Santa Clara, CA – April 14, 2022 The Palisadoes Foundation has been accepted into the 2022 Google Season of Docs (GSoD) program.

GSoD is an annual program organized by Google. Its goal is to bring technical writers and open source organizations together to foster collaboration and improvement of documentation in the Open Source space.

This initiative is extremely important because the documentation of an Open Source project provides an avenue for users to not only understand the project but also make contributions to it.

During the program, accepted technical writers spend between 3-5 months either building a new doc set, improving the structure of the existing docs, developing a much-needed tutorial, or improving the contribution processes and guides of an Open Source organization. It gives professional technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in open source.

• Providing funds to open source organizations to use for documentation projects
• Providing guides and support for open source organizations to help them understand their documentation needs
• Collecting data from open source organizations to better understand documentation impact
• Publishing case studies from open source organizations to share best practices

Season of Docs seeks to empower open source organizations to understand their documentation needs, to create documentation to fill those needs, to measure the effect and impact of their documentation, and, in the spirit of open source, share what they’ve learned to help guide other projects. Season of Docs seeks to bring more technical writers into open source through funding their work with open source projects and organizations.

This is excellent news for Palisadoes. It validates our mission of creating viable open source projects to aid community organizations like ourselves service their communities better. Our Talawa projects will benefit immensely and we are excited to get our software projects recognized in this new and meaningful way.

Peter Harrison, President, The Palisadoes Foundation

The Palisadoes Foundation will start evaluating GSoD candidates immediately and hopes to hire two persons in 2022.

About Palisadoes

Since 2016, The Palisadoes Foundation has been assisting STEM students to become globally competitive in software engineering.

The Foundation promotes software engineering education internships for university students in under-served communities. Over 40 students have participated in its summer programs mentored by IT professionals.

The demographic focus is on Black, Brown, Latinx and indigenous groups. The geographic focus is on the North American and the Caribbean regions.

Palisadoes has participated in the annual Google Summer of Code, the GitHub Externship, and the DigitalOcean Hacktoberfest programs.
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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.

Sandeep is one of our 2022 GitHub Externship – Winter Cohort students working on our Talawa project. He started formal coding with the Externship in January and has been collaborating with other students and mentors on his various GitHub pull requests.

Welcome Sandeep!

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I’m Sandeep Valpasani, a pre-final year undergraduate student pursuing a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India. I’m a self-taught full-stack developer with expertise in different web technologies. My interest lies in developing web applications that solve any problem. I enjoy contributing to Open Source projects. In my free time, I like writing scripts that automates the boring stuff, participating in Hackathons. I also worked as a part-time freelancer in developing full-stack applications. I also engage in tech communities in my free time.

Currently, I’m working as a GitHub Extern for Palisadoes Foundation. Over the period, I’ll be working on testing, improving the Architecture of talawa API. I always wanted to work on real-world applications and I’m happy because I’m in the right place working under the guidance of mentors.

Apart from coding, I also play cricket, badminton during my vacation. In my free time, I enjoy listening to music, watching cricket and movies, spending time in nature.

Keep Contributing 🙂

Thanks for reading till here. Have a great day.

Santa Clara, California: March 7, 2022

The Palisadoes Foundation announces its acceptance into the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization. Palisadoes previously participated in 2021.

Established in 2005, the Google Summer of Code offers developers from around the world stipends to write code for various Open Source software projects. GSoC will run for nine months this year. The aim is to attract new contributors to be regular Open Source contributors

“From Summer to Autumn, many new contributors to our Talawa projects will benefit from this program. GSoC participants this year will include not only students but also industry professionals. This is an exceptional Google sponsored activity,” said Peter Harrison, President of the Palisadoes Foundation. “The program helps us to not only get some great code written, but also to introduce developers into Open Source development and hopefully recruit some new long-term Committers.”

Participants are encouraged to discuss ideas with mentoring organizations and finalize proposals for projects by the April 19 deadline. Palisadoes mentors have proposed numerous ideas for Talawa projects in mobile development, web applications, and practical API concepts. Participants may choose from the Talawa “Ideas Page” or suggest their own project for approval. The Talawa software repositories can be found on our organization’s GitHub page. The GSoC website has a complete timeline that you can review. Participants can learn more about our projects on the Talawa GSoC FAQ page.

“GSoC gives students the chance to work on industry-leading Open Source projects, collaborate with diverse communities, and gain real world experience related to their academic pursuits,” added Harrison. “We are proud to have mentored so many talented students over the years, and furthered our mission of providing software products for the public good. It’s a rewarding experience both for the students and the Talawa community at-large.”

Since 2016, The Palisadoes Foundation has actively participated in furthering the education of software engineering students through its various programs. The Calico Challenge, modeled on GSoC, has mentored over 30 Jamaicans attending local universities. Like GSoC, students received stipends upon achieving predefined goals when contributing to the Foundation’s GitHub projects.

“This second GSoC success would not have happened without the faith our Jamaican corporate sponsors had in our Calico vision. Their support since 2016 in terms of time, people and financing has been invaluable, ” Harrison explained, “The GSoC acceptance is a clear vote of faith from arguably the world’s largest software company. This is a huge global endorsement of Jamaican software development skills”

Details on the Google Summer of Code is available at: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

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.

The 2022 Calico Challenge has begun! Jamaican students! Get familiar with our projects and what you need to do to apply.