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