GSoC 2020 : Student's Introduction to community

Community GSoC
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Hi folks,

Again congratulations and a warm welcome to the 9 students selected for Google Summer of Code 2020 , and extended thanks to our fantastic group of OpenMRS project mentor volunteers, as well as all students that submitted applications this year!

Students - the community bonding period has begun, and we’ll be posting more details around the next steps soon, but in the meantime, please take the opportunity to get in touch with your mentors, and introduce yourself to the community and other students in this thread. Specifically, please tell us about yourself by answering the following questions here:

  1. Where are you from/based?
  2. How far along are you in your education? Where are you currently enrolled?
  3. Tell us about your project in a sentence or two.
  4. What’s your IRC/Telegram nickname?
  5. What interests you about OpenMRS?
  6. Tell us one (or more) interesting or fun facts about yourself
  7. Tell us about your previous open source contributions (short and sweet :wink: )
  8. Which are the Open source tools/techs that you most preferred to use, introduce to the OpenMRS community?
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Hello everyone, myself Aman from India. Currently, I am pursuing my Bachelor of Technology from National Institute of Technology, Surat in India and am currently in third year of this four year program.

So, the project I will be working on is “OpenMRS should support PostgreSQL”. While OpenMRS runs successfully atop MySQL, there are a lot of complications when it comes to using PostgreSQL like issues due to hibernate dialect differences between the two, problems with liquibase changesets. I will be working this summer to resolve these problems.

My IRC nickname is aman1 . What interests me most about OpenMRS is how such a big project has been kept functioning with utmost level of sincerity by some of the smartest developers for social good. Community here is really supportive and always ready to help in case you get struck.

Well there are not a lot of fun facts about me. My hobbies include playing football, cricket, PC games and I ocassionaly do meditation.

OpenMRS will be my first Open Source organization that I’ll be contributing to. Although, I have done some personal projects and collaborative projects with my friends, all being present at my github account.

There are a lot of Opensource tools that we make use of, knowingly or unknowningly. For instance I did a recent web based project using Django and later I found out that it was open source.

So yeah thats all from my side. Hoping to have a fruitful summer ahead with all of you. :smiley:

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Hi there. I am Shivansh Rakesh. I am a software developer hailing from India. I am a technophile and an opensource-lover. I just completed my second year of B.Tech. from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. My IRC nick is iamsr and on Telegram, it is ShivanshRakesh (I prefer Telegram though).

My project is about adding support for FHIR Narratives. For those who are new to the community, FHIR is basically a standard for exchanging health records; FHIR Narratives are human readable representations of the resources described by FHIR. The project is all about adding support for the same, which I feel, is essential to enhance the user-friendliness of the implementation.

Coming to OpenMRS, the thing I like the most about it is that it contributes directly to the society, by giving a push to medical advancement through its Medical Record System. This is something that motivates me the most, and also links to my motive of making technology advance further. Talking specifically about the community, I guess this is the most helpful, responsive and organised developer community I’ve ever been a part of, which further interests me.

Umm, fun facts huh? I love music. One can find me with my guitar or synthesizer when I lose sync with my schedule. I also like designing. I am a designer at Ping!, a student magazine and at E-Cell, IIIT-Hyd.

Apart from OpenMRS and my own opensource projects, I have worked on a project under FOSSi (Librecores) and made other small contributions to Oppia Foundation and FOSSASIA.

Talking about the opensource tools, I prefer GitHub for managing issues, etc; though in the recent past, working with OpenMRS, I’ve also been getting a grasp of JIRA. I use VS Code and Eclipse IDE for development (since they have VCS support out-of-the-box).

So yeah, that’s pretty much it. I am really excited to work with this great community. Hoping to have a summer full of productivity. Also, thanks to all my mentors, and all the very best to the other GSoC candidates too! :smiley:

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hi everyone, I am Rishabh Agarwal from India. Currently, I am pursuing my Integrated Masters of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Dhanbad in India and currently in second year of this five year program.

So, the project I will be working on is “OpenMRS Android Client 2.9” which is a compatible functional of refence appliaction and i am looking forward to make it more user friendly with bit more features

My IRC nickname is rishabh997 . What interests me most about OpenMRS is how such a big project has been kept functioning with utmost level of sincerity. Community here is really supportive and always ready to help in case you get struck. It seems wonderful to see people across the globe use our platform with certain modifications in huge industries(health related).

Talking about me, i love making new friends and I am a lazy lad with good sense of humor, I do run a meme page of my own for college related stuff. I love playing Cricket and football. Keeping all this aside, I also take interest in new technologies and being a mathematics student, I am also inclined towards machine learning.

I was introduced to open source in December, 2018 as a part of a college event where we had to complete a project in a group(not so open source but yeah, gave me idea about git and stuff). Then I worked for Fossasia and helped them migrate theiw google maps api to mapbox api. Then finally i switched to openMRS and sticked with it as it had a wonderful environment and i could help my coding skills for good.

I primarily use Android Studio and Java is my speciality. Also i have designed few server in flask for hackathons.

So yeah thats all from my side. Hoping for a fantastic summer ahead with all of you. :smiley:

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Hi there. I am pahonsi bebeto achile .I am pursuing my Bachelor of Engeneering from faculty of engeneering Technology, under University of Buea in Cameroon and am currently in third year of this four year program. My IRC nick is achilep .

My project concerns Upgrade Platform Core Libraries Project. most of the OpenMRS core platform libraries are a little old which prevents us from being able to exploit all the latest functionalities in the latest published versions of these libraries.

My admiration for OpenMRS is due to the fact that it contributes to the improvement of the living conditions of society, thanks to its medical record system. which is one of my passion. Speaking of the community, it’s the most active and organized developer community I’ve ever seen.

my fun facts are: play football even as i am not a good player, i also like playing the piano but i am just a beginner.

Apart from OpenMRS I recently started contributing to creative commons.

Speaking of open source tools, I prefer GitHub to manage issue, Android studio and java to develop mobile applications, Vlc to watch films, LibreOffice to handle documents, etc.

I think that’s it. It is an honor for me to work with this great community. Hoping to give the best of myself and produce an exceptional result. Thank you also to all my mentors and to all the other GSoC candidates!

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Hi everyone and congratulations to all accepted students! I am Alin Mihaila, I am from Bucharest, Romania, where I study at Politehnica University of Bucharest, field Computer Science. This summer I will work at the project “Switching from XML Mappings to Annotations on OpenMRS domain Objects”, a project which is very useful for other contributors because there are less files to look in for a property you are looking for. My Telegram nickname is AlinMihaila. At OpenMRS I like the most this community from the forum, because there are always people who can help you. I also liked the motto of the organisation, and I always liked to do something to help people. Even if I am a programmer, I am a very active person and I like very much football, swimming and travel. As a fun fact about me, I am that kind of person who have nightmares when I am waiting for something, and a few nights before the results for GSOC I had a few dreams in which I was not accepted and I woke up very sad. OpenMRS was my first opensource project I contributed for, but I got familiar with it quickly. I worked at a few projects with my university mates, and that made the interaction with opensource easier. As dev environment I use IntellIJ, and Ubuntu. I also use github, and since I started contributing for OpenMRS i got familiar with JIRA.

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Hello everyone. I am Siddharth Vaish from India. Currently, I am pursuing my Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior (IIIT Gwalior) and currently in third year.

The project on which I’ll be working on is “Advancement of OAuth2 Module and Improvements in SMART OWA”. The basic idea of this project is to be able to run existing SMART apps on OpenMRS via FHIR. This will allow users of OpenMRS to be able to take advantage of already existing health apps without writing a single line of code. It would give a Plug and Play functionality to OpenMRS (just like we install apps on our Android/IOS devices through Play Store/App Store)

My IRC nickname is sid__ and on Telegram is Sidvaish97 ( I prefer OpenMRS Talk ). OpenMRS is great as a community. The best thing here is that OpenMRS has ample of projects and people who are contributing regularly. So for a new comer it’s easy to start. I must say that OpenMRS has some amazing people who are always ready to help no matter how silly or stupid the question may be. I have asked plenty of them myself :sweat_smile:

Fun Facts :sweat_smile: I guess this is the most difficult question to answer for most of us :joy: :joy: So not really a fun fact but here it is I really love playing sports to name a few I love playing badminton and Table Tennis.

I have contributed to Wikimedia Commons Android app also I have answered some questions on Stack Overflow.

The best tool I can think of in Open Source world is Git. I was unaware of Git in my first year of development and the things were really difficult to mange without it. Git is obviously the first step towards Open Source and also the best tool one can find. Other than that I love the JetBrains IDEs, I have got a chance to work on few of them namely Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm.

It was a dream for me to be selected as a GSoC student and OpenMRS helped me in turning it into a reality. I am really honoured to be working with some of the best developers and students in the world. I hope to learn and also help others learn new things this summer. Again congratulations everyone :partying_face:

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Hello everyone, I am Varun Gupta from India. I am currently pursuing Bachelor of Engineering (Hons.) in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani. I am in my final year of university.

The project I’ll be working on is “Improve FHIR Search”. The OpenMRS FHIR Module allows searching resources by some parameters and this search is not very exhaustive at the moment. Also, there is not a paging support for the search and we aren’t also really making use of the Lucene indices available for certain resources. I’ll be working on all of these issues throughout the summer.

My Telegram name is Varun Gupta, but I am more active on Talk and Slack. OpenMRS is a large scale project which aims at helping the underprivileged sections of the society and is maintained very well by the vast group of enthusiastic developers. The community is quite helpful and you get responses to all your queries very quickly and this is something that I really thank and appreciate.

There is just one thing I find interesting about myself and it basically is that I have never watched a TV series till date (I don’t know, I just don’t feel like watching any!). Apart from that, I like playing and following sports and that is really my favourite hobby.

OpenMRS is the first open source organisation that I’ll be contributing to. I have done some software development projects at university and at my two software development internships, but this is really going to be my first open source project.

I feel like Version Control is the backbone of software development and should be the first thing to be learnt by a developer. I used to struggle with Git initially, but I finally decided to give it some time and I am really comfortable using it now. The other tool that I find very helpful is an IDE. Managing a large codebase without a good IDE is an almost impossible task. These two tools have indeed made life a lot easier.

That’s pretty much it from my side. I feel great to be a part of this community and look forward to contributing to OpenMRS and simultaneously growing as a developer during the summer. Thanks to everyone who made this possible and congratulations to all the selected students. :slight_smile:

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Hello everyone. I am Ayeshmantha Perera from Sri Lanka. Currently, I am pursuing my Master’s degree in Information Technology from the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT) and in the final year.

The project on which I’ll be working on is Expose System Metrics For Monitoring

OpenMRS is great as a community. That I would love to work on.

My Mentors are Jude Niroshan and Suthagar Kaliyapthy.

I would love to lean new technologies.

Thanks alot for providing me the opportunity to work again with openMRS in gsoc 2020 :smiley:

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Hi there, I’m Jayasanka Weerasinghe from Sri Lanka. I’m a third-year software engineering undergraduate from the University of Westminster, London via Informatics Institute of Technology, Sri Lanka.

The project I will be working on is “Improving OpenMRS DHIS2 Integration” The main objective of this project is making the DHIS2 Reporting module compatible with the current OpenMRS platform and the latest version of DHIS2.

My telegram nickname is “jay_asanka”. This is the first time I got selected for GSoC. ‘Write Code Save Lives’ this fascinated me for the very first time when I’m starting to contribute to the OpenMRS.

Apart from programming, I like arts and crafts. I’m a creative person and like making things with my own. I love reading, so I’d always love hearing about the great books you’ve read.

I’m an active contributor of entgra.io since 2018. Also, I’m contributing Sustainable Education Foundation since 2017. Apart from them, I’ve contributed to several opensource communities.

Git was the best opensource tool I’ve been ever used. Apart from that, I love opensource from Facebook such as ReactJS, PyTorch, etc.

I would like to mention that OpenMRS Community is So awesome! :heart_eyes: Thanks for everyone and congratulations to all the selected students!! :partying_face:

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hi every one,thanks much for those awesome introduction stories and we are glad as a community to take on gsoc 2020 with you people :wave:

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