramveer Rajpoot

Vikash Prem Sharma – India –  Micro Frontends Proof of Concept Mentors: Jose Alberto Hernandez, Radha Thakare

AI & Machine Learning

Parth Kaushal – India Machine Learning Credit Scorecard 6.0 Mentors: Victor Romero, Yemdjih Kaze Nasser

Shubham Pal – India  Generative AI for Community Support Mentors: David Higgins, Chaitanya Nuthalapati, Nayan Ambali

Akshat Sharma – India Bank Statement Analysis Mentors: Bharath Gowda, Jose Alberto Hernandez Aleks Vidakovic

Fineract Platform, Security & DevOps 

Zeyad Nasef – Egypt Type Safety of REST API  Mentors: Aleks Vidakovic,  Sanyam Goel, Rahul Goel

Google Summer of Code

Akshat Sharma

Akshat is part of our intern class working on artificial intelligence projects as part of AI for All strategy. Under the mentorship of Jeremy Engelbrecht he will be conducting a medium-sized project to build an open source module for bank statement analysis to evaluate creditworthiness of applicants. Akshat is currently in his pre-final year at Graphic Era University in Dehradun, India and has accumulated a wealth of experience in artificial intelligence through several research projects and internships he has completed as well as the attendance of a number of conferences and seminars exploring the potential of Artificial Intelligence. Coming from humble beginnings and rising through merit and scholarship, Akshat has achieved a great deal in the field to date, and uses his passion for finance and research to shape and meld artificial intelligence that is accessible to anyone on the internet and advances the financial industry. Through his project, Akshat will be using the LightGBM and XGBoost algorithms to capture the financial behavior that is indicative of credit worthiness by preprocessing. bank statement data and extracting the relevant information such as income, spending habits, and balance variation Quoting Akshat, his proposed project stands as a beacon at the crossroads of finance and artificial intelligence, poised to redefine the landscape of credit assessment while championing user-centricity.

Parth Kaushal

 

Parth is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree in Computer Science, with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence (CSAI), from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-Delhi). Parth has been genuinely interested in the field of Artificial Intelligence and not just the current hype – he believe in its tremendous potential that has yet to be uncovered and wishes to work on maximizing this potential by pursuing higher studies in AI at a top foreign university. This fervor for AI and the deep skillset he already demonstrated in its disciplines were on firm display in Parth’s proposal and body of pull requests for the machine learning credit scorecard in its next iteration. Working under the mentorship of Victor Romero and Yemdjih Kaze Nasser, Parth will be evolving this module by improving the accuracy of the machine learning and statistical models by training them against the larger data set shared by Victor, deepening its integration into Fineract, and laying the foundation for fraud detection as well.

Shubham Pal

Shubham is a classmate of Parth’s, also pursuing a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree in Computer Science, with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence (CSAI), from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-Delhi), now in his third year. We chose Shubham for this medium-sized, bleeding edge project exploring the usage of generative AI to improve community support mechanisms for implementers and adopters of Mifos and Fineract. Shubham’s experience with machine learning across a number of different academic projects coupled with his creative thinking and his ability to adapt quickly convinced us that he was the right candidate to take on such an open-ended exploratory project. Shubham was motivated by our mission and eager to begin his open source journey which already includes experience with Java and MySQL. Under the leadership of David Higgins, Chaitanya Nuthalapati, and Nayan Ambali, Shubham will be developing a chatbot that helps users navigate through various sources of Mifos and Fineract documentation along with previous communications via Slack and mailing lists. Shubham will begin by collecting and preprocessing the various data sources, before choosing an AI and solution and fine-tuning and deploying the model using libraries like Hugging Face’s Transformers, TensorFlow, or PyTorch, and then integrating this into the user-facing channel (chatbot) providing the community with an AI-powered support system for Mifos/Fineract 

Zeyad Nasef

Zeyad Nesaf is one of our two interns from Egypt this year; he is a final year computer science student at Menoufia University in Egypt who was drawn to computer science by his fascination with how various components intertwine and function cohesively within a system. Zeyad’s enthusiasm to apply to Mifos and the tech industry in general stems from its potential to enact positive change in the world. Witnessing the tangible impact of code on people’s lives inspire him to tackle new challenges and continually expand his problem-solving abilities. Long-term Zeyad will likely explore a career in fintech and has already acquired valuable experience working as an intern at Fawry, the leading fintech platform in Egypt reaching more than 30 million users, where he worked on an end-to-end e-commerce project implementing seven REST APIs on a microservices architecture using Spring Boot, MySQL and Angular. This experience along with Zeyad’s deep knowledge and passion for Java and Sprint Boot tech stack made Zeyad a standout candidate to work on our much needed refactoring of the Fineract codebase to reduce boilerplate code and introduce type-safety at the rest API layer. A project like this is well-suited for Zeyad who loves to solve problems and fix bugs. During the evaluation period Zeyad’s knowledge of these Java fundamentals as well as his high level of activity and engagement with the community made him the right choice for this project.  Aleksandar Vidakovic and Sanyam & Rahul Goel will be his mentors, harnessing this passion and enthusiasm of Zeyad for this project. Zeyad’s project will be quite impactful reducing boilerplate code and complexity of the codebase, improving maintainability and the overall developer experience, and setting the groundwork for greater modularity in the future.  However he will be working in critical areas of the platform so we welcome additional mentors and committers to help in reviewing his pull requests and progress of his project.

Vikash Prem Sharma

Vikash Prem Sharma is one of three interns working front-end web development projects. Although he originally applied for our web app enhancements project, Vikash will have a primary focus on the micro frontends proof of concept project that Pushpendra is also working on. Vikash is a Pre-final Year B. Tech student, pursuing Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Information Technology Design and Manufacturing Kancheepuram ( IIITDM Chennai ). Vikash possessed a strong depth of experience in the various javascript framework align with good knowledge of Hibernate and Spring Security. He was deeply motivated by our mission of 3 Billion Maries and contributed nearly a dozen pull requests during the evaluation period. Through his application and pull requests, the strong grasp that Vikash had around the Angular framework led us to re-focus his project to contributing to building out a set of common micro frontends which can be used to create different end to end flows and applications beyond just that of the singular web app user experience. He will be guided by Radha Thakare and Jose Alberto Hernandez as his mentors.

 

 

 

Omar Nabil

Omar Nabil Abosalem, our second intern this year from Egypt, is in his final year of computer science studies at Tanta University. His career aims are to become a full-stack open source contributor specializing in Angular and .NET technologies. He just started his open source journey recently by contributing to the Kharagpur Winter of Code but has worked on an umber of Angular projects focused on e-commerce, movies, and notes. Omar was active in contributing to the web app during the evaluation period and had a through application where he articulated his version for improving the standard Mifos UI for back office users. Under the mentorship of Ramveer Rajpoot and Bharath Gowda, Omar will be working on a number of enhancements including upgrade of the Angular version, improving translations support, finalizing the type-script client layer, improving Superset dashboard integration and revamping design of key pages like customer and account summary pages. 

Pratiyush Singh

Pushpendra Kumar

 

Pushpendra is another one of our returning interns. Since childhood, Pushpendra has had a keen interest in Computer Science. He is now a final year student studying Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Mandi and post-graduation will pursue reach in this field and plan to complete his Master’s Degree at a highly reputed university. Pushpendra’s continued involvement with Mifos furthers his ambition to help the poorer sections of society by providing them with better alternative banking platforms. Last year as part of Google Summer of Code, he successfully completed his project on enhancement to the web app. He stayed active throughout the duration of the year, continuing to contribute to the web app, fixing and bugs and improving usability while also mentoring other contributors. This summer with all of his knowledge on the web app, Pushpendra is leading efforts around our implementation of a micro frontends proof of concept extending upon last year’s efforts of Radha Thakare. This project would break down our Angular web app into small, independent, and deployable micro-applications with each being responsible for handling its own set of features. Through this we will enhance scalability, flexibility, and maintainability by reducing the complexity of the web application and promoting modularity. Pushpendra will begin by defining the approach and design of the architecture to follow, selecting the common screens and components, and identifying a use case to do an end to end implementation of a UI using these micro frontends.

 

Avneet Singh

Avneet is one of four interns this year working on mobile application development. He’s driven by using his software engineer expertise to advance the betterment of the world and drive a positive impact on society. The dynamic nature of this project along with this ability to effect positive change immediately drew Avneet to Mifos. His focus will be on the Mifos Mobile mobile banking app and will cover a wide range of technical improvements to the app to improve the developer experience, cross-platform development, performance and stability, and ongoing maintainability and extensibility of the app. Avneet will be initially completing the migration of the app from XML to Jetpack Compose and then integrating Compose Navigation to introduce more declarative and intuitive ways to define navigational paths and reduce boilerplate code. He will also be evolving the app to a feature-based multimodular architecture and enabling cross-platform development by supporting Kotlin Multi-Platform (KMP) including migrating shared preferences to datastore, introducing an umbrella module for iOS development, migrating from SQLite to SQLDelight, Retrofit to Ktor, and introducing a new dependency injection platform to support KMP. Apart from his academic experience at Graphic Era Hill University, Avneet has a lot of valuable practical experience including a year-long Android internship and 3 years developing Android apps including multi-modular apps for education and journalism. This strong practical experience along with the breadth of Kotlin and Android knowledge present in Avneet’s extremely thorough application and strong contribution via pull requests made him a shoe-in for an internship. He’s working under the mentorship of Rajan Maurya for this summer.

Pratyush Singh

 

Pratyush joins us one again as a Google Summer of Code intern – this year focusing on enhancements to the mobile wallet app. Last year, Pratyush successfully completed his internship working on Mifos Mobile and has spent the past 3 months leading up to GSOC contributing the mobile wallet. Pratyush is now a pre final year student pursuing Information Science and Engineering at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering. As he did last year, Pratyush impressed us with his deep knowledge of the fundamentals around Kotlin, Android, and Java, his proven track record in successfully completing his internship last year, and his continued involvement in the community around the mobile wallet app. As one of two interns working under the leadership of Rajan Maurya and Avinash Vjayvargiya on the mobile wallet app, Pratyush will be focused on a number of tasks. These improvements include integration with latest version of Payment Hub EE to support G2P transfers, peer to peer transfers and QR-code transactions, improving the notifications framework, incorporate of the Mifos UI design library and consumption of the Android SDK, migration of core dependencies, improving CI/CD pipelines and test coverage, enhancing the security framework, and exploring a proof of concept architecture for alignment with the Open Wallet Foundation.

 

Aditya Kumdale

Aditya is currently in his third year, pursuing his Bachelor’s degree with a Major in Computer Science from MIT ADT University, Pune. He sought out applying to Mifos because the project would allow him both to apply his learnings on a practical scale and the opportunity to work on a big project with real world impact. Through his application and pull requests to the community, Aditya demonstrated the necessary knowledge of Kotlin fundamentals that he had gained through his classwork, work on complaints app, and previous open source contributions through events like Hacktoberfest. Aditya will be one of two interns working on continuing to enhance our mobile wallet at a technical and functional level with the end result being a stable, native, well-documented, Multi-Platform Mifos Mobile-wallet application for both Android and IOS that the community can immediately use for mobile wallet demonstrates for use cases like G2P payments. Technical improvements will include the completion of migration from XML to Jetpack Compose, finalizing migration from Java to Kotlin, and moving from Jetpack Compose to Compose Multiplatform. At a functional and design level will be adapting new designs from our common UI library and integration with payment flows through Mifos Payment Hub EE to be able to demonstrate production readiness for use cases like G2P and social cash transfers. Aditya will be guided by Rajan Maury and Chirag Gupta.

 

Aditya Gupta

Aditya is another familiar face in our community as although he barely missed the cut for Google Summer of Code last year, he was chosen for Mifos Summer of Code and successfully completed an internship on the Android client. Aditya is now a final year student pursuing Electronics and Communication Engineering at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering. With two years of experience under his belt, Aditya now possesses extensive experience with have extensive experience with many Android architectural components such as clean architecture, MVVM, activities, fragments, support libraries, version control, Firebase, Node, MongoDB, Jetpack Compose, Realm, Datastore, and more. This year, Aditya will continue working under the mentorship of Rajan Maurya and Avinash Vjayvargiya on the Android Client again. He will be tackling the following enhancements: updating to latest dependencies including DBFlow to Realm or SQLDelight, moving from Shared Preferences to Datastore, Hil to Koin dependency injection, switching from rx Java to Coroutines and flows, upgrade of Gradle, and Paging3 for load more functionality. Aditya will also rewrite the network layer to consume the SDK using coroutines, migrate XML features to Jetpack Compose, implement multi-module MVVM, adding Kotlin Multiplatform support, writing appropriate unit tests, improving the CI/CD pipeline and updating documentation.

Code for GovTech

Abhinav Kumar

Abhinav is currently studying Computer Science at BMS college of engineering in Bangalore. He has experience across Python and Javascript as well as a lot of experience in DevOp’s tooling (Jenkins, CI/CD/Docker, Flash, Shell Scripting). Abhinav sees this project as a fantastic opportunity to use his skills and passion for creating meaningful impact. is excited to help simplify the deployment process of our projects and optimize resource consumption.  As Abhinav says “Mojafos represents more than just software, it’s a gateway to financial inclusion.  By optimizing its resources and enhancing its accessibility, I can contribute to breaking down barriers and making financial services more attainable for everyone”. This made Abhinav a perfect fit for developing Mojafos ahead of starting his final year of studies and indeed he has already shown a commitment to PR’s on this.  The Mojafos project is mentored by former GSOC 2023 intern Elijah Okello, along with Tom Daly, Nelly Kiboi, Victor Romero and Courage Angeh.

 

Dipan Dhali

Dipan is a 2nd year student in Electronics and Communications Engineering at Indian Institute of Information Technology, Jabalpur. He has a passion for technology and is eager to learn new skills.  This desire to continue boosting his development skills whilst making a meaningful impact though a project. He has a strong foundation in programming languages and experience in frontend web development.  This ability to understand and develop backend services along with Frontend web development means he is ideally matched to his project – Enhancements to PH-EE UI. This project is mentored by Alberto Hernandez, Karim Jindani, Azeem Yaseen and Tufail Gadit.

 

 

 

Yash Sharma 

Yash is studying Computer science and Engineering at Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies. Yash started by loading front end, then backend and cloud and now is learning DevOps he has a good grip of Kubernetes and is keen to enhance these further within the project. He was keen to apply for this project to continue focusing on Kubernetes.  Yash will be working on Implementing Kubernetes Operator for Mifos X/Fineract to improve deployment  The project is mentored by Victor Romero along with Tom Daly, Elijah Okello and Courage Angeh.

 

 

 

 

Palak Mishra

Palak recently graduated from Galgotias University with a B.Tech in Computer Science Engineering. She has had a passion for Java and JavaScript since her school days, but also has a diverse technical background that allows her to approach challenges with a solution-oriented mindset.  She is keen to broaden her development horizon by venturing beyond web development projects, and was drawn to Mifos projects as they are dynamic, impactful, and tackle real-world challenges.  Palak will be continuing the work undertaken by Lakhwinder last year on PISP enabling open-banking.  The Open Banking/PISP project will be mentored by Karim Jindani along with Azeem Yaseen and Tifail Gadit.

 

 

 

 

Akash Meruva

Akash is a student studying for B.Tech CSE in Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning at SRM University. He is an experienced Android developer having developed over 15 apps in the past 2 years. He was eager to become a member of the Mifos community due to his interest in contributing to open-source projects. Mifos offered him a unique opportunity to engage in impactful open-source projects and it was appealing to be collaborating with a diverse cohort of global developers.  With his App development experience he was a clear match to developing our Mobile Wallet for G2P payments.  Akash will be mentored by Rajan Maurya and Avinaash Vijayvargiya.

 

 

Devesh Pandey

Devesh is a student at National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, where he is studying B.Tech Mathematics and Computing. He has clear understanding of Java, Docker, Apache jMeter, Spring Boot, having experience of spring boot based projects. This combined with his understanding of Dockerisation makes him a good match to his project, the Mifos Performance Testing Tool. Devesh was highly motivated to apply for this project as it aligned with both his interests and technologies he knew.  Devesh says “The opportunity to contribute on a tool that will monitor and optimize the cost of deployment excites me”.  He is looking forward to the experience he will get from working on a large scale open source project.  Devesh will be mentored by Tom Daly alongside Nelly Kiboi, Victor Romero, Courage Angeh and Elijah Okello.

 

Ratnesh Mishra

 

Ratnesh is a 3rd year student at Dr A P J Abdul Kalam Technical University. He is a backend developer who loves all things Backend and Devops. He brings programming experience in Java, Spring Boot and Nodejs. He was passionate about working on a fintech project. Ratnesh says “ I always loved to explore open source projects but they always seem to be difficult to understand. When I was learning Spring Boot, the first thing I heard was that it’s popularly used in enterprise and banking applications. From that point, I always wanted to work on a fintech project. For me, this is my best opportunity when I can successfully accomplish my both dreams, i.e, being an open source contributor and to work on a fintech project.”  With his love of backend service and  passion to work on the project he was a clear choice to work on the PHEE Mojaloop Connector, ensuring it’s ready for Mojaloop V-next. He is mentored by Elijah Okello alongside Tom Daly, Nelly Kiboi, Victor Romero and Courage Angeh.