Meet the 2020 Google Summer of Code and Outreachy Interns

This past week we kicked off the 2020 Google Summer of Code. This year marks the 16th year for GSOC with Mifos participating for the 7th time independently and 9th year overall. As our stack of open source building blocks for financial services continues to grow, so does our class of interns – this year will be our largest class to date with 17 interns participating in GSOC through the Mifos Initiative along with three GSOC interns under the Apache Software Foundation working on Fineract and one Outreachy Intern for Mifos sponsored by DIAL to work on Apache Fineract. 

Working with an intern class of this size across all the projects and repositories between Mifos and Fineract will be a challenge that requires the effective participation of our community in helping to welcome these interns, provide feedback on their work, and to review and merge the contributions they are making. We are eager to incorporate the enhancements they’ll be making to our existing repositories and the new projects they will be starting but most importantly being able to pass the torch onto the next generation of our open source fintech force, who will become the future leaders of our community and fintech innovators blazing new trails. We will have eight interns working on our suite of mobile apps, five interns working on our web apps, four interns working on integration and new plugins/modules, and four interns working directly on Fineract 1.x. 

For our mobile apps, the primary focus areas will be integrating our customer-facing apps via Open Banking APIs and an API Gateway, enhancing functionality and user experience, deepening the integration with Payment Hub EE, along with rewriting apps into Kotlin to enable cross-platform development, and even abstracting out common code into an SDK and building a brand new app for third-party fintechs. Shashank Priyadarshi, will be working under the mentorship of Abhilash Gunasegaran and Saransh Sharma on our Android Client 7.0 while Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi will be working with support from Rajan Maurya on Fineract CN Mobile 4.0. Chinmay Kulkarni will also be working on our Android field operations apps by abstracting out common features into an SDK with support from Ishan Khanna. For our customer-facing apps, Shivangi Singh will be working on Mifos Mobile 5.0 under the mentorship of Sashank Mishra and Saksham Handu. Garvit Agarwal will be working on Mifos Mobile CN 3.0 with Abhijit Ramesh as his mentor. Ashwin Ramakrishnan will also be working on our customer-facing apps but converting them to Kotlin. Devansh Aggarwal will be working on our Mobile Wallet 4.0 with Shivansh Tiwari and Naman Dwivedi as his mentors. Ankur Sharma, a returning GSOC intern, will work on building brand new open banking fintech app with Naman, Rajan, and Istvan Molnar as his mentors. 

On the web front, we will aim to complete the rewrite of our web-app, build a more polished and streamlined reference UI for Fineract CN, enhance our online banking app, and build a configuration wizard and extend our Operations UI for Payment Hub EE. Two interns, Karan Takalkar and Muskan Khedia, working with Abhay Chawla and Jivjyot Singh, will be focused on completing the remaining 40% of our new web app in Angular and getting all the testing coverage in place to make sure it’s production-ready. Manish Kumar, another returning GSOC intern, will work under Ankit Ohja on our Online Banking App 4.0. Ashutosh Sharma will split his focus on two sub-projects, a self-guided configuration wizard on the new web-app with support from Bharath Gowda, and adding new screens and functionalities to the Operations UI for Payment Hub EE with support from Adam Saghy. Abhijeet Khangarot will be working on a brand new reference UI for Fineract CN focused on digital and challenger banks with support from Pranjal Goswami, Gaurav Saini, and Giorgio Zoppi. 

On integrations and additional modules for Fineract, we’ll continue to deepen our payments integration, explore more concepts in machine learning and build out more components for decisioning and origination. Subham Pramanik will be building out the Payment Hub EE connector for the GSMA Mobile Money API under the mentorship of Avik Ganguly and Rahul Goel. Finalizing our credit bureau integration module, will be Rahul Pawar, with mentors, Nikhil Pawar and Manoj VM, to guide him. Mehul Arora, will be completing our Machine Learning Credit Scorecards project under the guidance of Lalit Mohan. Yash Khare will be working with Nayan Ambali as his mentor on completing the Vision PPI project. 

We have a stellar class of GSOC interns from ASF and Outreachy working on some critical upgrades, enhancements, and testing improvements to Fineract 1.x to make core platform more stable and and production-ready to be a rock-solid upstream codebase for others to continue to innovate from.  Manthan Surkar will be tackling the expansive code refactoring across the platform along with completing Swagger API documentation and addressing issues in our backlog under the mentorship of long-time and returning mentor, Michael Vorburger. Yemdjih Kaze Nasser is surmounting the much-needed migration of our ORM from OpenJPA to Eclipselink with support from Awasum Yannick, Courage Angeh, and Sanyam Goel. Percy Ashu with the guidance of Awasum will be addressing vulnerability found in code scanning along with improving testing coverage of the platform. Natasha Narajan, part of the Outreachy program that we’re participating in with support from DIAL, is being mentored by Michael Vorburger and focusing on completing numerous tasks and issues from our backlog related to strengthening and hardening Fineract 1.x.

Read on for a brief professional intro for each intern and their project and stay tuned for our second round of posts introducing some fun facts about each intern. Feel free to find them on the lists or Gitter and welcome them to the community. Throughout the summer, we’ll have showcases of their work during the community meetings. 

Mobile Apps

Web Apps

Fineract Integrations & Modules

Apache Fineract 

Chinmay Kulkarni

Chinmay is in his final year of studies pursuing Bachelor of Technology, Computer Engineering at Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune, India. He has more than three year’s experience as an Android developer. Apart from technology, he is highly skilled at Rubik’s cube and a huge builder of communities, growing a telegram community for Android developers, his Robotics network and amassing a major following on LinkedIn. He has been active in our community since early in the year, contributing nearly 30 PRs.  For GSoC 2020, he was originally going to work on functional enhancements for the Android Field Operations App  7.0 but he will instead take on the valuable work of abstracting the common functionalities across our mobile apps into layers that will ultimately form an SDK that will speed up development for all our mobile developers moving forward.

Devansh Aggarwal 

Devansh is currently in his second year of studies pursuing his Bachelors in Technology at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. Except for Software development and open-source contributions, his interest lies in travelling the world and capturing the moments with his camera. He is originally from Uttar Pradesh, India and a fun fact about him is that he wants to sit down for lunch with Elon Musk and cherish the traditional Indian cuisine. Devansh has been active in the Mifos community since August 2019, impressing us with his thorough application and several dozen pull requests he made to our mobile apps. In the coming time, he is going to work on Mobile Wallet 4.0 and help make the wallet consume our Open Banking API layer along with deeper integration with external payment systems including Mojaloop, Hover, and mobile money API integration. He will also improve the overall user experience and develop tighter integration with our notifications framework and Rocketchat for customer support. 

Shashank  Priyadarshi

Shashank is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science and Engineering at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. He is someone who has always had a profound passion and fascination for areas requiring an analytical approach. For GSoC 2020, he will work on Android Field Operations App 6.0 whose sole purpose is to make field operations easier and effortless. He will build upon this mature app by extending support of Kotlin, improving offline availability, extending testing coverage, integrating with external systems via Payment Hub EE, tighter integration with our notifications framework, improved client data collection via forms, and enhanced GIS tracking features. 

Ankur Sharma

Ankur is a fourth-year Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Undergrad at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi and has been a part of the Mifos Community for 2 years now, graduating as a GSOC intern two years ago working on the Mobile Wallet 2.0, serving as a GCI mentor, and even attending the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Edinburgh representing the Mifos Initiative. Ankur originally applied to work on Mobile Wallet 4.0 but we’re going to have him focus on a brand new customer-facing app that will nicely complement our mobile wallet. The new reference Open Banking fintech app will be built as an SDK providing the common components to build a stand-alone app for third party fintechs such as authentication, account creation, displaying customer and account details and then implementing a few sample Open Banking use cases related to account information and payment initiation that will be a vital part of our lab environment to demonstrate third party fintech innovation through our Open Banking APIs. 

Shivangi Singh 

Shivangi is pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Amrita University, Amritapuri Campus, Kerala, India. She was introduced to programming when she was in 2nd grade, that very experience sparked a passion for code in her. Over the course of her internship with Mifos, she will work on Mifos Mobile 5.0 and help us improve the app. Like our other interns working on client-facing apps, Shivangi will be rewriting the app to consume our Open Banking APIs via the WS02 API gateway, supporting external payment integration via Payment Hub and hover, improving the overall user experience, upgrading core dependencies, and improving customer communications through deeper integrations with the notifications subsystem and support for Rocketchat. 

 

Ashwin Ramakrishnan

Ashwin is currently pursuing Bachelor of Technology at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. He got the inspiration to code from his mother! Ashwin will work on ‘Mifos Mobile CN 3.0’. While Ashin originally applied to work on the Mifos Mobile CN app, he’s going to split his focus across all of our customer-facing apps, Mifos Mobile, Mifos Mobile CN and the Mobile Wallet to rewrite into Kotlin so we can start to leverage its cross-platform capabilities providing native app experience in both Android and iOS.

Garvit Agarwal

Garvit is currently pursuing Bachelor of Technology at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. His interest in coding initiated in 5th grade when he was introduced to the programming language, Java. Garvit will work on ‘Mifos Mobile CN 3.0 – Mobile Banking App for Fineract CN’. This GSOC his primary aim would be to integrate the app with the Open Banking API layer built on top of the WS02 API Gateway, which provides a secure authentication and integration layer for first-party applications. His other areas of focus will include include better support for transactions via external payment systems, improving the workflow for sign-up and account creation, and implementing new UI designs that were developed during GCI.

 

Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi

Ahmad is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Programming at Ness Wadia College of Commerce, Pune, India. He has developed two Android Applications on Google Play called SpotlightDo and Ingot. One of them has more than 15000 downloads with 4.6 stars. For GSoC 2020, he will work on Fineract CN Mobile 4.0. He will be focused on making the app offline-first with Couchbase support, changing the retrofit models in Kotlin, providing integration with external payment systems via the Payment Hub, adding GIS features like location tracking, improving collection of client data via ODK forms, adding task management features and bulk collections, and translating the app into Persian and Turkish languages.

Muskan Khedia 

Muskan is in her third year of studies, pursuing Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science at College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar, India. Since joining the community in November of 2019, Muskan has impressed us with her leadership, initiative and strong experience in Angular and open source that she’s demonstrated in working on more than 8 different open source projects. She has even been a finalist for the 2020 Red Hat Women in Open Source Award. For GSOC 2020, she will continue implementing the remaining screens of our UI in the latest version of Angular as part of the Web App rewrite but will also implement extensive end to end testing for the app as well.

 

Karan Takalkar

Karan is currently in his second year of studies pursuing Bachelors in Computer Science at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. His interest lies in experimenting and exploring with various branches of physics and Computer Science. He wishes to use his skills to help society. He also likes Math and Geek Jokes. Karan has been an active part of the Mifos community for the past 3 months, making more than 10 feature contributions – he outlined a thorough and detailed approach for completing the re-write of the web app and even a detailed plan of how he’ll stay involved with the community GSOC. Karan will be working completing the re-write of the Web App into Angular 8 alongside Muskan. 

 

Manish Kumar

Manish is pursuing his Bachelor’s in Technology at Bakhtiyarpur College of Engineering, Patliputra, Bihar, India. Last year, he participated in GSOC for Mifos working on the FiinWallet. This year, he’ll be working on the fifth iteration of our Online Banking App, upgrading it dependencies to their latest versions, revamping the UI, communicating via the Open Banking APIs instead of the self-service APIs, integrated notifications and customer support, and strengthening the dashboards and visuals available. 

Ashutosh Sharma 

Ashutosh is pursuing Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science at Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, India. Apart from coding, he likes watching thriller web series, playing volleyball and learning new things. Ashutosh was one of the many strong candidates we received for the Mifos X Web App rewrite; with Karan and Muskan focused on the web-app rewrite, Ashutosh is going to be working on two separate projects – implementing a product tour/wizard to enable self-guided configuration of Mifos X for the new web app and implementing additional screens and functionalities for the Operations UI for Payment Hub EE which allows financial institutions to monitor the state of transactions flowing through real-time payment systems like Mojaloop. 

Abhijeet Khangarot

Abhijeet is pursueing his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kalyani, India. Apart from technology, he is an expert in Yoga and practices it in his daily routine. For GSoC 2020, Abhijeet also applied for the Web App rewrite project but we decided he’d be a great fit to work on a brand new codebase by designing and implementing a new reference UI for Fineract CN for the staff of digital and challenger banks. This new UI will address a few challenges by providing a polished and complete UI on top of Fineract CN that demonstrate some of the workflows and use cases digital banks focused on individual accounts that aren’t as readily evident from our primary Web UI focused on group and center-based institutions.

 

 

Yash Khare

Yash is pursuing his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Amrita University, Amritapuri Campus, Kerala, India. He is extremely passionate about coding and has been in this field since he was 11 years old. He has contributed to and mentored various open-source organizations through competitions like Google Code-in. In GSoC 2020, he will work on Computer Vision-Based PPI Tool Version 2.0. The aim is to increase the accuracy of the models for object detection, train more models using the Google Cloud Vision platform to recognize more objects, improve the current augmentation procedure to include more techniques and hence build a better dataset, integrate the AutoML API with the android client and improve the UI/UX of the app.

Rahul Pawar 

Rahul is pursuing his Master’s degree in Information Technology at Nagindas Khandwala College, Maharashtra, India. He has great memories from his college, where his faculty members helped him improve his soft skills as well as technical know-how. He believes that everything should be done with a quick pace and therefore, he is a multi-tasker. For the past year, he’s been actively involved in the community helping with the GSIM and LSIM features. He will be working on Phase 3 of our Credit Bureau integration for GSOC 2020 to provide a real-time integration with a credit bureau to push and push data in and out.

 

Mehul  Arora

Mehul is pursuing Bachelor of Technology, Information Technology at Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. He is an extremely passionate developer. He loves working on ML, thinking from the user’s perspective, system design, multithreading, and architecture. Mehul was one of our two very impressive candidates for the PPI Vision 2.0 project – he demonstrated an exceptional grasp of both machine learning and Android as well as a highly level of activity with more than a dozen contributions to the project. Seeing the high degree of experience in Machine Learning and his thirst for knowledge, we though he’d be a natural fit to complete the work around our project creating machine learning based credit scorecards. This is a much-needed project to help provide some fundamental credit scoring components in the open source platform and develop the community expertise in machine learning with access to the data across our widespread user base.

 

Subham Pramanik

Subham is in the final year of Bachelor of Technology, Information Technology at SRM University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu. He aspires to be a full stack developer and has already demonstrated his skills working across a number of different projects, languages, and domains. Apart from IT, he loves watching a lot of art movies. For GSoC 2020, Subham will work on completing the GSMA Mobile Money API connector for our Payment Hub EE to provide a reference implementation of how to integrate Mifos in real-time with mobile money APIs for repayments and disbursements occurring via mobile money both for initiating transactions from Fineract and receiving inbound mobile money transactions.  ‘

 

 

Manthan Surkar

Manthan is in his second year of his Bachelor of Technology, Information Technology, at Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad. His overarching goal since childhood is to make a substantial and lasting impact on society. Manthan impressed us with his active presence in the community since early this year, contributing more than 10 pull requests to Apache Fineract and actively engaging and supporting others on the list. His thorough application and breadth of experience across multiple open source projects and different languages along with a strong initiative and willingness to learn made him a great fit to focus on some much needed refactoring and hardening of the core Fineract 1.x platform. Under the mentorship of Michael Vorburger, Manthan has an ambitious project plan in front of him to implement and enforce checkstyle across the entire platform, rewriting any of the code that’s not in compliance, using prepared statements instead of string-concatenated SQL, completing our Swagger live API documentation, and addressing as many of the 51 critical P1 bugs as he can throughout the summer.

Yemdjih Kaze Nasser

Yemdjih Kaze Nasser is a third year Computer Engineering major at the University of Buea, Cameroon. Long term, he aspires to be an AI/robotics engineer focused on Deep Learning. Nasser has been a very active part of the Mifos and Fineract community since September of 2019, having made more than 10 contributions and even earning Apache Fineract committership. As part of his GSOC internship for 2020 under the Apache Software Foundation, he will be working on the critical migration of our ORM from OpenJPA to Eclipselink, Since having to migrate away from Hibernate to be compliant with Apache licenses, we’ve learned that Eclipselink is a much more suitable replacement in terms of reliability, maturity, familiarity, and performance.

Percy Ashu

Percy is also a third year Computer Engineering student at the University of Buea, Cameroon. Percy has been an active member of the Mifos and Fineract communities since November 2019, making a half dozen pull requests to the platform. Percy is going to be addressing some of the must-need tasks in stabilizing and hardening the codebase and improving code quality and test coverage across the platform. He’ll be focusing on running a number of code scanning and static analysis tools and fixing the issues found in addition to replacing Joda time with java.time, enabling and enforcing Google’s Error Prone, re-enabling PMD and enforcing it, extending test coverage to at least 50% and improve the execution time, as well as fixing issues arising from the Java 11 upgrade.

Natasha Natarajan 

Natasha is joining the Mifos community as an intern through Outreachy under the generous sponsorship of DIAL. Natasha brings to bear her work experience in data science and publishing along with her skills in building web applications with Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, and JavaScript. She aims to grow as a full stack developer as whe works under the mentorship of Michael Vorburger and Sanyam Goel to strengthen and harden Fineract 1.x by fixing numerous bugs and features in the current backlog.