 Hello, it's Rachel Lawson here again from the Drupal Association. In this video, this chat, we are going to speak with Vishal Choudhury, who has been this year's 2020s Google Summer of Code student. Hello Vishal, how are you? Yeah, I'm great. Thanks. That's good. So we have a few of the people on the on the call and we'll all get chance to introduce ourselves in a moment. But first of all, can you tell me a little bit about yourself? Where are you at the moment? Yeah, so I'm in New Delhi, India. I'm currently a programming enthusiast. So from high school about building projects and basic sites and looking forward in Drupal community. Wow, that's great. So, so you were at college, as you say, high school, and you want to take part in Google Summer of Code. So how did you hear about that? So I think this program is pretty popular or famous amongst youth, especially under engineering background. So I heard it from my colleague. Oh, that's great. Okay. So what can you tell us about the program? What does Google Summer of Code do? Yeah, so it's a three month internship student intern program in which we get to work with our professional or experienced personnel in the field and create some projects and help in the community. That's great. So you'll sit down, you're at college and you're looking at this Google Summer of Code and you look down through a long, long list of projects. And you chose Drupal to work with Drupal. Do you want to tell us kind of why? Yeah, like initially in the initial phase where you apply for almost the look for every community and many organizations in the BSOC. And I think the huge community of Drupal and professionals from different areas and available for Drupal community. I really like to working here and I mean, I like the concept of CMS and for it. Oh, that's great. Yeah. I think the CMS and everything is kind of interesting to us all here actually. So you apply and you have to fill in a proposal and things like this and so on. Yeah. And did you get help along the way with the proposal? I mean, yeah, like when you discuss the projects and ask the integrities about the things, what mentor would be looking for the proposal in the community? Cool. So you got some help along the way and you were assigned a mentor for the project you were getting involved in, yes? Yeah. Sean McCabe. Yeah. So Sean McCabe. So Sean, hello Sean. You're the CTO AcroMedia, is that correct? That is correct, yes. Good. That's good because that means that you've kept your Drupal.org profile up today. Yes. It hasn't been replaced yet. Or it means my title hasn't changed in a long time. Oh, this is great. So you chose, you were Vishal's mentor for the summer, which is fantastic. Now, being a mentor for a Google Summer of Code student is actually a lot of work. It's a lot of contributions. So again, why? It was actually someone else that our company mentioned that, I mean, I was aware of the Summer of Code program, but he said that Drupal actually has a lot of spots every year and usually they don't actually all get filled. And so I was like, okay, well, we could, you know, I'm sure I could come up with a few, you know, projects and things like that that we could propose for people to do. And then if someone's going to be, you know, sponsored by Google to work basically a whole summer, I'm sure we could come up with enough time to, you know, mentor them and stuff like that. That said, I did round up a couple other people who I work with to help out with the mentoring Vishal programmed a little bit faster than I could keep up with. So yeah, but that was easy. I could just fully other people into helping out doing the reviews and stuff. But yeah, I mean it was basically to get, you know, three months of straight contrib time. We had lots of things so sort of on our wish list to do at Acro of like, hey, these things would be great for the community but they just, you know, haven't quite made it from a business perspective or whatever. And so it was like, okay, well, what could we, you know, get done that would be great there. So we proposed a couple and yeah, that's sort of how it went. So obviously Vishal, I'm sure will have learned lots of things from yourself. But do you think that there are things that you learnt whilst being a mentor that I overestimated how quickly I'd be able to review things. That doesn't sound familiar at all. A programmer has never overestimated anything that they've done or any skill set that they have. I've had a patch open on my browser for about two weeks now and I keep saying to the team, oh yeah, no, I'll get to that. I'll get to that tomorrow. I know I'll get to it soon. Yeah, as like a manager, it's super helpful too because you're like, yeah, if I had like a whole day I could review that you're like, yeah, in this mythical future time and when I have a whole look at something or whatever, right, I'm sure it will come up soon. I learned a fair bit about, you know, someone coming straight into Drupal, you know, and straight into commerce we actually started with a fairly complex project. Shaw actually onboarded super well to Drupal because it's known for its sort of rough learning curve, especially to get all the way into commerce and not even really easy parts of commerce but we're talking about fraud and stuff like that or whatever it was. We were really in the weeds, but that worked quite well. And then it was learning actually quite a bit about the summer of code project as well. I didn't realize we had so many slots available. And it was actually unfortunate we couldn't fill them all we had, we had tons of applications but we had very few good applications there was lots of ones that were essentially spam people had just clearly tried to apply to every single thing that they could see. And Michelle was one of the only people who properly crafted a proposal, talk to people ahead of time, got himself involved in the community. That was a big thing that I was even being mentored a little bit on how to be a mentor by a couple people. And to check that people were involved in the community and followed some of the recommendations in the proposal they you know they tried to go make patches ahead of time and things like that. And we didn't have a lot of that because it didn't seem that people had really even read that so that was kind of unfortunate but I mean it did make visual applications stand out we only had. I think I reviewed two applications that were actually really good applications or whatever so be nice to get more of those in the future, I mean you get, you get covered for, you know, a whole summer job of programming on open source. I mean, I wish I could get paid the whole summer to work just to management things and stuff like that or whatever so it sounds pretty awesome. I know the feeling. So it's funny because I was going to ask a question there around what what do you think we can do in terms of more resources that would attract more mentors but it sounds like what you're saying is making sure maybe a resources could be around how we students really understand what we're going to be looking for when we're selecting people would be a big help. Yeah. Yeah, because we had an okay. We had, I think the mentors put through 10 different projects or something like that I think of proposals available. And mine was the only one you actually just got decent applicants really, which is why it came through so that that was more the problem than the than the lack of mentors I mean Drupal has such a community of mentors and mentorship But anyways, you know, that part was pretty easy. But it's getting good applicants we tried to do a little bit of local promotion within Canada but it was kind of at the last minute because we got in a little late sort of to the program. But that would definitely think it seemed like it was underutilized I mean ultimately we could have gotten more spots, and we didn't so it seems like, you know, a big waste to lose out on all this free open source funding or whatever right Absolutely. Yeah. So just jumping back to Vishal for a little minute. Because it's all about you at the end of the day. It's the end of the summer now. And you have been working on a new version of a key Drupal module commerce fraud. And can you tell us about it what what does it do. Yeah, so the project mainly aims at checking the orders of how the fraudulent and how they work and basically distinguishing the exceptional orders which are not up to the mark for the e-commerce and using different rules and mostly with entities and plugins so that the orders details can be extracted and shown to the user and admin how orders are functioning at what quality of orders. Wonderful. Yeah, so that's pretty much ready for use now is that Yeah, We tagged a beta at basically about the end of Vishal's term, which I would say is a very usable beta to it's one you could use for in production or something. It's mostly a beta just because it hasn't got much use yet and so it seemed a little optimistic to tag a 1.0 I mean that's fantastic. I've got some client sites that would be a good candidate. Yeah, so it's funny actually because what I was going to do is bring in Ryan Zurama here, CEO of Centaro and co-founder of Drupal Commerce. Hi, Ryan. Hey, so Drupal Commerce, how should we say it's been a big part of your life? Yeah, it's been the biggest part of my life. Aside from, I guess, my marriage and my family, then there's Drupal Commerce. That's my fourth child, you know, seem to be fifth child. We're about to have one more. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that this model is really exciting because it's a frequent conversation, particularly with larger merchants. I mean there's about 50,000 merchants running on Drupal Commerce right now, processing over $2 billion in annual transactions based on our estimates, our payment payments. And once you get above, you know, even a small amount of sales, I mean let's say a million dollars a year and you kind of hit that first here, oh, I'm a legit e-commerce business. Your website becomes an attack vector for fraudulent activity all over the world. It could be as simple as somebody just using your checkout form to try to test a whole batch of stolen credit cards to find, you know, a functioning credit card to, as this module detects, you know, fraudulent orders placed in other parts of the world or using stolen credentials and shipping to a different country, you know, the rules that Vishal has included in this module would really help flag those orders to a customer service representative or a merchant so that they could really scrutinize it before they ship the product out. And I legit had just had this conversation with the merchant recently who's in Switzerland, they use Braintree for payment, and they were being tasked by Braintree to prove that their e-commerce platform had fraud control on it. And so like, having found out now about Vishal's work, guess what website that module is going on. I was just going to say, because literally when I gave you a message, I sent you a message on Slack talking about maybe you'd like to come along to this conversation and said that Vishal had been working on this commerce broad thing. You were like, oh, well, that's a strange coincidence. I can really use that. Yeah, yeah, so we, you know, we partner with PayPal for the development of the Drupal commerce platform. And they connected us to an analyst firm who wanted to learn more about Drupal commerce as a platform and half the questions were about, okay, well, what do you do to prevent fraud? What do you do to support merchants? And again, this is kind of PayPal's angle, right? Like PayPal is very merchant and fraud, merchant friendly with respect to fraudulent transactions. And so it was a really good conversation. And I'm sitting here on this call thinking, huh, this is kind of identifying some gaps we've long known we had in the platform or should probably figure out how to fill. And lo and behold, you know, Vishal and acro media are over here filling it. And I think this is like one of the greatest things about the Drupal community being an open source is that you end up with these partner and friendly companies like acro media who just take it upon themselves to have a vested interest in the platform. And then they're willing to find opportunities just like this to increase the capabilities of the platform. And so like I had no clue it was happening, right? But over here is Sean and his team working with Vishal to now fill this gap that we've had. And, and as you said, it's really important because the reputation of Drupal as an e-commerce platform is impacted by gross fraud, you know, so it's great. It's a great story. I hope you're very pleased with the work Vishal because it's obviously been very important. It's been key to the project which is which is great. Looking back at the looking back through the summer, I through applying through working with all the people you've worked with. Is there anything that you wish you knew before you started? I mean, I think, like, majorly understanding how Drupal works and the basic concept Drupal understanding more about Drupal core would be much better. Yeah. Cool. And you have not been the first Drupal, the first Google Summer of Code student that we've had. You won't be the last. I'm sure we'll have many more in the future. What would you tell the next student who's about to join the program? What would you tell them now that you've learned? I mean, it's a golden opportunity for anyone like me. And as you said, like, it's a great summer, even with the lockdown and coronavirus, like, it's a great opportunity, great community and practical experience, which I don't think I will find anywhere, even in my college. Well, that's fantastic. So I hope that your career is is boosted. And I hope that all of the people out there that are looking for people who are really key to the Drupal project get to hear about where you where will they be able to find you to come and say here come work with us. Yeah, like I'm available on LinkedIn and GitHub. Excellent. Okay. And I don't know if Sean or Ryan have anything, any tips for VCHEL's career in the future or anything else they want to add? If someone wants to hire them, they should hire them before I have a spot to hire them. I didn't hire them because we have to hire some Canadians for a specific project. Unfortunately, people located in Canada, which is about the only thing preventing that right now. So, yeah, well, again, it's good. And I actually met my partner in Centauri, Boyan Javanovich through the Google Summer Code program in 2010, which is when he worked on the Drupal Commerce affiliate module. And, you know, that started a friendship where eventually he came to work for Commerce Guys in 2016 and we separated from platform to form what is now Centauri. And, you know, all of that came as a result of him just diving in. So, you know, my advice to Michelle and whoever else is interested in the program is, like, if you had fun, like, dive in. There's a lot more areas to contribute to and plenty of opportunity in the Drupal community, not just to make an impact on the project, but also on your own life and career. And that's been true for me and for countless others. Well, that's wonderful. Well, as I say, thank you, Vishal. You've been fantastic. You've done some work. And I hope that we get to work with you or the project gets to work with you many times in the future. And good luck for that future as well. I think you deserve it. So thank you. Yeah, thank you everyone. Thanks. And thank you everyone for joining this. I hope everyone finds it interesting. Thank you.