Dominic is currently an Associate Software Engineer at RealDecoy–A business technology company that helps B2B and B2C organisations maximise their investments in e-commerce, site search and data insight. He has experience in the mobile and web development space and has previously been in a number of leadership roles: He was a group leader for the inaugural Lindau Sciathon; team leader for UNLEASH+ 2020; and is currently the team lead for one of the six funded AlumNode Projects in 2021. Additionally, he is a twice selected Leader of Tomorrow of the St. Gallen Symposium, and is the first Jamaican selected for the CERN Summer Student Programme. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Royal Commonwealth Society and has participated in many international programmes aimed at nurturing young scientists and thought leaders, such as the Think Summit Global Solutions, Heidelberg Laureate Forum and Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.
Dominic finds mentoring a thoroughly enriching experience and always aims to learn as much from his mentees as they do from him. He is keen on helping others unlock their full potential as well as refining his skills in communication and teamwork.
Press Office
Meet Our GitHub Externship Students
We are pleased to announce the GitHub Externship students who will be working with the Palisadoes Foundation this summer.
The GitHub Externship is a 90-day fellowship program for third or pre-final year students of GitHub Campus Partner schools. The GitHub Externship program is about learning, preparing students to be market ready, strengthening industry-academia relation, and giving practical experience to students. This program aims to provide innovative solutions to the partner organizations on their existing challenges as well as helping organization identify real talent that can be employed by the organizations at later stages.
We are grateful to GitHub for the opportunity to allow us to continue our work on Talawa, our mobile app that helps community organizations manage their membership.
Enough talk, let’s learn about the awardees!
Aditya Birangal
I’m Aditya Birangal from Pune, India leading the Google Developer Student Club to help students grow their knowledge to be better developers & build solutions for local businesses and their community.
I’m extremely passionate about Technology. I’m a #SelfTaught developer and makes Android, iOS & Web Apps using #Flutter & deploy them on #Cloud. I spend a lot of my time in learning, innovating & developing new tech stuff.
Favorite Quote: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Steve Jobs
Follow Aditya on: Linkedin, Github or his Portfolio Website
Aditya has been collaborating with other students and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests.
Muskan Modi
Hello! My name is Muskan Modi and I am an active open source contributor. I love dogs 🙂 and enjoy contributing to the exciting technological advances.
I have worked in almost every technical field from Cloud Computing, DevOps to Big Data and Machine Learning. I am a final year student at the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India. Since my childhood, I have always been eager to learn something new whether it is skating, painting, or coding.
With the Palisadoes Foundation it feels like every day we are learning something new. Happy open source contributing!
Muskan has been collaborating with other students and mentors on her various GitHub pull requests.
Saumya Singh
Namaste, I am Saumya Singh an ordinary girl with a bag full of extraordinary dreams to learn, explore, be happy & achieve a lot more.
Technically, I enjoy working in the field of Web Development. I strive to be a better Web Developer daily. Mainly working on the front end and aiming to be a Full Stack developer. Besides, I am curious about Machine Learning and deep dive into the world of Computer Vision. I have participated in various National level hackathons and I am part of the Women’s community in tech too. I am blessed that my team is a grand finalist of the National level technical event Toycathon’2021, and have also applied for a patent in the same project.
I am an avid book reader The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is one of the best novels I have read, I also like reading Dan Brown novels. Writing soothes my soul, I have a domain on WordPress where I express my thought at times. Swimming, dancing, and sometimes talking to plant (😬) gives me joy. When I am working, learning, or coding, I like to listen to Jazz.
I believe “Life is Learning & Learning is Life” when anyone lives by this motto, they have the curiosity to look forward to something and a vision to learn new things with a positive attitude.
Let’s connect here: LinkedIn , GitHub
Keep Smiling. Thank you.
Saumya has been collaborating with other students and mentors on her various GitHub pull requests.
Talawa Mobile App Redesign 2021
See the new look of our Talawa mobile app!
Talawa was created to help community based organizations collaborate with their membership. These organizations would include religious groups, non-profit charities, social groups and in limited cases, businesses.
Though software applications exist for these types of organizations they assume their memberships are fully literate and have access to email. We wanted to create a system that would work for countries with similar technology and education challenges as Jamaica.
Talawa has three main components. A mobile application with social media features, a web based portal to be used by the organization’s administrative team, and finally an API providing access to data and features.
The Palisadoes Foundation wants to eventually host Talawa as a cloud service to help finance its education outreach.
Talawa’s main features for 2021 include:
- User news feed
- Event calendars with lightweight project management
- Group chats
- Member notifications
- Donation acceptance
- Service provider level multi-organization capability
- Plugin support for administration services such as billing
Meet Our GSoC 2021 Students
We are pleased to announce the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students who will be working with the Palisadoes Foundation this summer.
Since 2005 Google has sponsored summer internships for students to work on open source projects around the world. Stipends are paid upon meeting predefined goals under the guidance of a software engineering mentor.
We are grateful to Google for the opportunity to allow us to continue our work on Talawa, our mobile app that helps community organizations manage their membership.
Enough talk, let’s learn about the awardees!
Rutvik Chandla
Rutvik is one of our 2021 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students working on our Talawa project. He started participating in March, and was formally accepted as a GSoC student in May. He has been collaborating with other students and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests.
Hi, I’m Rutvik Chandla, Computer engineering student from Gujarat, India.
I love to design new products and code them to reality. UI/UX and mobile development are my major interests. Started my development journey with Android. I’ve been working on Flutter for a few years.I’ve also dipped my toes into web-development with VUE JS.
The Thing which excites me the most is to solve or make things more efficient for day-to-day problems. Development is a way to solve those problems. Open source is always a fascination for me, I’ve contributed to few organizations and gratefully got a chance to work with the Palisadoes Organization in GSOC 21. Till now it has been a great learning experience from the mentors and building the Talawa project.
Hope to have a great journey ahead.
Yasharth Dubey
Yasharth is one of our 2021 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students working on our Talawa project. He started participating in March, and was formally accepted as a GSoC student in May. He has been collaborating with other students and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests.
Hey guys, I am Yasharth Dubey. A 2nd-year Computer Science Student from India, I am currently pursuing my bachelors from the Indian Institute of Information technology Dharwad. I am a competitive programmer along with a developer. I am a regional finalist in ICPC 2019, 6:star: on Codechef and Pink Band Candidate master on code forces. I am a very keen contributor to open-source programs. This interest in the opensource brought me to the GSoC as it Is the Olympics for opensource. I searched for some familiar Tech-stacks and while I was searching, I found The Palisadoes Foundation there. The thing which took my attention as it was the only foundation that has put the label of Social Good in the description. That zeal for social good brought me here. After finding the culture and nature of every mentor here I was happy to choose The Palisadoes Foundation for my GSoC journey. Hope I will be able to contribute in the future as well. Thanks to Peter Harrison Sir for allowing us to serve the social good by this organization’s motive.
Sumitra Saksham
Sumitra is one of our 2021 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students working on our Talawa project. He started participating in March, and was formally accepted as a GSoC student in May. He has been collaborating with other students and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests for Talawa and the Talawa API backend.
I am Sumitra, a graduate student from the Indian Institute of Technology, Dhanbad. I have completed my bachelors in Petroleum Engineering. During my pre-final year of college, I was introduced to backend development in Nodejs and GraphQL for an Order Management System. Since then, I have devoted myself to technology. I love to dig deep into problems and solve them with technology. My specialities include problem-solving, app optimization, user interface design, user experience design, database design, continuous integration, and continuous delivery of code. I was selected as one of the Student Software developers in GSoC 2021 to contribute to Talawa App and Talawa Backend (the project under palisadoes foundation). This is the first time I am working for an open-source organization. The amount of growth that I witness here has been phenomenal. I began to ask myself many questions related to scalability, project structure, database design, encryption, and clean code, which helped me grow my knowledge base. My intention in life has always been to build something people love. I am sure that the work we are doing here will help the community to grow and make this world a better place.
Utkarsh Shendge
Utkarsh is one of our 2021 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students working on our Talawa project. He started participating in March, and was formally accepted as a GSoC student in May. He has been collaborating with other students and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests.
My name is Utkarsh Shendge and I am an undergraduate student at Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, pursuing Computer Science and Engineering as my Major. Currently, I am working as a Google Summer of Code student developer with Palisadoes Foundation. And my primary focus is on improving the UI/UX of the Talawa App. I always wanted to build applications that help people on a global scale and I am really happy that I am doing the same by working with other student developers under the guidance of mentors.
I have a keen interest in App development, Machine Learning and I love studying Advanced Algorithms. My primary focus and inspiration for my studies are software algorithms. I have 2 years of experience in app development and I have been working with the flutter framework for more than 18 months. I have been a Data Structures and Algorithms tutor and completed a few freelancing gigs.
Ritik Kumar Srivastava
Ritik is one of our 2021 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students working on our Talawa project. He started participating in March, and was formally accepted as a GSoC student in May. He has been collaborating with other students and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests.
Hello, my name is Ritik Kumar Srivastava. I am currently a senior at Galgotias University, standing under the course B.tech(Hons) in Computer Science and Engineering with Specialization in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
On my first interaction with “The Palisadoes Foundation” under the open-source contribution program, I had this opportunity to showcase my skills in an open-source application. It was necessary for me to get into GSoC 2021 to boost my skills perspective but also an opportunity to help my family financially.
Every moment from March 12, 2021 has been memorable and taught me a lesson each day that helped me grow more. This opportunity was only made possible with the combination of passionate mentors and Peter Harrison Sir.
I aimed to give Talawa some of the features like:
- Donations to an organization via users.
- Well-defined authentication flow.
- Migration of code base.
- Invitation to other users registered/unregistered.
- App showcase on the first launch.
I find myself fortunate to have so many good friends and colleagues because of there contribution to my learning is immense. I don’t have a laptop to be true of my own whatever I learned and gained is; all that was not possible without their help.
I am currently watching iOS development tutorials. Have a keen interest in mobile app development. I am also interested in the automation of tasks via python automation, UiPath or automation through development boards. Being an AI and ML enthusiast, I always try to learn new things and implement them in my free time.
Palisadoes Selected for the GitHub Externship – Summer 2021 Cohort
Santa Clara, CA – May 6, 2021: The Palisadoes Foundation has been selected to participate as an open source organization by the GitHub Externship run by GitHub India.
The GitHub Externship is a 90-day fellowship program for third or pre-final year students of GitHub India’s Campus Partner schools. The initiative provides hands-on, collaborative, remote learning with practical experience under the guidance of expert mentors.
Students get to select from a vast variety of Open Source projects managed by various organizations. They get paired with a mentor from participating organizations who will handhold them and review their work on a regular basis.
The program offers many advantages for the many expected participants.
- On-the-job opportunities to work on real-world technology challenges.
- Learning best practices under the guidance of tech leaders from the industry.
- Live projects to showcase resumes.
- Attractive stipends.
The Palisadoes Foundation’s participation builds on our successful application to this year’s Google Summer of Code program.
Our selection exemplifies the faith placed in the quality of our work by the international open-source community. GitHub, and it’s parent Microsoft, have proven their commitment to supporting software engineering talent around the world. We are proud to the a part of this movement. It is a great honor.
Peter Harrison, President, The Palisadoes Foundation
The Palisadoes foundation looks forward to continuing this partnership with Github India in promoting open source software collaboration around the world.
About the Talawa Projects
For the past four years we have focused on creating a mobile app to help community organizations like ourselves better manage their membership. We felt these organizations often faced similar challenges with the project management of events and keeping track of volunteer abilities, roles and responsibilities with a social media component.
The mobile app is useful for any community-based organization such as clubs, small religious institutions, neighborhood groups, and volunteer associations.
About GitHub India
GitHub India was created in 2020 to support the third-largest number of active developers on GitHub that was growing 22 percent annually. GitHub supports 73+ million software developers, 4+ million organizations, 200+ million software repositories and is used by 84% of the Fortune 100.
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.