Meet the 2021 Google Summer of Code Interns for Apache Fineract

After the long and difficult year that 2020 provided us with, we are excited to announce some positive news as we are kicking off our 2021 Google Summer of Code! Our community is grateful to be participating in this exceptional 18 year old program for the 10th year. This year, we will have a class of 5 extraordinary interns participating in GSOC as a sub-organization under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation. The Mifos Initiative looks forward to participating in GSOC directly in 2022. Although our class is smaller than previous years, the talent and knowledge they provide is unmatched. These 5 GSOC interns will be focusing their time and efforts on Fineract and Fineract CN.

This year is a little bit different since we have a smaller group of interns and a new streamlined version of GSOC that Google is testing out, but don’t let that fool you on the amount of quality work they can get done. Working with a smaller intern class will allow us to work closer with the interns, and provide them with a greater deal of attention and feedback. That being said, we are beyond excited to see the improvements they will be making this summer that we can incorporate within our own work here at the Mifos Initiative. This year, we will have two interns working on our mobile apps for Fineract CN – Fineract CN Mobile and Mobile Wallet for Fineract CN, one intern working on our machine learning credit scorecard, one intern working on the Android SDK for Fineract 1.x, and one intern working on the Fineract backlog and collateral management module.

First, we will have 2 steller interns working to improve different aspects of some of the mobile apps. Varun Jain will be working on functional enhancements to the Fineract CN Mobile app. Specifics on the project include integrating the Payment Hub to enable the disbursement, making use of the GSMA Mobile Money API, adding a task management feature to the app, implementing UI and functionality for creating new accounts and tellers and displaying those detail, improving the offline functionality of the application via Couchbase database support, and improving the GIS features in the app such as location tracking. Varun will be supported in his efforts by his mentors, Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi and Rajan Maurya. Our other mobile app intern for Fineract CN, Kinar Sharma, will be building out a version of the mobile wallet that natively connects to Fineract CN. With support from his mobile development mentors, Devansh Aggarwal, Garvit Agarwal, and Shivansh Tiwari, he’ll be working with the Fintecheando team who will be adding additional APIs in Fineract CN to provide secure self-service operations that can be directly consumed by the new mobile wallet app.

Our next intern, Danish Jamal, will be working on the Android SDK and Fineract Client Project under the mentorship of  Chinmay Kulkarni and Shashank Priyadarshi. The project focuses on simplifying and automating the post processes of SDK generation, such as adding moustache templates to configure the code and add the missing utils and service files automatically. Some plans Danish has for the project include updating the client SDK release using Fineract 1.5.0, improving documentation of the SDK, and then integrating the SDK in the Mifos android-client application.

For our Machine Learning and Credit Scorecard project, we will have our impressive intern, Yemdjih Nasser, focusing his time and efforts improving the credit score system from the previous years. During  the summer, Nasser will be refactoring and patching work from previous years, productionizing the scorecard module, integrating the scorecard in Fineract 1.x/Mifos, implementing credit risk scoring with H20.ai, and then documenting the scorecard service. Nasser will be helped this summer by a team of mentors including Lalit Mohan, Aaashish Sawhney, Abhijit Ramesh, Jeremy Engelbrecht and Rahul Goel. 

Our last phenomenal intern, Benura Abeywardena, will be working on a number of tasks related to making Fineract more performant and robust by tackling issues in the Fineract backlog.  He has already been churning out fixes for a number of functionalities across the loan, client and accounting module but will dedicated most of his project around the long-awaited collateral management module. Benura will be working under the mentorship of Bharath Gowda and Chaitanya Nuthalapati on the functional side and Manthan Surkar and Sanyam Goel on technical side.

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. 

Projects

Varun Jain

Varun is a a second-year undergraduate student in the Dept. Of Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He is a self-taught and passionate developer that is always ready to learn. Varun has corporate experience in the field of Mobile Application development for almost 2 years, with experience in Native App development(Android with Java/Kotlin as well as iOS with Swift), Cross-platform Development using Flutter, Front-end technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and basic-level knowledge of Backend Development using NodeJS and MongoDB. Varun is thrilled to be working on the Fineract CN Mobile project under the mentorship of Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi. Some new improvements Varun hopes to implement under this project include integrating the Payment Hub to enable the disbursement making use of Mobile Money API, adding task management features into the app, and improving the offline functionality.

Benura Abeywardena 

Benura is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and is currently a 3rd year student at the University of Colombo, School of Computing, taking classes in computer science. Benura comes in with great experience, as he did an internship with WSO2 Lanka(Pvt.)Ltd where he learned product API management and knative concepts (Eventing & Serving).  For the summer, Benura will be working on issue/feature requests that are in the backlog. His main goal is to improve the robustness of Mifos X and Apache Fineract by focusing on the functionalities of Client’s Saving Account, Client’s Share Account, Loans Component, Clients’ Component, and Accounting components. Benura started coding in 2017, and ever since then, he has had a dream of becoming a good software engineer. He started with Java and then moved to several other languages such as c, c++, python, scala after he got into the university.  He has been extremely active in the Mifos and Fineract communities over the past year, solidifying his well-earned position as a GSOC intern. Outside of coding, Benura is a big Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fan, and hopes to one day sit down with him for an Italian meal. 

Kinar Sharma

Kinar is currently a junior at LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur, studying Computer and Communication Engineering. This will be Kinar’s first year participating in Google Summer of Code and is hoping to advance his skills in Android Development, Kotlin, Java, Git, and Rest API. This summer, Kinar  was originally going to be working on Fineract CN Mobile but will be taking on a high-priority project in designing, architecting a new version of the mobile wallet framework and app that natively consumes Fineract CN APIs. After college, Kinar hopes to become a full-stack developer since he loves to develop interesting applications and learning about different aspects of technology. Like coding, Kinar also has a love for Rajasthani traditional food. He strongly suggests that if you have never tried Rajasthani thali, that you go try it and enjoy it for yourself!

Yemdjih Kaze Nasser

Nasser is a fourth-year Computer Engineering major, studying at the University of Buea in Cameroon. When Nasser got to college, he started to code due to his passion for artificial intelligence and its various applications in the medical and financial sectors of society. For the summer, Nasser will be working to improve the machine learning scorecard for credit risk assessment. The project will be focusing on refactoring previous work, filling missing parts, and scaling up the solution to take it to a production ready state where it is integrated with Fineract and made available for external use. After university, Nasser aspires to become an AI/ML engineer specializing in deep learning. A fun fact about Nasser is that he one day hopes to sit down with Elon Musk and have a nice sushi meal.

  

Danish Jamal 

Danish is currently pursuing a Btech in computer science with a specialization in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Galgotias University. Danish has preformed quite well at Galgotias, holding 8.55 cgpa in his last semester exams! For the past two and a half years, Danish has been pursuing android development as his primary domain, making him savvy with the various technologies that are required to build a successful app. For GSOC, Danish will work on an Android SDK project, and hopes to provide an easy to use SDK for Mifos applications to easily integrate with Fineract API and making the codebase more scalable, reusable and maintainable. This is not the first time Danish has contributed to open source as he also helped with the agora-android open source project. Outside of coding, if Danish could travel to anywhere in the world, he would go to Iceland where he could witness The Northern Lights!