Meet the 2018 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns
Google Summer of Code
2018 is well underway so this blog post is admittedly a bit late. GSOC is now in its 13th year and we’re proud to be participating in GSOC once again for the fiftth time as the Mifos Initiative and the seventh year overall. 1264 students from 62 countries are working with a record 206 open source organizations this summer. This year will be our biggest year to date. We were able to select thirteen interns through the Mifos Initiative who are working alongside four interns from the Apache Software Foundation. Our students are working on mobile apps, web apps as well as back-end innovation and new modules on top of Fineract and Fineract CN. As the voice for the financial inclusion community within Apache Fineract, the Mifos Initiative looks forward to participating in GSOC for many years to come to deeply engage with the high number of students interested in Fintech and captivated by our mission.
This year, our interns are coming from five different countries with both India and Cameroon heavily represented and interns from Singapore and Mauritius for the first time. We have six interns working on mobile apps, three interns working on web apps, four interns working on new modules or the back-end for Fineract, and four interns working on the Fineract CN framework.
For our suite of Mifos X Mobile Apps on Fineract, we have three students continuing to extend them. Aksh Gautam, under the mentorship of Tarun Mudgal, will be extending our Android Field Operations App to Version 5.0, adding in additional offline capablities, new features, and enhancing the user experience. Saksham Handu, under the mentorship of Rajan Maurya, will be building out Version 3.0 of our mobile banking app, Mifos Mobile, adding chat/messaging support and additional functionalities. Lastly, Ankur Sharma, under mentorship of Puneet Kohli and Naman Dwivedi, is extending the two applications on top of our mobile wallet framework.
As Fineract CN begins to reach a point of stability, we’re focusing on building out client and user-facing mobile apps. Dilpreet Singh and Mohak Puri are both working with Rajan Maurya to build out Version 2.o of Fineract CN Mobile. Manish Kumar is working on the first client-facing mobile applicaition on top of Fineract CN.
On the back-end for Fineract, we’re looking to wrap up some eagerly awaited projects and release some new Mifos X innovation,Sanyam Goel is completing our much-anticipated Mifos payment gateway providing mobile money integration, under the mentorship of Steve Conrad and Rahul Goel. Kumaranath Fernando with the expertise of Avik Ganguly is tackling scalability enhancements to enable better performance for high client volumes. Dingfan Zhou is experimenting with some bleeding edge fintech applications by building out a chatbot and adapter for Fineract under the guidance of Aleks Vidakovic and Thynn Win. Likewise, Lalit Mohan, is helping us explore Machine Learning for the first time guided by Nayan Ambalia, Avik, and Mark Reynolds.
For the first time, we have students through both Mifos and Apache working with the core Fineract CN framework for the first time. Ebenezer Graham is building out a brand new SMS/email microservice with the mentorship of Isaac Kamga and Myrle Krantz. Courage Angeh is helping enable the rapid deployment of Fineract CN in the cloud through her containerization project with support of Victor Romero & Viswa Ramamoorthy. Ruphine Kengne and Pembe Miriam are developing out group lending and management features in Fineract CN at both the back and front-end with support from Awasum Yannick.
As we do each year, here’s a brief intro on each of our interns and stay tuned for a follow-up post with some fun facts on each of them.
Mobile Apps – Mifos X (Fineract)
| Saksham Handu – India
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Ankur Sharma – India
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Aksh Gautam – India
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Mobile Apps – Fineract CN
| Dilpreet Singh – India
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Mohak Puri – India
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Manish Kumar – India
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Mifos X Web Apps
| Anwesh Nayak – India
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Ankit Ojha – India
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Abhay Chawla – India
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Fineract & Mifos X Modules
| Sanyam Goel – India
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Dingfan Zhou – Singapore
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Kumaranth Fernando – Sri Lanka
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Lalit Mohan – India
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Fineract CN
| Courage Angeh – Cameroon
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Ebenezer Graham – Mauritius
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Ruphine Kengne – Cameroon
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Pembe Miriam – Cameroon
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Saksham Handu
Saksham is a 3rd year undergraduate pursuing Bachelors of Technology in CSE from VIT University, Chennai, India. He’s passionate about user experience and strives to build easy to use products without compromising the final functionality. He has more than 2 years experience in Java and one and a half years experience in Android with experience across a number of different mobile projects. Saksham’s thorough application and comprehensive list of pull request submitted, made him a great fit for our Mifos Mobile 3.0 project. Working under Rajan, he’s building out the next set of features on our mobile banking app to make it a world-class mobile banking solution.
Ankur Sharma
Ankur is currently a sophomore pursuing his Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science with a minor in Applied Mathematics at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. While Ankur has only been programming and tinkering with apps for the past 2 years, he’s become proficient in Java, Python, C++ and C. He’s also worked on various Design Patterns including MVP, Singleton, Observer, and State. Ankur is passionate about Machine Learning and is largely intrigued by algorithms that improve convergence and reduce curse of dimensionality.
While Ankur originally applied for the Fineract CN Mobile Banking App 1.0, we assigned him to the Mobile Wallet 2.0 project as we were confident in his ability to deliver with his experience on numerous Android apps and his success in different hackathons. Ankur will be extending the architecture and functionality of the mobile wallet framework, building out additional use cases for both the India-specific app as well as the generic mobile wallet app. These functionalities include integration with external payments systems, improved user experience, integrations with system notifications, and more.
Aksh Gautam
Aksh is a 3rd year Bachelor’s of Technology student in Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandy in Himachal Pradesh, India. Aksh began contributing to Mifos all the way back in December, contributing 51 pull requests across our three different mobile codebases – Android client, Mifos Mobile and Fineract CN Mobile. He got introduce to open source through participation in Hacktober Fest and has created web applications and projects related to neural networks and machine learning. He applied for three different projects and was ultimately chosen to work on the Android Field Operations App 5.0 because of his strong domain knowledge and experience in Android, Java, MySQL, and various mobile libraries. Aksh is a passionate problem solver and he finds real bliss in solving problems through code. We’re certain he’ll be able to put this passion to action by helping to solve poverty through code by building out new features, enhancing the user experience and refining the architecture of the Android Field Operations App.
Manish Kumar
Manish is an undergraduate student of the Computer Science and Engineering branch at IITP, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. Manish aims to be a full stack developer and would love to solve real world problems with technology by helping people with the skills that he has. Manish impressed us with his skillset in Java, Android and other languages as well as his experience working on numerous mobile apps including contributing to the OpenMRS Android Client. During the bonding period, he submitted more than 32 pull requests to the Mifos Mobile and Mifos Android client repositories.
While Manish originally applied for the Fineract CN Mobile 2.0 project, we thought he would be best suited for the challenging project of designing and building the first client-facing app on Fineract CN.
Dilpreet Singh
Dilpreet is a senio pursuing his degree in Computer Science from Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. He has three experience developing on Android including his Android Developer nanondegree which he completed with a scholarship from Google and Tata Trust and most recently as GSOC intern for the Mifos Initiative, building out our Mifos Mobile 2.0 mobile banking app. This year, Dilpreet was selected as an intern with Apache Fineract to work on Fineract CN Mobile 2.0 – refining the architecture and building out new functionality for the Android field operations app on our new architecture.
Mohak Puri 
Mohak is a self-taught programmers pursuing his BTech in Computer Science at Indraprastha University in New Delhi, India. Mohak has been developing on Android for nearly 3 years now and also worked with React Native. In these three years, he’s built out a great body of practical work including creating several open source projects that have gained a lot of populatority on Github including user-facing apps like InstaChat, animations like Uber X, and libraries like MultiProgressBar. It was this impressive body of work and breadth of experience across architecture and techniques like MVP architecture, Dagger2, RxJava2, Espresso, and Mockito, coupled with his thorough application and extensive number of pull requests that made him a shoe-in for the community.
Anwesh Nayak
Anwesh is currently in his final year pursuing his Bachelors of Technology at Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad (IIITA), one of the top colleges for computer science in all of India. Anwesh has contributed already to more than a half dozen open source projects and has extensive experience in not only AngularJS but also Python, Django, ReactJS, and VanillaJS.
Anwesh had submitted a thorough and detailed plan for implementing a number of functional , UX, and performance enhancements to the Mifos X Web App. However, during the bonding period, Gaurav proposed that rather than continue refining the current Web App which is on an outdated AngularJS 1.5 stack, why not start re-writing the web app onto the latest stable version, Angular 6. Knowing that Anwesh had the all-around skillset to take on such a monumental project and willingness to learn from it, we’ve committed to the re-write and focused Anwesh along with Abhay on the re-write. Moving to Angular 6, we’ll be able to attract more developers to contribute, we’ll be able adhere to the Material design standards, take advantage of the latest plugins, enable better white-labelling and skinning of the app, more accessible offline browser support, and ease in implementing design and performance enhancements.
Abhay Chawla
Abhay is currently in his third year studies pursuing a Bachelor’s of Technology in Computer Science from Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, New Delhi. He strives to become a full stack web developer, yearning to keep learning and exploring new technologies everyday. Abhay has strong academic, professional and open source experience not only in Javascript and Angular but Java and MySQL as well. He’s contributed to the coala and mozilla projects and interned with two startups, Medicians and Grafiesto, helping build out a POS solution for pharmacists and an app for administration of gyms respectively.
Abhay submitted a very thorough application along with more than 17 pull requests during the bonding period. His project centers around building out an administrative portal to help better manage self-service users as we get more adoption of client-facing solution on Fineract. Administrative features he’ll be building out include better self-service user management, configuration of look and feel of self-service apps, task management of client-facing tasks, and an interface for chat/support with clients. A number of these features requires new APIs so while Abhay waits on the creation of these APIs, he’s helping build out the general architecture of the new Web App on Angular 6 and focusing on the new screens for self-service user management.
Ankit Ojha
Ankit is our third front-end developer we’re working with for GSOC this year. He is a second year student working towards his Bachelors’s in CSE from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in Kerala, India. He aims to be a software developing working for the good of society so Mifos was a perfect fit. Ankit brought a solid track record in AngularJS and submitted more than 30 pull requests during the evaluation period. He originally applied for the Web App enhancements project but we assigned him to the Online Banking App 2.0 project under the mentorship of Raunak. With Raunak’s support, he’ll be adding additional features and improving the usability of our online banking app making it a more powerful reference application for an omnichannel banking solution that’s ready to be white-labeled.
Sanyam Goel 
Sanyam is in in his final year of studies majoring in Information Technology at the Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Engineering a the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University in New Delhi. Sanyam has extensive experience as a full-stack developer inside and outside the classrom with experience on JavaSE and JavaEE, Hibernate, Spring, and Android. He’s won various awards and participated in many hackathons. Last year he successfully graduated as an intern with Apache Fineract writing out all API documentation in Swagger format. He’s continued to be an active member of our communities as a GCI mentor and we knew had the requisite knowledge to work on the critical payment bridge to enable easy integration with mobile money APIs. This is a project that has carried on for multiple years now and are optimistic that we can finally bring to completion with a future-proof architecture that provides a middleware service to provide seamless integration between any payment system and Fineract or Fineract CN. Working under Rahul Goel and Steve Conrad as mentors, this is a rock solid team that should finally be able to deliver on this project.
Dingfan Zhou
Dingfan is in his third year of students majoring in Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore. While Dingfan had very little experience in open source projects prior to GSOC he has experience working in the stack through a previous internship at Paypal and his coursework has exposed him to a number of key disciplines and techniques that made him a good fit for this project to build out a Mifos chatbot that interacts with Fineract. Under the mentorship of Aleksandar Vidakovic and Thynn Win, Dingfan is building out a natural language processing component to understand text queries from messaging apps like Messenger or Rocketchat and have them process API calls that return data from Fineract.
Kumaranath Fernando
Kumaranath is currently a final year undergraduate awaiting his Bachelors in Software Engineering at the Informatics Institute of Technology Sri Lanka affiliated with the University of Westminster UK. Kumaranath was a GSOC intern last year, integrating the data import tool into Fineract and adding in some much needed functional and performance improvements. With this demonstrated proficiency in Fineract, we knew that Kumaranath would be a great fit for the performance scalability and enhancements project that we’d be seeking an intern for last year. Working with Avik, Kumaranath will be implementing a number of performance tuning measures to reduce the bottlenecks that Fineract hits at certain volumes of transactions and concurrent users. He’ll be parallelizing scheduler jobs, compressing http requests, and implementing server-side caching.
Lalit Mohan
Lalit is our most experienced student during this year’s GSOC as he’s currently a full-time PhD student in his third year of studies at IIIT Hyderabad. We were eager to work with Lalit because he brings to us more than 15 years experience developing and maintaining application for the banking and fintech sectors. We interacted loosely in the past with Lalit while he was IDRBT so saw this internship as the perfect opportunity for him to contribute deeply to the Mifos community and refine his machine learning knowledge through practical work. The scope of his project has evolved from building a library that would take customer and transactional data as input to identify Good/Bad Loans, Frauds and other risk management activities using Machine Learning Algorithms to now being a machine-learning based scorecard. This work represents an important foray into machine learning at the Mifos community level so we can hopefully incorporate more components into the core platform and framework to better help the community leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Courage Angeh
Courage is in her final year of undergraduate studies in Computer Engineering at the University of Buea in Cameroon. She loves learning new exciting technologies and strives to channel all she learns to improving her local community in every that she can. Courage successfully completed her GSOC internship last year with the Mifos Initiative working on the notifications framework in Fineract 1.x. In that project she really demonstrated her abilities to contribute across the full Mifos stack. Since last summer, she has been a very active member of the Mifos and Fineract communities, growing her professional skillset immensely, even gaining committership with Apache Fineract. Courage has continued to grow her knowledge base getting experience in microservices and cloud-native architectures making her a promising candidate to take on this challenging yet critical project to containerize the new microservices-based Fineract CN architecture and make it easily deployable.
Ebenezer Graham
Ebenezer is in his third year of studies pursuing his Bachelor’s of Science in Computing at the African Leadership University in Mauritius. Applying to Apache Fineract was a perfect match for Ebenezer as FOSS enthusiast and a passionate for Africa and utilizing technology to alleviate poverty. Ebenezer has been following the Mifos Initiative and Fineract project for more than a year now and been very actively engaged in transparent dialogue with the community about the desired approach to this project. Despite only 8 months practical experience and 2 years studying Java, MySQL, and JavaScript, Ebenezer has been very thorough and proficient in his work. His professionalism, transparency, and technical know-how gave the community the confidence in selecting him to be one of the first external contributors to build a brand new microservice focused on SMS/Email communications.
Pembe Miriam
Pembe is a final year computer engineering major at the University of Buea in Cameroon. She came to the community with some familiarity of Mifos X given she had previously done an academic internship with Skylabase, one of our silver Mifos partners. While initially she only was introduced to coding because of her school requirements she’s grown a deepness fondness for it, especially for web technologies. Her experience on the Mifos X web app and the several pull requests she made along with her close proximity to a strong mentor like Yannick Awasum made her a good candidate to work on a new web UI for group-based lending practices in Fineract CN.
Ruphine Kengne
Ruphine Kengne is a final year computing engineering major at the University of Buea in Cameroon. With her past studies of accounting, her experience in web development and Java along with familiarity of Mifos X gained during her academic internship at Skylabase, Ruphine seemed up to the task to tackle a complex project like implementing the back-end for group management and group lending, a much needed feature for parity between Fineract CN and Fineract 1.x
