Meet the 2019 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns
Google Summer of Code
2019 is well underway. We are now just nearing the end of Google Summer of Code but we still would like to properly introduce you to this year’s class of interns – GSOC is now in its 15th year and Mifos has the honor of participating for the sixth time independently and eighth year overall. Once again this is our biggest year to date with a total of 14 interns participating in GSOC directly through the Mifos Initiative. In this post we’re also going to introduce you to two GSOC interns that are being mentored through the Apache Software Foundation as well as two Outreachy interns sponsored by DIAL and the Outreachy General Fund working on documentation projects.
We have six interns working on mobile apps, three interns working on web apps, six interns working on new modules or the back-end for Fineract, one intern working on Fineract CN, and two Outreachy interns working on migrating our mailing list to Discourse and converting our user manual to a Gitbook. Stay tuned for some upcoming webinars in which our interns will be showcasing their work to our community and Part 2 of this blog post giving a personal look into each of interns.
For our suite of Mifos Mobile Apps on Fineract and Fineract CN, we have six students continuing to extend them. Moksh Mahajan, under the mentorship of Tarun Mudgal, will be extending our Android Field Operations App to Version 6.0. Prashant Khandelwal is working Mifos Mobile 4.0, our mobile banking app, Shivansh Tiwari is working on Version of our Mobile Wallet, Saksham Handu, under the mentorship of Rajan Maurya, is working on Version 3.0 of Fineract CN Mobile while Abhijit Ramesh is working on Version 2.0 of Mifos Mobile CN. Lastly Manish Kumar is contributing to FiinWallet – a hybrid mobile wallet/banking app contributed by Fintecheando.
On the front-end, both Jivjyot Singh and Abhay Chawla are working completing the rewrite of the Mifos X web app into Angular 7 while Cajetan Rodrigues is working on Version 3.0 of the Online Banking app.
On the back-end for Fineract, we’re looking to wrap up some eagerly awaited projects and release some new Mifos X innovation, Sidhant Gupta is using the recently created Payment Hub to integrate with the GSMA mobile money API. Apporva MK is experimenting with some bleeding edge technology by building out a tool to collect the PPI by only taking images and using the Computer Vision APIs and machine learning to detect objects in those imagesk. Anshul Singth is refining the Mifos chatbot and helping to make it production-ready – Likewise, Supreeth S Karan, is continuing our machine learning project development a scorecard from credit risk assessment. Last but not least, Dylan Robson is hardening and strengthening Fineract and Mifos X by fixing some long outstanding bugs and feature request from our backlog.
Under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation, on Fineract CN, Ebenezer Graham, is continuing his contributions working to remove Category X dependencies. Kang Brader is updating and making production-ready our Swagger APIs.
Participating in Outreachy with the support of DIAL, we have two interns from Cameroon working on documentation and collaborative projects – Massabe Lydian Kengne is converting our user manual to Gitbook format and Kerlyn Manyi is migrating our old Mifos mailing lists and Google Groups to a highly collaborative Discourse forum.
Mobile Apps – Mifos X (Fineract)
| Prashant Khandelwal
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Shivansh Tiwari – India
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Moksh Mohajan – India
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Manish Kumar – India
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Mobile Apps – Fineract CN
| Abhijit Ramesh- India
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Saksham Handu – India
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Mifos X Web Apps
| Abhay Chawla – India
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Jivjyot Singh – India
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Cajetan Rodrigues – India
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Fineract & Mifos X Modules
| Sidhant Gupta –
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Dylan Robson – USA
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Apoorva M K – India
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Anshul Singh – India
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Supreeth S Karan
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Apache Software Foundation GSOC Interns
| Kang Brader – Cameroon
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Ebenezer Graham – Mauritius
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Outreachy Interns
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Kerlyn Manyi – Cameroon
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Massable Lydiane Kengne – Cameroon
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Saksham Handu
Saksham is a 4th year undergraduate pursuing Bachelors of Technology in CSE from VIT University, Chennai, India. g successfuil He’s passionate about user experience and strives to build easy to use products without compromising the final functionality. Having successfully completed his Mifos Mobile 3.0 project last year and continued his active involvement in the community as a GCI mentor, we were happy to have Saksham apply again this time focusing on our Fineract CN Mobile 3.0 project – he has continued to refine his Java and Spring framework skills so will be ready to improve the architecture of our staff-facing Android client for Fineract CN along with integrating it wit with the payment hub and building out new features. He will work under the guidance of Rajan Maurya, who designed and built the initial Fineract CN Mobile app.
Shivansh Tiwari
Shivansh is in the third year of his Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology program at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad. Shivansh has had a deep interest in technology since childhood and is most driven by Android development and Machine Learning. Shivansh has strong experience in Android, MySQL, and Java as well as a history of contributing to a number of different open source projects. He was exceptionally active during the evaluation period, opening more than 50 issues and submitting nearly 30 pull requests across the Mifos Mobile and Mifos Mobile Wallet projects. Shivansh originally applied for the Mifos Mobile 4.0 project but we thought his skillset was a perfect fit for the next version of our mobile wallet so selected him for that project. Working under the mentorship of Naman Dwivedi, Shivansh will be integrating the mobile wallet with two Mojaloop payment workflows, integrating with mobile money via USSD and the Hover SDK, enhancements to the user experience, integration with our forthcoming API gateway, as well as other wallet features driven by community requirements.
Moksh Mahajan
Moksh is a 3rd year B. Tech undergraduate in CSE at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Katra, India. Moksh aims to be come a successful mobile application development and long term open source contributor and is also interested in learning more about Blockchain technology. Moksh had a strong application including a range of practical and theoretical experience working with Android and many of the external libraries and APIs our projects leverage. He’s been active contributor to multiple open source projects for the past year and submitted more than 15 pull requests to the various Mifos mobile projects during the bonding period. Moksh is working on Version 6.0 of the Mifos Android Client for field officers. Under the guidance of former GSOC intern, Tarun Mudgal, as his mentor, Moksh is working on adding in support for authentication via fingerprints, a UI for viewing and completing tasks, user-driven improvements and extending integration testing.
Manish Kumar
Manish is in his second year of studies pursuing his B Tech in CSE at Aryabhatta Knowledge University, Patna, India. Manish began his programming career learning Python completely ohn is own and began his Android development through a a Google India Challenge Scholarship. Apart from his academic experience, Manish has also interned for TheTweaks, a social platform in India, getting his first experience in open source there. While Manish originally applied to work on Android field client, we selected him to contribute to the new codebase made available by Fintecheando, FiinWallet, a hybrid mobile banking/wallet app developed on the Ionic 3 framework using typescript. He’ll be mentored by Karina and Victor from Fintecheando.
Prashant Khandelwal
Prashant is a 3rd year student pursuing his Bachelor of Engineering(B.E) in Computer Science and Master of Sciences(M.Sc.) in Mathematics at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. Prashant submitted a very through application outlining plans for his project and has more than three year’s experience with Java and Android including contributions to open source projects. He was active in the community submitting more than 15 pull requests. Working with Rajan and Annamika as his mentors, Prashant will improve the Mifos Mobile app to version 4.0 by adding support for customer chat via RocketChat, integration with external payment systems via the payment hub, full support for viewing reports, improved skinnability and notifications, and extension of the integration testing coverage.
Abhijit Ramesh
Abhijit is only a freshman pursuing his Bachelor of Technology degree with a major in Computer Science and Engineering at the Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, Kollam, Kerala, India. Ultimately, he aims to complete a Masters in Computer Science and enjoys contributing to open source and doing social work such as awareness camps and organizing technical workshops. Despite his early stage in academia, Abhijit already has 3+ years of Java/Android development experience and contributions across a number of different Android development projects. His thorough application and strong history of contribution to Mifos over more than six months, making 19 pull requests made him a great candidate to work on Version 3.0 of our Fineract CN mobile app – our mobile field operations app for our new architecture. Under the guidance of Rajan and Abhilash, he’ll be adding new features and UI enhancements, introducing Kotlin, improving the offline sync, and allow for high quality photos to be taken and compressed.
Jivjyot Singh
Jivjyot is currently in his final year pursuing his Bachelors of Technology in Computer Science from Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, New Delhi, Delhi, India. His career goal is to become a full stack web developer and be the best version of himself by constantly learning from his mistakes. Although Mifos is his first experience with an open source project, he’s done a number of internships which provided him experience with AngularJS, Java, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL. We were impressed with Jivjyot’s detailed and comprehensive application as well as all of his transparent and thorough involvement with the community. He contribute more than 8 pull requests to the community app and web app which demonstrated his strong grasp of Angular. He is picking up where Abhay and Anwesh started and is bringing to completely the web app rewrite to Angular 7 under the mentorship of Gaurav, Kelvin, and Pranjal.
Abhay Chawla
Abhay is currently in his fourth year of studies pursuing Bachelor’s of Technology in Computer Science from Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, New Delhi, Delhi, India. He strives to become a full stack web developer, yearning to keep learning and exploring new technologies everyday. Abhay successfully completed an internship with Mifos for GSOC last year and continued his contributions post-GSOC in guiding other contributors and serving as a Google Code-In mentor. Just as we did last year, Abhay was flexible in switching his project at the start of GSOC. Originally, Abhay had applied to work on building out a self-guided configuration wizard for Mifos X but given the priority of releasing the new web app and the work remaining, we had him focus there once again. Abhay is working under the mentorship of Pranjal and Gaurav.
Cajetan Rodrigues
Cajetan is our third front-end developer we’re working with for GSOC this year. He attends the Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering, Mumbai University in the field of Computer Engineering. Cajetan’s professional goal to use his knowledge as a web developer to create an impact by making meaningful and powerful contributions that would benefit millions aligns perfectly with our initiative. He possesses more than 4 years experience at a practical and academic level across wide variety of languages, receiving multiple certifications, helping to lead and win hackathons, numerous internship positions, and contributions to open source projects. Cajetan applied to multiple projects within the Mifos Initiative for GSOC, all with great depth and attention to detail and a deep passion for our mission along with contributions to our web app repository. For the 2019 GSOC, he is working on our Online Banking App 3.0 under the mentorship of previous GSOC intern, Ankit Ohja. He will be integrating the notifications framework, improving the architecture, adding chat support, and more.
Apoorva M K
Apoorva is in her second year of studies pursuing her B. Tech in Information Technology at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka – Surathkal, India. Apoorva was drawn to Mifos by our social mission which aligned with her long-term objectives to use technology to help under-represented segments of society. Apart from her exceptionally thorough application, Apoorva had a strong body of interactions with the community and an impressive amount of experience in with Android and Machine Learning throughout her classes and beyond. Apoorva is a working on a very frontier and bleeding edge project thought up by Nayan Ambali to use machine learning like Google’s Computer Vision to create a photo-based PPI collection tool. So rather than manually input the answers to the ten question PPI scorecard, photos of the household and their belonging could simply be taken and uploaded and using the Computer Vision tool determine the answers to the PPI scorecards. The Computer Vision PPI tool project is an ambitious one, designing and building the Android application from scratch and training the necessary ML models. She’ll be workin under the leadership of Nayan, Ishan, and Rahul.
Anshul Singh
Anshul is a second-year B Tech student at Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India and aims to complete his MS in machine learning upon graduation. Despite only being in his second year, Anshul had a good amount of experience with Spring, Java and MySQL – this coupled with his sincere passion in machine learning and his experience with virtual assistants made him a great candidate to extend the work of our previous intern Dingfan in building out the Mifos chatbot 2.0. Working under the leadership of Aleks and Raul, Anshul will be adding support for additional messaging app integration, adding proper authentication, and improving the NLP for the chatbot.
Dylan Robson
Dylan is a junior in the Computer Science program along with a math minor at the University of Utah Honors college in the United States. The Honors college is “a place for motivated, engaged students to make a difference and impact the world” and Dylan truly exemplified this in his application. Dylan is highly interested in the ethical practices of Computer Science such as privacy and big data ethics, along with the foundational principles of open source software and will likely do grad school before ultimately becoming a software product manager and lifelong open source contributor. Dylan followed Ishan’s tips on delivering a solid GSOC application and provided an exceptionally thorough application that showcased the vast range of academic and professional experience that Dylan had including a strong base in all the languages the Mifos stack is built on, winning the 2016 Congressional App Challenge and a handful of internships, working on complex functionality like the Android Camera2 API. Although Dylan applied for one of our mobile app projects, we ultimately selected him to harden and strengthen the Mifos X and Apache Fineract platforms by fixing issues in our backlog due to how articulate his application was and the thorough amount of Java experience he demonstrated in his application and interview. He’ll be working under the mentorship of Courage Angeh and Vishwas Babu.
Supreeth S Karan
Supreeth is in his second year of his B Tech and Master of Science in Electronics and Communication Engineering byResearch at IIIT Hyderabad, India. Supreeth expressed a deep interest in our social mission and had good familiarity with the languages Mifos is built on as well as experience through a number of academic projects although he’s new to open source. His application for the Machine Learning Scorecard for Credit Risk assessment was very thorough and we selected Supreeth to work under the mentorship of Lalit to improve the existing scoring model, and implementing new screes and UI based on on rest APIs for the module.
Sidhant Gupta
Sidhant is a third-year student pursuing his Bachelors of Technology in CSE at Amrita School of Engineering, Kerala, India. He is deeply passionate about social change and even intends to pursue an internship in microfinance during his final year of study. Sidhant possessed a good range of skills and experience across Java and Javascript along with contributions to multiple open source projects including WikiToLearn and Manticore. While Sidhant originally applied for the Machine Learning Scorecard Credit Risk assessment tool, we ultimately chose him to work on our project to integrate the GSMA mobile money API with the payment hub as we felt he possessed the skillset and level of personal initiative to complete this project under the mentorship of Avik Ganguly, Rahul Goel, and Steve Conrad.
Kang Brader
Kang Breder Mbulle is a third year Telecommunications Engineering student at Faculty of Engineering and Technology, University of Buea, Cameroon. She has good working knowledge of Java and just recently started learning the Spring framework. For her GSOC internship with the Apache Software Foundation, she is working under the mentorship of Sanyam Goel to refine, update, and make production ready the Swagger API work on Fineract that Sanyam previously completed.
Ebenezer Graham
Ebenezer is now in his final year of studies pursuing his Bachelor’s of Science in Computing at the African Leadership University in Mauritius. He is returning for his second GSOC internships through Apache Software Foundation. Having built up a strong body of knowledge on Fineract CN last summer while working on the Email and SMS campaigns module, he was ideally suited to take up the remaining work on removing Category X dependencies from Fineract CN including completing the migration to PostgreSQL and replacing Hibernate.
Massabe Lydian Kengne
Massabe Lydian Kengne is attending the University of Buea in Cameroon and for her Outreachy internship is preparing the migration of our user manual from a Confluence wiki to a Gitbook format along with improving the layout of the manual Itself. This migration will allow a more user-friendly and more maintainable user manual. She is being mentored by Courage Angeh.
Kerlyn Manyi
Kerlyn is attending the University of Buea in Cameroon. Under the mentorship of Ruphine Kengne, she is working on migrating the Mifos mailing lists and Google Groups over to a Discoiurse forum which will provide a higher degree of collaboration and broader forum for conversation for the Mifos community.
