News

Troy began volunteering with The Palisadoes Foundation in 2021 to support our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students.

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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 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

Santa Clara, CA – January 2, 2022: The Palisadoes Foundation is pleased to announce the latest iteration of our annual Calico Challenge.

The Calico Challenge is a program that offers stipends to Jamaica based student developers to write software code for our various open source software projects. It allows students to publicly show the quality of their work.

The projects are advanced. A majority of participants are enrolled in university or college Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs.

For the past four years we have focused on creating Talawa, a mobile app to help community organizations like ourselves better manage their membership. We first saw the need for a social media component to keep in contact with our volunteers. Later, we realized that these organizations often faced challenges with the project management of events and keeping track of volunteer abilities, roles and responsibilities.

We are glad to restart the Calico Challenge after the difficulties of the COVID19 pandemic. Despite these challenges, our coders managed to make continuous updates, and our sponsors kept in touch. This is a continuation of our successes with the international Google Summer of Code and GitHub Externship programs. It is good to be back.

Peter Harrison, President, The Palisadoes Foundation

The aim is to make Talawa useful for any community-based organization such as clubs, small religious institutions, neighborhood groups, and volunteer associations. We also want to see how the open source software could be installed as a “freemium” cloud service as many of these organizations often don’t have sufficient IT skills to run the software independently. We hope that our contributors will help us achieve this goal in 2022. We hope that revenue from the cloud service will partially supplement inflows from our donors and sponsors to help us expand the Calico program further.

More information about Calico can be found on our website’s Calico Challenge page.

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Our Current and Past Sponsors

Many corporations and individuals have contributed to the success of the Calico Challenge. Here is a representative list.

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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.

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.

Welcome Utkarsh!

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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.

Santa Clara, CA – November 23, 2021: The Palisadoes Foundation has been selected to participate as an open source organization by the GitHub Externship run by GitHub India.

This is the second time that the Foundation has been awarded this status after successfully participating in the first Externship in the Summer of 2021. At that time, GitHub received over 1300 student applications from 175 Indian higher education institutions that are participating in the GitHub Campus Program. 62 students were selected as GitHub Externs to work with projects and mentors from 18 organizations, of which Palisadoes was one.

Three students participated by contributing to our Talawa mobile app projects. They focused on adding new features and redesigning the web administration portal.

This continued collaboration 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 GitHub Externship

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.

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.

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.

Welcome Ritik!

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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.