Meet the 2023 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns
Our 2023 intern programs are well underway and our interns are making great progress. Google Summer of Code is now in its 18th year and Mifos has the privilege of participating for the 8th time independently and 11th year overall. Once again we were blessed with the selection of 10 interns through Google Summer of Code. However we had such a high-quality number of applicants yet a limited number of slots to select them for GSOC that we have also offered an additional 4 internships separately through our inaugural Mifos Summer of Code. So give a big welcome to all 14 of our interns who will be contributing this summer and to all of their mentors who have been guiding them on their journeys. We will be sending regular updates to the mailing list on progress and hosting mid-term and end of program showcases to keep the community informed of their work.
While our primary aim for Summer of Code is to build the next generation of open source contributors who will become the future maintainers, committers, and builders across our ecosystem, the projects this year will be quite impactful for the community with valuable enhancements to our existing projects as well as new exploratory work. Between Google Summer of Code and Mifos Summer of Code, we’ll have five interns working on our mobile apps, 2 interns working on the web front-end, 2 working on security and penetration testing, 2 on the Fineract platform or DevOps, and 3 AI-related projects.
On the front-end, Pushpendra Kumar will be enhancing the new Web App to consume the auto-generated typescript client to be more maintainable and synchronized with Fineract releases while Radha Thakare will explore the next generation of our web UI by building out a POC of a modular UI framework containing micro-front-ends.
All of our mobile apps will be getting some attention with Pratyush Singh and Abhishek Gururani working across Mifos Mobile our mobile banking app to refine its architecture, upgrade its libraries, improve the security of its connection to the Fineract back-end and extend its consumption of the mobile UI library and Android SDK. The mobile wallet will be getting similar treatment from Rachit Gupta with upgrading of dependencies, streamlining of the UI with the mobile UI library and genericizing the use cases it supports for a mobile wallet that represents that majority of global wallet use cases. Aditya Gupta will be enhancing the Android Client for field officers to further consume more of the Android SDK and complete its migration from Java to Kotlin. Lakhwinder will be splitting his time between the mobile UI library but also completing our open banking fintech app and extending it to integrate with the Mojaloop PISP APIs for third party fintech innovation.
On the back-end Fineract platform, Abhinav will be leveraging his experience in converting monolithic apps to microservices architectures by enabling greater Fineract modularity by extending the customer module layer designed by Aleks Vidakovic across more packages in Fineract. On the DevOps front, Elijah Okello, will be helping to demonstrate the power of Mifos, Mojaloop and Payment Hub EE by providing an easily deployable package along with demonstrate storyboards and use cases to showcase the power of IIPS powered by DPGs. Both Kerlyn Manyi and Yash Sancheti have extensive experience with cyber security and penetration testing and will be putting Fineract as well as the Mifos web and mobile apps through rigorous security, penetration testing, and static analysis under the mentorship of Godfrey Kutumela. Meghna Bajoria, with support from Jeremy Engelbrecht, will be resurrecting our Mifos Chatbot for Fineract to take advantage of the latest advances in AI and LLM. As part of Mifos Summer of Code, both Deepthi M and A Patel as medium-duration projects will be working our Vision PPI app to make the app itself functional and refine the cloud vision analytics for image processing for PPI scorecards.
Mobile Apps – Mifos X
Pratyush Singh – India
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Abhishek Gurarani – India
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Rachit Gupta – USA
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Mifos X Web Apps
Pushpendra Kumar – India
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Radha Thakare – India
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Fineract Platform, Security & DevOps
Abhinav Sinha – USA
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Elijah Okello – Uganda
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Meghna Bajoria -USA
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Kerlyn Manyi – Cameroon
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Yash Sancheti – India
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Mifos Summer of Code Interns
Deepthi Mavillapally- India
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A Patel – India
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Aditya Gupta – India
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Lakhwinder Singh Sarao – India
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Abhinav Sinha
Abhinav is an experienced software engineer currently on a career break pursuing a graduate degree in Computer Science at Indiana University. He’s passionate about improving himself as a software engineer, and is excited to get back into real-world software projects this summer with Mifos. Having successfully completed GSoC with the Apache Software Foundation during GSoC 2022, Abhinav is ready for another Summer of Code this time with Mifos. Capitalizing on his experience with the Java and Spring framework, Abhinav’s project aims to modularize Fineract by creating smaller, independent Java libraries that can be used be used by developers. He’ll be working with Aleks Vidakovic, Annurudha Premalal, and Sanyam Goel as his mentor.
Abhishek Gururani
Abhishek is a final year engineering student, doing bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from GEHU, Dehradun, India. Abhishek has dedicated himself to Android Development, successfully building and contributing to a vast array of Android projects. Through this experience, he has become proficient in the Android Ecosystem, Kotlin programming language, Firebase, REST APIs, and other modern technology stacks used for developing, shipping, and maintaining Android Applications. Abhishek has already raised issues and offered solutions in a variety of areas throughout our platform including functionality shortcomings of some Fineract APIs. While working with us for this Summer of Code, Abhishek’s goals are to, replace self-service Fineract APIs with a more secure API layer, develop complete support for customer support/chat via RocketChat, and provide integration with an external payment system (Mojaloop, mPesa) via our Payment Hub EE. Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi will be guiding him on his GSOC journey.
Elijah Okello
Elijah is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering from Makerere University in Uganda. His ultimate goal is to make a great positive impact on the world through contributing to impactful projects. He has a passion for Backend and DevOps Engineering and hopes to grow into this field as he gains experience. Leveraging his existing knowledge of Java, MySQL, and Android, Elijah’s project during Google Summer of Code will be to create a deployable package for Mifos/Fineract, Payment Hub EE, and Mojaloop. During the project, he intends to develop a toolkit that will allow developers to easily deploy a payment stack consisting of Fineract and Mojaloop and Payment Hub EE. This will allow for easy testing by potential adopters and act as a proof of concept for what is possible with a connection of Mojaloop and Fineract via Payment Hub EE. Tom Daly was the brainchild of this project and will be mentoring Elijah along with support from Avik Ganguly.
Yash Sancheti
Yash is currently studying at the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida in pursuit of a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering. He is an open-source enthusiast with a keen interest in development and security. Yash has worked previously as a Security Researcher at Validoku and has worked as a Data Structures & Algorithms Problem Creator at iMochaWorks. Yash is well versed in Web Development tools including Javascript, ReactJS, HTML and CSS, and is fluent in Firebase and Django. Our project interests him because it, “has a clear objective, expected outcomes, and a well-established codebase, which makes it an excellent opportunity to apply security testing techniques and learn from experienced mentors”. Yash’s focus in the Summer of Code is going to be conducting security research of the Mifos X and Fineract open source projects and identifying and repairing specific security vulnerabilities that will be
found. His goals for the Summer are to repair vulnerabilities in the platform, create continuous integration tools to prevent the introduction of new vulnerabilities, and conduct regular security awareness training. Godfrey Kutumela has provided his leadership presence and security expertise to guide Yash.
Kerlyn Manyi
Kerlyn is a postgraduate student studying Network Security and Distributed Systems at the University of Buea, Cameroon. Kerlyn has more than 4 years of experience with core banking applications
and has a growing interest for financial inclusion. She has experience as a technical support specialist providing core banking solutions tomicro financial institutions, and fintechs. Using her experience, she intends to develop a detailed understanding of the Mifos Core banking application from the user perspective as well as the developer perspective. Kerlyn has demoed, trained and provided solutions to several MFIs making use of the Mifos
application already. Her mission this Summer is to perform a vulnerability assessment and penetration testing engagement on the Mifos X web application and the Apache Fineract APIs to identify vulnerabilities which can be exploited by malicious hackers and help provide patches for these known vulnerabilities. She too will be working under the mentorship of Godfrey as well.
Meghna Bajoria
Meghna is currently pursuing her Masters in Artificial Intelligence at San Jose State University, CA, USA. She have 4 years of experience with Java and 2 years of experience in Spring Boot, Maven, and Gradle architecture. She has a strong background in software development and is familiar with the technologies
involved in this project, like Spring, Maven and Gradle framework, Java and databases like SQL, MongoDB, and MariaDb. With her experience in building secure and scalable systems that integrate with third-party APIs and platforms, Meghna initially applied to integrate Mifos with MOSIP and eSignet. Based on availability of mentors and her skillset, we shifted her focus to be the next version of our Mifos chatbot for Fineract – revamping its design and architecture and taking advantage AI and NLP models for best performance and functionality. Jeremy Engelbrecht along with Param Mirani will her primary mentors.
Pratiyush Singh
Pratiyush is currently a pre-final year student pursuing Information Science and Engineering at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering. Self-taught as an Android developer, open source projects have played an integral role in his growth too date as through a mix of personal and academic projects as well as open source contributions he has honed his low-level Android skills and begun the transition into a full-stack mobile developer. His primary aim is to master Android SDK and multi-threading along with specializing in UI/UX design and enterprise app development while seeking out leadership roles. Pratiyush quickly became proficient on the Mifos Mobile stack, submitting dozens of pull requests during the bonding period and aligning himself deeply with our mission of making a significant difference in the world by providing financial inclusion to people who would otherwise be excluded from the formal financial system. Throughout the summer, he’ll be focused on the next evolution of Mifos Mobile under the mentorship of Ahmad Jawid Muhammadi, migrating from MVP to MVVM-Clean architecture, migration of dependencies like from Dagger to Hilt, integration with external payment systems through Payment Hub EE, and securing the connection of the app to the Fineract back-end.
Pushpendra Kumar
Currently, Pushpendra is a pre-final year student studying Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Mandi. Pushpendra believes he is the right man for this project because over the past year, he has been actively contributing to a web app project and become comfortable with its codebase. By working on side projects and actively contributing to the web app repository, his grasp of Angular has improved, making it a valuable skill. His project would involve work on the redesigning of customer and account dashboard pages, refactoring the web app to consume typescript clients, enhancing the look and feel of the app, and implementing a third party library for proper internationalization. His goals are to optimize the design of key flows, improve app localization, add in better context-sensitive help, improve dashboards and visualizations, and refactor the web app to consume a TypeScript client for better maintainability. Leading Pushpendra on his project will be Ramveer Rajpoot, Bharath Gowda, Jose Alberto Hernandez
Rachit Gupta
Rachit is a sophomore at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, majoring in Computer Science with an intended minor in Linguistics. He is deeply familiar with the Mifos community as a former Google Code-In grand prize winner. He is deeply passionate about deeply passionate about exploring the intersection between people and technology and devising ways to make their interaction more seamless and efficient. During his time with us this Summer, Rachit will be working on functional enhancements to Mifos mobile wallet. He wants Mifos Pay to be a feature-rich reference wallet app which can demonstrate the capabilities of Mifos. He will work to integrate the lastest version of Payment Hub EE, integrating Mifos’ robust notifications framework thereby empowering us to provide our users with instantaneous notifications about the status of their transactions, aligning our mobile wallet with the Open Wallet Foundation Framework, and implementing a new design library to provide a seamless and visually appealing user experience in Mifos Pay.
Radha Thakare
Radah is a Fourth Year Bachelor of Technology student, pursuing Instrumentation and Control Engineering from Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune. She has three years of experience in development as a software developer thanks to her employment as a web developer. Radha has experience with front-end development, server-side programming, database design, deployment, and other facets of web development. She is familiar with our Mifos X web app codebase, and proficient with tools like Gatsby, Strapi, Graphql, Angular, React, and Node Js. Using her existing knowledge, and leveraging the help of her mentors, Radha will be assisting Pushpendra on some of the enhancemetns to the web app including implementing a third party library for proper internationalization and redesigning customer and account dashboard pages but her primary focus will be the next generation of our Web UI providing a modular UI framework with pluggable micro-frontends and other components to enable a wide variety of web applications to be built on top of Fineract.
Lakhwinder Singh Sarao
Lakhwinder recently switched career paths to aspire to excel as a Product Design Engineer at a leading product-based company. He is passionate about developing high-quality, user-friendly, and visually appealing apps that help organizations achieve their objectives and cater to user needs. He is committed to continuous learning as well as making long-term contributions to Mifos’ projects. As. a Mifos Summer of Code intern, Lakhwinder will be focused on a couple projects. First, he will extend and evolve the existing UI library for Mifos’ customer-facing mobile apps. A primary focus of this project is the implementation of new UI designs, the development of shared components based on common screens and workflows, and the development of a design system that is consistent across all apps. Secondly he will also be working under the guidance of Rajan Maurya and Karim Jindani to extend our stand-alone 3rd party fintech app to integrate with and consume the Mojaloop 3PPI (Third Party Payment Initiation) APIs for PISP (Payment Initiation Service Provider) use cases. Key in this will be the centralized consent mechanism, enabling fintechs to build scalable solutions like the Google Pay wallet in India.
Aditya Gupta
Aditya is a pre final year student pursuing Electronics and Communication Engineering at Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering. Aditya is a driven and dedicated Android developer who is committed to continuously improving his skills and knowledge in this field. He is excited about contributing to the open-source community, working with a diverse team of like-minded professionals, and taking on leadership roles that will enable him to make a significant impact in the industry. Aditya has more than one year of active experience with Android Application Development and is excited to bring his knowledge to Mifos. For Mifos Summer of Code, Aditya will be working under the mentorship of Avinash Vijayvargiya to extend our Android Client, migrating it to Kotlin, upgrading key dependencies, and consuming more deeplying the Fineract SDK.
Deepthi Mavillapally
Deepthi is a final year student pursuing a Bachelor’s of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering at Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar, Punjab as well as a passionate AI/DL intern from Myelin Foundry. With a burning desire to make a difference in the world, she is hoping to continue her journey by pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, after which she will aim to become a senior AI engineer or architect. Our project resonates with Deepthi’s personal values and aspirations, and she is eager to commit herself fully to this endeavor. Deepthi will work during the Summer coding period on helping us expand the capabilities of the Mifos application and improve its performance by incorporating new ideas and features. This project focuses on enhancing user engagement by adding new features to the application. The primary goal is to provide users with additional functionality that makes the application more user-friendly and intuitive. She’ll be working with mentors including Param Mirani, Paras Dhama, Harsh Vardhan.
