Meet the 2014 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns

It’s official. Coding for the 2014 Google Summer of Code has now begun. Once again we’re lucky to have a diverse and talented group of students interning with us this summer. This year we have seven interns from four different countries who will be working under the leadership of our mentors from six different countries.  They’ll be working on a wide spectrum of projects that range from the back-end platform to the front-end community app, on down to mobile apps used directly in the field. By the end of the summer, our community will benefit from a native Android app dedicated to making field staff more efficient, a mobile app for enabling Pay as you Go Solar Energy transactions, a vastly improved user experience for our community app, enhancements to our data migration tool, a batching API that will unlock performance improvements across the entire platform, as well as a powerful ad-hoc reporting tool and evolutions to the client impact portal to a production-ready release.

This year we’ve got a very young, talented class with some true characters and unique personalties. They are all very driven and passionate about our mission. Throughout the evaluation period, our interns demonstrated their enthusiasm and fervor for the project with a substantial flow of contributions coming in. Coupled with our mentors who are eager to shepherd in the next generation of Mifos contributors, I’m already certain we have an unforgettable and productive summer in store. We once again thank Google for accepting us in the program and are ready to rise to the task of giving a larger class of interns a successful entry into the world of HFOSS.

Activity has already begun to pick up – discussions are going back and forth on the mailing lists, wiki pages are popping up each day and code is moving upstream through the various GitHub repositories. Before our students get too busy :), join us in taking an in-depth look at each one of the interns. Please take the time to congratulate them on joining our community and wish them a fruitful summer.

	Diunuge Buddhika is a third year undergraduate majoring in the field of Computer and Science engineering at the University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka.  Diunuge has been developing applications using Java for four years including a strong understanding of Object Oriented Design and Design Patterns.  As a leading member of his department’s web development team, he’s gained a range of front and back-end experience with web-based technologies. Most recently Diunuge was a Trainee 3D Research Engineer at 3D Incorporated, Japan. These experiences have prepared Diunge well for the diversity of our community, and the fast pace of innovation in our platform.In the several weeks that Diunuge has been a part of our community, he’s demonstrated how quick of a learner he is, how committed he is to developing new skills, and how passionate he is about our mission. To match the energy level of Diunuge, we’ve paired him up with Nayan Ambali, a first time mentor from Conflux Technologies in India, who’s overflowing with advice and encouragement to help out new contributors. Diunuge will be extending the GSOC project that Avik Ganguly completed last year by fully integrating the Excel-based data import tool into the platform and extending it with support for chart of accounts, offices, product definition import, etc.
	Gaurav is an undergraduate student in his third year studying Computer Science at Punjabi University. Gaurav has an impressive range of front-end development skills including HTML and HTML5, CSS, Javascript, AngularJS, and Cordova. We were lucky to find a student with such a varied set of experiences already working with AngularJS, Cordova, and the Ionic Framework. Immediately we know Gaurav would be a great fit for working on our Mifos Community App. Gaurav sealed the deal when we say his dedication and activism during our bonding and evaluation periods.  He tackled one of the biggest and time-consuming tasks with his work on updating the Community App to Twitter Bootstrap 3.Originally Gaurav was going to be working on converting our AngularJS Community App into a cross-platform native mobile app with offline capabilities using Cordova and the Iconic framework. However, we still had a number of high-priority optimizations being made to our Communtiy App so Gaurav will focus on enhancing our Community App and then working on a hybrid mobile/web app if time permits.  Gaurav will be in good hands as he’s working under the mentorship of Kojo Gambrah, who’s now based in the US. Kojo is a season GSOC veteran as a student one year and now a mentor for a second year.
	Rishabh Shukla is a 3rd year undergraduate student of Computer Science and Engineering at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University in India. Rishabh brings to the community significant web development experience along with an ample knowledge of AngularJS, having recently built a chat system based on socket.io.  He’s very well-rounded in his skills as he also has strong knowledge of Java, MySQL, and is a quick learner when it comes to any new framework or language. Rishabh also has worked for more than 2 years in open source environments so he’s well-versed in the communications and workflows while committing. Long-term, Rishabh is seeking out a career tying together web development with artificial intellegence. We know from the strength of Rishabh’s application and the quality of his contributions during the evaluation period that he’d be a great fit for in our community on whatever project. He’s been patient as we’ve shifted him from differnent mentors and proposed a new project idea that was of higher priority to our user base. Originally Rishabh was going to work on a framework for system notifications and alerts – but a high-priority project that would help across many areas of the platform came up. Rishabh will now be working on building out the Mifos X Batch API which will allow a user to access significant amounts of data from a single call. This will be very valuable for operations like the collection sheet module and offline scenarios. Rishabh is lucky to be working under two awesome mentors – Anruddha Premalal from Sri Lanka, who joins us as a mentor for the first time after graduating from the 2013 GSOC program. His co-mentor is Markus Geiss, a newcomer to our community from Germany, who in the one month he’s been here has made incredible ripples all throughout the platform.
	Ishan Khanna is a 2nd year B. Tech Undergraduate Student from GGSIPU in New Delhi, India. He’s already a seasoned Android developer, having been a freelancer for 1.5 years, contributing to more than a half dozen mobile apps. Apart from Android, he’s also well-trained Java, Javascript, and MySQL so is capable of working on the server-side too and building APIs as needed. Long-term, Ishan would like to pursue his MS in the US and become an entrepreneur. He’s well on his way there; although one of our younger interns, he’s already wowed us with his mobile development skills and his confident and self-driven attitude. Straight away, we knew that Ishan was the ideal intern to work on our highly requested native Android field operations application. Prior to GSOC beginning, Ishan had a already written a fair amount of code and had already delivered a proof of concept native Android App. Ishan was clearly ready for this role and we’re looking forward to him building out the our first community Android client on Mifos X with support for on and offline transactions and all the primary use cases and mobile scenarios. Ishan will be directly under the mentorship of Vishwas Babu who’s now in the US as well as the mentorship of Nayan.
	Channa Gayan is a third-year Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate student at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Channa already has significant hands-on experience with all the languages in our technology stack as well the development tools our community uses. These languages and frameworks include Java, JavaScript, Spring, MySQL, Oracle, SOAP, Eclipse, JUnit, JBoss, and Apache Tomcat. Channa has already served as an intern for Direct Financial Network stock exchange software, worked on a back-end server project related to SOAP web services for a Nigeria company, and also contributed to Zoomi Technologies in Canada. With this experience in the financial services domain, his back and front-end development along with his knowlede of web services, we knew Channa was a student we wanted to select and just had to line him up with a project that warranted his skills.Originally Channa was going to work on our business rules engine but we soon realized that was much too large of a project to conqure in a summer. We hadn’t yet assigned an intern to our Client Impact Portal, which was one of our highest priority projects as it will help our community dramatically change how social impact is communciated back to funders and stakeholders around the world. Channa was the perfect intern to take this project on as he’d have the ability to implement the back-end logic, as well as the front-end and solidly grasp the financial services aspects. Guiding Channa, will be Sander van der Heyden from Musoni Services in Amsterdam, whose Musoni System customers are gladly awaiting the opportunity to provide their funders with a stand-alone portal to view their client impact.
	Oleg Dolidze is a 2nd year Informatics and Control Systems major at the Georgian Technical University.  Having served as an intern in the past at one of our global support partners, FinA, Oleg has the knowledge of our community and software that would allow him to fit right in with Mifos. For his prior projects at FinA, he’s worked on Pentaho and other BI solutions as well as Java, MySQL, and Hibernate.With his network of supporters at FinA and these skills, Oleg was a solid choice for our Ad-Hoc Query Builder and Reporting Tool. Users have continously requested a more easy user experience for creating reports on the fly so we’re looking forward to Oleg’s deliverable at the end of the summer. He’s already demonstrated a working Proof of Concept of Saiku so we’re well on the way there. Oleg will be working under the mentorship of Anuruddha Premalal & Nick Gochiashvili. Nick is a part of FinA and will be his primary day-to-day mentor and expert Pentaho resources while Anuruddha will be the Mifos subject matter expert.
	Antonio Carella is pursuing his Masters of Science in Software Engineering, with a focus on Entpreneurialism and Technology Leadership, at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. Coming from a social services background with extensive time spent living and working in developing nations, Antonio brings a unique perspective and skillset that will allow him to flourish in our community.  He is eager and ready to put into practice his knowledge of the technology stack that Mifos X uses: Java, Eclipse, Javascript/JQuery, REST, JUnit, HTML, CSS, and am familiar with the concepts and syntax of Spring and MySQL. To quote Antonio, “I hope to combine my years of experience as a non-profit manager and my spirit of social entrepreneurialism with my recent training as a software engineer to build and promote tech projects that foster social justice and equality.Although Antonio doesn’t have as much practical hands-on experience as some of our other interns, he quickly showed how he could grasp the overall architecture of Mifos X and pull together the various components to make a cohesive solution. Antonio has the lucky opportunity to work on an exciting new project that can help Mifos X make a footprint in the clean energy space and set the stage for other consumer credit models. Pay as You Go Solar brings together off-grid solar installations and mobile payments to make solar energy accessible to all households by allowing them to purchase power as they use it. Antonio will be building this module out on Mifos X to enable the transactin processing, the consumption monitoring to help MFIs became providers of the service. Mentoring Antonio will be James Dailey, based in the US, the original Mifos founder and a current global expert on clean energy and financial inclusion. James sees huge potential in Antonio and is ready to help him realize it this summer. Augmenting James’ functional expertise, will be Pramod Nuthakki from India who will serve as a back-up technical mentor.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our Google Summer of Code introductions this upcoming week when we reveal some fun facts about our interns!