Edward Cable

Google Code-In Grand Prize Trip

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I remember the day, around 2 weeks before the GCI was scheduled to start, when I told Edward Cable, “Ed! I have my last semester exams from 15th November to 15th December. So I won’t be able to apply in GCI as a mentor!”. However, by the end of the week, I had realised that the organisation had given me a lot. So, I changed my mind and decided to give it a try!

During the GCI period, it was common for students to ask for help, so I talked to them, and discussed with them about various things like git and Android, helping them resolve their issues.

Believe me when I say, I wasn’t aware of the trip to Google until late January. I came to know about it from a friend, and my reaction was all surprised. “What! Which trip? Where? Where was this mentioned?”

On 7th February, I got an email from my the head of my organisation, Edward Cable, stating that I had been selected for the Google Trip. The same was confirmed by Mary Radomile soon enough.

I was extremely excited to meet Stephanie Taylor, Mary Radomile and the Open Source team.

Dinner at Google San Francisco Office (Day 1)

Anubha, the mentor from an organization called Systers, and I started out day by meeting with Edward Cable, followed by a visit to the Facebook headquarters and the LinkedIn office, both being great experiences! We came back to Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, to meet the Google Open Source team.

Later that day, I met Stephanie Taylor, Helen Hu, Mary Radomile and Josh Simmons. I felt proud! Once we had all gathered in the hotel lobby and collected our badges, we went to the Google office. There, we met with Cat Allman, one of the core members of open source team. It was extremely great meeting each of them!

As if it wasn’t already great, all the students and mentors were given various goodies (T-shirts, stickers, notebooks and a jacket for mentors, an awesome backpack for the students). To top it all off, specially for a foodie like me, we got to dig into the awesome food at Google. We spent an hour, eating and talking to the other mentors I was with: Damini Satya, Milindu Sanoj Kumarage, Rostyslav Zatserkovnyi, Anubha Kushwaha, Ignacio Rodríguez, Sam Reed and Ben Ockmore. We interacted with various students present there, with their parents. It was a great experience, and a view of several cultures all at once. Read more

Alex Moses

Support the Mifos Initiative on AmazonSmile

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Are you looking for an easy way to contribute to the success of The Mifos Initiative? Do you use Amazon for your online shopping needs? If so, before you make a purchase check to see that you are using https://smile.amazon.com, and not https://www.amazon.com. Then, look under the search bar to confirm that you are supporting The Mifos Initiative. Simple as that!

Now, The AmazonSmile Foundation will donate .5% of your purchases to The Mifos Initiative. Although it may seem like a small donation, every penny counts and is much appreciated. Help Mifos help the unbanked!

If you are not currently supporting The Mifos Initiative through AmazonSmile, you can find us here.

AmazonSmile has raised $54,509,978.56 for charities as of May 2017. The Mifos Initiative, being a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is eligible to receive donations through this program. We are very thankful to announce that as of May 2017, The AmazonSmile Foundation has donated $91.04 to The Mifos Initiative. Thank you to all who have been supporting The Mifos Initiative!

If you don’t want to forget to use AmazonSmile, you can download these extensions.

Edward Cable

Fun Facts about our Google Summer of Code Interns

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Now that you know a bit more about our interns professionally and what they’re working on over the summer, let’s take a more a personal look at their lives with some fun facts about each one of them.

When and why did you start coding?


Courage: I started coding in my first year in the university, 2012. At that time we had a club called elite programming club, where I studied C programming daily and with each day I learnt something new. It was amazing to know what I could do just coding.

Naman: I started coding at the start of my college. Initially, I was mainly interested in fixing some of the bugs I encountered in CyanogenMod which I was using on my Android device and then slowly started building android apps.

Vladimir: I started coding in 2012 but it was mostly html and css, but really got interested software dev after taking Harvard’s CS50 online. I use to go to the cyber cafe with my mom around 2002, in those days most websites were not very interactive. Then in 2009 I signed up for a Facebook account and surprisingly it was very interactive. So I was curious to find out what made Facebook so interactive and this curiosity pushed me to learn code.

Gopala: My interest in coding particularly began when I was around 13 years old and found a multiplayer online game called ‘Roblox’. Roblox was a platform where the registered players could create their own game from scratch( using a programming language called Lua ) and where other players could play and rate it. I was really amazed by the quality of the games the players used to make considering the fact that many of them were just around ( 12 -15 ) years old. Since then I wanted to pursue programming as a career.

I actually started coding basic C++  when I was in 12th as it was part of our curriculum.

Raunak: I was exposed to playing games like Dave on PC since way back with Windows 98. That did pique my interest in these machines, to be able to achieve so many things through these machines. I actually started coding in 2008/9 making websites and scripts.

Kumaranath: It was in the year 2013,when I took my first software engineering and programming  lessons.I was intrigued to find out what and how we as engineers we would solve problems in real life and make an impact to the world.

Tarun: I started coding in senior secondary school (XI – XII standard). when I had CS as one of my subjects.

Dilpreet: First line of code I wrote was in LOGO where I wrote commands for writing A-Z in logo in 4th grade. Learnt basis of web development in 10th grade and after studying c++ in 11th and 12th grade I fell in love coding when I was introduced to Android Development during 2nd semester of my college.

Mohit: I was very much fascinated with the computers since my early years. I started a little bit of coding when i was in the 10th grade. It was so much exciting to see how u can automate the task from some lines of code. I started Coding because it was fun and all the stuff which can be made excites me a lot 😉

Mayank: I started coding in first year of Bachelor’s degree and  I came to know that Coding skills are required almost in every field irrespective of your Major. That was the time when I started my coding journey.

Thisura: I started coding form my school age. First I started coding with Dos, VisualBasic and then moved on to c#. Lately I learned java somewhere around 2010. I simply enjoy coding. I like to learn new technologies, concepts in computer science and coding is a part of that.

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