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.
Welcome Sumitra!
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.
The Palisadoes Foundation’s GitHub projects are now being used as a part of the Software Architecture SWEN3120 course at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.
This video explains how to get started with Talawa and outlines many of the everyday challenges that software developers face in creating applications that users value.
This video is a recording of the final presentations that our GSoC 2021 students gave to our mentor team as part of their evaluations. It highlights the significant gains we made over the summer.
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.
Welcome Rutvik!
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.
We highlight the many mentors who donate their time to assist students and other contributors to our open-source software repositories.
Troy Anderson
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 Google Summer of Code (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.
Brandon Chung
Brandon Chung is a Software Developer experienced in working with Flutter, Vue, SpringBoot, and other programming languages and frameworks. Brandon specializes in Web and Mobile App development, and has had a hand in developing a number of personal and enterprise grade applications. Brandon has held positions of student leadership at the University of Technology, most notably as the Student Chair of the IEEE UTech Student Branch. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys tutoring others in Software Development and playing video games.
Brandon volunteered for the first time with with the Palisadoes foundation in 2021 as a Google Summer of Code mentor.
Jason Gayle
I am a software developer specializing in full stack development, and however, I am mostly fluent in using frontend technologies such as React.js and Next.js. Moreover, I am also versed with UI design, and aim to delve into UX engineering as my career progresses. For Google’s Summer of Code, I had primarily mentored for the Talawa-Admin project, whilst also occasionally assisting with the code review for the Talawa-API project. My role as a mentor has been to ensure that the quality of the contributions made to the project were of a high standard, whilst also providing the contributors with assistance whenever it was needed.
I am currently in my final year of studies for my Bachelors degree in Computer Science at the University of the West Indies and in my spare time, I enjoy practicing playing the guitar, and travelling to improve upon my photography.
Dominic Mills
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.
Sagar Utekar
Sagar Utekar has been a key contributor to Palisadoes Foundation projects. He learned about because of his interest in the Google Summer of Code and quickly realized that most of our mentors were based in Jamaica while most of the students wanting to work on our projects were based in India.
Sagar lives in Maharashtra, India where he is currently working for the VMware Software India Pvt offices in Banglore.
He has a Diploma in Information Technology from the Institute of Petrochemical Engineering, Lonere, Raigad and a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology.
He has over 3 years experience managing client-facing projects, troubleshooting technical issues, and working with engineering. This includes experience with:
Maintaining internet facing production-grade applications in Virtualized environments.
Writing software in Java, Python, Go, Node.js
Cluster deployments and orchestration technologies using Chef, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, OpenStack, Jenkins, KOPS.
Managing Kubernetes in large production environments.
Monitoring and alerting infrastructure using ELK, Prometheus, Grafana, Pagerduty, Slack, Datadog
Scalable networking technologies (e.g., Load Balancers, Firewalls) and web standards (e.g., REST APIs, web security mechanisms).
System administration tasks in Linux, Unix, or Windows and familiarity with standard IT security practices (e.g., encryption, certificates, key management).
Managing Kubernetes in large production environments.
Open source server software such as NGINX and Elasticsearch
