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.

GSoC 2021 Spurs High Participation Rates in Palisadoes Foundation Software Projects

Santa Clara, California: April 14, 2021

The Palisadoes Foundation announces very high participation rates spurred by its Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects.

GSoC is an international program in which Google awards stipends to students who complete a free and open-source software coding project during a three month period. Details about the program can be found at https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/. The Palisadoes Foundation was accepted as a GSoC mentoring organization in 2021.

“The interest in our projects has been outstanding. In the past months our Talawa projects have been forked (copied) hundreds of times,” said Peter Harrison, President of the Palisadoes Foundation. “It’s also very encouraging to also see hundreds of fixed bugs and added features being created through our pull request process. Prior to GSoC we had less than a dozen of each.”

The statistics for each project provide more details of the recent progress:

  • Talawa: 132 forks, 672 pull requests
  • Talawa API: 77 forks, 230 pull requests
  • Talawa Admin: 12 forks, 15 pull requests

“The professional developer community has been very supportive. We have 20 mentors actively participating in our coordinating activities.” added Harrison. “The Foundation has also received 59 GSoC applications from international students, more than double what we normally see for our previous summer programs.”

This success is the result of The Palisadoes Foundation’s efforts to promote Open Source software development through its various educational programs. Since 2016 it has been working with university students and their academic institutions to create sustainable projects that would be both relevant and useful to users in developing nations.

“Our all volunteer team is constantly working on requirements, fielding questions and reviewing code. It’s an international effort with mentors in India allowing us to support students 24 hours a day due to the time difference with the Americas,” Harrison explained, “The GSoC award is a clear vote of faith from arguably the world’s largest software company. This is a huge global endorsement of projects created with Jamaican software development skills. We are proud that our projects are now have global participation.”

About the Palisadoes Foundation

The California based Palisadoes Foundation aims to provide new avenues to promote Jamaica’s technology businesses and talent using a series of programs aimed at creating increased awareness of the island’s abilities in the global marketplace.

About Talawa
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. It has three main components:

  • talawa: A mobile application with social media features
  • talawa-api: An API providing access to user data and features
  • talawa-admin: A web based administrative portal
  • talawa-docs: The projects’ online documentation website

The projects’ software repositories can be found on our GitHub page at: https://github.com/PalisadoesFoundation

Pattoo Web Redesign Review

Dominic Henry discusses his work during the 2020 Calico Challenge. He focused on completely redesigning the Pattoo web application for a much better user experience.

Pattoo is a suite of software applications that gather and present time series data. In other words data that changes over time, this could be computer system performance, stock market prices or foreign exchange rates.

Specialized software agents collect this data and send it to the central pattoo server for storage. We also have guides on how to create agents for your specific needs.

The data on the central server can be accessed easily using either the Pattoo mobile app or via the web.

Let’s take a look at what the students did in 2020.

Pattoo Administration Review

Cargill Seiveright discusses his work during the 2020 Calico Challenge. He focused on creating and administrator portal for the pattoo application.

Pattoo is a suite of software applications that gather and present time series data. In other words data that changes over time, this could be computer system performance, stock market prices or foreign exchange rates.

Specialized software agents collect this data and send it to the central pattoo server for storage. We also have guides on how to create agents for your specific needs.

The data on the central server can be accessed easily using either the Pattoo mobile app or via the web.

Let’s take a look at what the students did in 2020.