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 January, we're showcasing Jakub Sławiński who recently joined the Mifos community and his been fixing some critical bugs for our customer, Al Majmoua in Beirut, Lebanon.

Jakub Sławiński - Gdynia, Poland

Brief Bio (in the words of Jakub): I have a Master of Science in Informatics (Best Student of the Year) from University of Gdańsk, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics. I participated twice in the Google Summer of Code (2006 and 2007), where I worked on the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) with the help of mentors from Internet2. After graduation I worked at the ADVA Optical Networking, where I was a Java Developer and some kind of a Quality Assurance person. After two years, I decided that I should try my own business. I have since founded a small software outsourcing company, named SolDevelo, with a friend. My responsibilities include keeping an eye on the technological aspects of the development.

I always hack something during my free time. I created Active Port Forwarder, actively participated in development of one of the polish multi user dungeon (MUD) games and did some contributions to a few open source projects. However, I spend most of my free time on Mifos recently.

Relevant Skills/OS Experience: Java, Python, Linux, Networking (tunneling, firewalls/NACS bypassing), Software Quality

Discovering Mifos: I heard, that Mifos won the Seventh Annual Duke's Choice Awards in the “Java Technology for the Open Source Community” category. I made some investigation about the project and decided that I should give it a try.

Jakub's Impact:

Contributions Made to Date: As soon as Jakub arrived to the Mifos community, he immediately started providing great value. In a mere three weeks he's fixed more than 10 bugs - many of these have been fixes directly supporting our customer, Al Majmoua, on scalabilty to business logic to missing functionality. Not only has Jakub fixed these bugs with great speed, he's done it with great quality - writing superb code that has helped him to become a trusted committer to the Mifos trunk codebase.

Current Projects: Jakub is still working on the Al Majmoua Bugs and Enhancements project. In a meantime he's thinking about how to improve integration/acceptance tests running time. In the future he would like to work on some scalability issues.

What’s Rewarding about Working on Mifos:

"Satisfaction. Mifos is a big project and even small fixes can improve a lot of things. Moreover, every code change can have a significant impact on someone's life."

Advice for others in the Mifos Community:

"I'm too short in the Mifos project to give advice. However, I can tell you, that “mvn clean install” is one of my best friends."

Fun Facts about Jakub:

Favorite Food: Polish food named “kartoflak” (some sort of the potato cake).

Favorite Open Source Project: Without any doubts – Mifos.

If Jakub could travel to one place in the world, it would be: I would like to see Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest man-made structure ever built.

Interesting fact about Jakub: My rex rabbit is cuddling with my feet whenever I work on Mifos at home.

Please visit Jakub's LinkedIn profile and his company's website, SolDevelo to learn more about him.