The Mojaloop Community is a great place for talented students to level up their skills.
Elijah Okello, now a Software Engineer at INFITX, started as a student contributor to the Mojaloop Community in 2022 while he attended Makerere University, working on his B.S. in Software Engineering. Elijah is a great example of how contributing to Mojaloop can provide a host of benefits and even help launch your career.
“I think a lot of my career development has been because of the Mojaloop community,” says Okello.
“I received a lot of mentorship, because as you’re contributing, your work is being reviewed, and it’s very important for an open source community to keep to good standards. These interactions changed the way I do my work, especially in software development. They also made me a better engineer.”
Joining the Mojaloop Community
Okello got started with Mojaloop when he attended a HiPipo hackathon where he and other participants worked on building a fintech solution on top of the Mojaloop API. Intrigued about Mojaloop, he joined the Mojaloop Slack channel and decided to attend a Community meeting after watching a recording of a past presentation.
For Okello, attending a Community meeting was key. “When I went to the Zanzibar convening it was the final decision maker because I met the people in person.”
At the Community meeting, Pedro Barreto, solutions architect at Crosslake Technologies and the lead for the vNext workstream, asked for help and Okello responded.
He has since worked on different workstreams, mostly vNext and the current codebase, vNow. Okello says, “Lately, I’ve been working on the government-to-person (G2P) payments workstream. This workstream is building a proof of concept for the integration of Mifos and MOSIP in a digital public good that governments can use to deliver funds to people, especially in times of need. Currently I am also involved in the deployment of a digital retail payments platform for COMESA based on Mojaloop.”
Okello highlights the key difference that has kept him involved in the Community to the present day: “The Mojaloop Community is welcoming. I’ve tried contributing to other open source projects, but most are not as friendly. It was different from my experience in the Mojaloop community. It’s very welcoming and engaging.”
Juggling Schedules and Other Challenges
One of the struggles Okello faced was balancing his Community volunteer work with his academic work and getting a job. “Depending on the time I had it could become a scheduling challenge because I needed to be committed to all of them. But I’ll always choose to be a part of the Mojaloop village!” says Okello.
A second challenge lay in the fact that, while he knew other programming languages, he was unfamiliar with TypeScript, the JavaScript-based language used in the Mojaloop platform. He had to work to get to the level where he could contribute.
He wasn’t left on his own to figure everything out, however. “The people in the Community were definitely very supportive and really kind. If you don’t know something, they’ll take you through it nicely and let you know what you need to do.”
Winning a Google Summer of Code Internship
The Google Summer of Code program is a paid internship that contributes to hundreds of open source projects every year, and competition for placements is fierce. According to Business Insider, the acceptance rate for internships in the program is about 4%, the same as for MIT.
“I got into the Summer of Code because of my involvement in the Mojaloop community,” says Okello.
During the 23rd Community Meeting in Kigali, he met Ed Cable, the president of the Mifos initiative. Cable recommended that Okello apply to the Google Summer of Code initiative, saying that Mifos was participating as one of the open source projects.
Okello summarizes with, “I got in and spent a great summer contributing to a deployable package for the Mifos EE payment hub using Mojaloop and Apache Fineract — a project which is still being maintained.”
More Benefits for Students
Okello notes that as a Community member, he learned about the latest technology and engineering principles used in the real world. “What I learned is school was good. But in the Community, I learned how to use the Agile software framework first-hand. I also started using domain-driven development to make very complex systems modular for easier maintenance and scalability.”
There are also great networking opportunities in the Mojaloop community for a student trying to build a career in fintech.
Okello says, “There are few communities in the world that have Mojaloop’s networking potential. The number of finance and fintech experts you can find in the room at a Community meeting is just overwhelming. You’ll find policymakers, central bankers, technology leaders, and a lot of very accomplished software engineers.”
There are also direct and indirect job opportunities to be found in the Community for those who excel. “If people in the Community know what you can do, they can give a recommendation that goes further than any CV can,” says Okello.
Attending the Community events also gives a fuller picture of how Mojaloop contributors make a difference. “You don’t stay the same once you learn that people are doing great things to help people, and you become driven to collaborate and work towards something bigger yourself. It’s the best thing that can happen to anyone, to have friends who are making a big, huge, scalable difference in the world.”
Advice for Students
Okello recommends that students new to the Community start small. “My first contribution was just one line and it didn’t even count as code — I was just removing a comment — but it’s one of the little things that count.”
He also notes that students need to put in a good effort. “I’ve seen a lot of students that come around but don’t contribute, or don’t contribute in a way that helps make progress. You can’t hold things back, because work needs to get done. That’s how you learn, and that’s what allows the Mojaloop Community to be sustainable. It’s just a win-win for everyone.”
