Troy began volunteering with The Palisadoes Foundation in 2021 to support our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students.
I am a Software Engineer at Digicel Group specializing in backend as well as cross platform mobile development and was a primary contributor in the development of the MyDigicel App. My primary role in GSOC entails planning and code reviews for the Talawa mobile app to ensure the code remains maintainable, testable and readable during it’s lifecycle. Having had mentors not only during school but also throughout my professional career, GSOC is my way of paying those favors forward; empowering those whose position I was once in. The journey of learning never ends and I am happy to say I learn as much from students as they do from me; I believe that’s what GSOC and mentoring in general is all about. Outside of work I enjoy traveling, cooking and the occasional amateur photography
Santa Clara, CA – January 2, 2022: The Palisadoes Foundation is pleased to announce the latest iteration of our annual Calico Challenge.
The Calico Challenge is a program that offers stipends to Jamaica based student developers to write software code for our various open source software projects. It allows students to publicly show the quality of their work.
The projects are advanced. A majority of participants are enrolled in university or college Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs.
For the past four years we have focused on creating Talawa, a mobile app to help community organizations like ourselves better manage their membership. We first saw the need for a social media component to keep in contact with our volunteers. Later, we realized that these organizations often faced challenges with the project management of events and keeping track of volunteer abilities, roles and responsibilities.
We are glad to restart the Calico Challenge after the difficulties of the COVID19 pandemic. Despite these challenges, our coders managed to make continuous updates, and our sponsors kept in touch. This is a continuation of our successes with the international Google Summer of Code and GitHub Externship programs. It is good to be back.
Peter Harrison, President, The Palisadoes Foundation
The aim is to make Talawa useful for any community-based organization such as clubs, small religious institutions, neighborhood groups, and volunteer associations. We also want to see how the open source software could be installed as a “freemium” cloud service as many of these organizations often don’t have sufficient IT skills to run the software independently. We hope that our contributors will help us achieve this goal in 2022. We hope that revenue from the cloud service will partially supplement inflows from our donors and sponsors to help us expand the Calico program further.
Many corporations and individuals have contributed to the success of the Calico Challenge. Here is a representative list.
About the Palisadoes Foundation
Since 2016, The Palisadoes Foundation has been assisting STEM students to become globally competitive in software engineering. Palisadoes does this by providing new avenues to promote STEM education for university students in under-served communities. The Foundation uses a series of programs aimed at creating increased awareness of their abilities in the global marketplace.
