Summer of Swift: Soe
The Google Summer of Code has ended. This year SwiftRiver was a mentoring organization and we wanted to give our GSoCers some ‘face’ time on the blog by interviewing them. Soe is a developer who worked on our distributed reputation product, River ID.
Interview with Soe Q: What is your educational (or professional) background?
Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering. Starting Master’s in Sustainable Engineering this academic year. I like to code for fun and for social wellness.
Q: The project you were working on was called ____________. Why did you select that as your GSoC project and what did you learn from working on it?
RiverID. I find it challenging as I am required to build a scalable platform interacting with remote Swift instances from scratch. The project involves technical challenges to work with NoSQL for scalability and OAuth and REST for interacting with remote Swift instances. Additionally, it involves working with human psychology to determine and reward useful contributions towards Swift instances.
Q: What challenges did you run into during and how did you overcome them?
Working with edge technologies; hence, not many reading materials and examples are available. Hence, it involves lots of trying out and experimenting around.
Q: GSoCers get to choose the organizations they work with, why did you choose to work with SwiftRiver?
I am much impressed by social impact that Ushahidi has. As SwiftRiver would add more values to Ushahidi, I wanted to contribute something to this upcoming platform.
Q: Any closing remarks?
I will continue contributing to RiverID till it is functional. As I have keen interest in developing journalism tools for rural areas, my experience working with RiverID would be very useful for my future project.
