CCI Welcomes Google Summer of Code Contributors

The Center of Complex Interventions is excited to welcome three contributors to the Mathesar project this summer as part of Google’s Summer of Code. Each contributor will be working on adding a specific feature to Mathesar under the guidance of 1-2 members of CCI’s Mathesar core team. 

Mathesar is an open source database project, currently in early development. Mathesar provides an intuitive user interface for non-technical users to work with relational databases without any existing knowledge of database concepts. Users can store, organize, and set up various views of their data. Users will also be able to collaborate with other users, see visualizations of their data, and evolve their data model as their needs change. Mathesar is designed to be self-hosted on users’ own servers. 

Over the next few months, our Summer of Code contributors will work with the team to get Mathesar ready for an alpha release. 

Meet our contributors

Yurii Palaida

Yurii Palaida is an alumnus of Binary Studio Academy, one of the best free online programming courses in Ukraine. Yurii works as a full-stack .NET developer and adores Python in his free time. Yurii also has experience as a mentor himself, working with students from the Academy after he graduated to build a state-of-the-art web application. In his free time, Yurii enjoys traveling with his wife, playing with their dog and cat, and reading about new topics like learning, evolution, and behaviorism. “I love learning and exploring. That’s why I applied to participate in the Google Summer of Code,” says Yurii. “I’m so happy to become a part of this community and consider it a first step into the world of open-source.”

Yurii will implement “dependency graph” functionality in Mathesar that will consist of API endpoints for querying dependents for specific database objects and a UI for displaying those in the form of visual graphs. 

Jinxiao Li

Jinxiao is a Master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in Information Systems Management. With previous experience as a data scientist intern, she maintained database tables with millions of daily recordings, and understands the need to design a handy data management application. In her free time Jinxiao enjoys painting, reading detective stories, and traveling. “Developing a tool that can help people with their work will be a really fun thing to do in my life,” she says.

Jinxiao will implement support for working with JSON data in Mathesar. Her work will include automatic recognition of JSON during data import, changing a database field to a JSON object, data validation and support for custom grouping, filtering, and sorting operations.

Anish Umale

Anish Umale is a junior computer engineering student from India, where his focus is in backend and API development. He’s interested in exploring different areas, including blockchain, computer networks, and system design. In Anish’s free time he likes to read, watch live streams, and play video games, as well as swimming and kite flying. He says, “I am fascinated by the idea of open-source software which unknowingly I’ve been using my entire life and is used by millions of users worldwide for free! This inspired me to contribute to open-source software.”

Currently, Mathesar only supports creating a new table when data is imported. Anish aims to enhance the capability of Mathesar’s APIs and database code to support importing data into an existing table for a seamless user experience.

Mentorship and community

The Summer of Code program is focused on mentorship as well as coding and open source. Mentors will meet with mentees at least once a week and stay in touch via chat daily. They’ll answer questions, review code, help mentees when stuck, and generally do whatever it takes to help the mentees complete their project on time. Yurii, Jinxiao, and Anish will learn what it’s like to work with a professional engineering team, work on an open source project, and improve both technical and non-technical skills.

“We’re so thrilled to have these three talented young professionals on our team this summer, and we’re excited to share our community with them as well as our ethos of open source,” says project lead Kriti Godey, director of technology for CCI. “By the end of the program, we expect to see their projects become part of the main Mathesar codebase and available to Mathesar users.”