MLH-Fellowship / FellowStories

A platform for MLH Fellows to share their stories and experiences

Fellow Stories

A platform for MLH Fellows to share their stories and experiences.

Browser Support

• Firefox: version 4 and up
• Chrome: any version
• Safari: version 5.2 and up
• Internet Explorer/Edge: version 8 and up
• Opera: version 9 and up

Note: Support for modern mobile browsers is experimental. The website is not responsive in mobile devices until now.

Inspiration

Fellow Stories aims to build an exclusive community around MLH Fellows and their interests, experiences and stories. It provides a single platform to all the MLH Fellows to post their blogs so that they can target and engage more readership from the audience that wants to explore more about the fellowship and the fellows. Only the users authorized by the admin i.e. the official MLH Fellows will be allowed to post on the platform, hence, this will act as an authentic source for insights and details about the fellowship.

Explore, Connect, Follow and more!

How we built it

• Frontend: Docusaurus, React
• Backend: Strapi, NodeJS
• Design: Figma
• Version Control: Git and GitHub
• Database: MongoDB
• Web Hosting: Netlify, Heroku

What it does

• Single Platform for all MLH Fellowship Stories & Experiences
• Helps MLH Fellows pinpoint and gain an audience
• Easy to track discussions and reader engagement for the fellowship
• Interactive Dashboard with latest stats about posts
• Easy search functionality

Challenges we ran into

1. All of us are new to Docusaurus, took us some time to explore it. Customizing Docusaurus for dynamically rendering links in Nav bar and layout was challenging at first but with enough research, we were able to make it happen.
2. Integrating backend to frontend is always time consuming, so that's one challenge. To add a new blog post to docusaurus, we need to commit a markdown file to the GitHub repo via the backend. This required took the most chunk of our time as
3. Time management was really challenging since it's only the beginning of the fellowship
4. Working in different timezones was quite a task :P

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1. Fellow Stories is one of it's kind, exclusively for the MLH Fellows, by the MLH Fellows
2. Fellows now have a dedicated platform for all their stories and experiences
3. This would bring the community closer, and help it expand even more
4. This would help in setting up a dedicated readership for the fellowship

What we learned

1. It was really interesting for us to explore Docusaurus. We were all new to this, thus took a while to explore and understand how things work within Docusaurus before actually starting to code.
2. We all went through rigorous meetings and discussions in this phase, which helped us in understanding more about collaboration to an open source project.
3. We learned and implemented open source best practices like- making use of GitHub project board, setting up branch protection rules, adding Issue/PR templates, and following a consistent style for writing commit messages etc.
4. We made use of some GitHub bots like - Welcome Bot, Stale Bot, Gitpod etc so as to speed collaboration and project management.

What's next for Fellow Stories

• Create a MLH Fellowship Email Newsletter to update people on new posts
• Integrate with GitHub for easy access to recent updates in posts
• Option to customize and manage favorite content on dashboard
• Add tags for filter and search
• Comments for blog posts

How to Get Started?

GitHub Repository Structure

S.No.	Branch Name	Purpose
1.	main	contains the frontend related code
2.	backend	contains all backend related code
3.	documentation	contains all documentation

Setup

• Fork and Clone the repo using

$ git clone https://github.com/MLH-Fellowship/FellowStories.git
$ cd FellowStories

• Install all yarn dependencies using

yarn install

• Run the server using

yarn start

MLH Fellowship( Fall 2020)

This is a hackathon project made by MLH Fellows(Spring 2020) - Pod 2.0.0 i.e. Shiny Shifu

Team:

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much."

S.No.	Name	Role	GitHub Username:octocat:
1.	Pawan Kolhe	Frontend Developer	@PawanKolhe
2.	Pragati Verma	Frontend Developer	@PragatiVerma18
3.	Lisa Chandra	Backend Developer	@lisa761
4.	Israel Adetunji	Backend Developer	@adisen

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Pawan Kolhe 💻 🎨

Pragati Verma 💻 📝

Lisa Chandra 💻

Israel Adetunji 💻

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

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