Fellow Stories

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

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Inspiration

Fellow Stories aims to build an exclusive community around MLH Fellows and their interests, experiences, and stories. It provides a single platform for 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.

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

How we built it

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

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 the 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. Fellows now have a dedicated platform for all their stories and experiences
  2. Learning how git can be used in the backend with node.js
  3. Exploring Docusaurus in depth
  4. Building a dedicated platform for fellows to share all their stories and experiences

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 the 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

  1. Create an MLH Fellowship Email Newsletter to update people on new posts
  2. Integrate with GitHub for easy access to recent updates in posts
  3. Option to customize and manage favorite content on the dashboard
  4. Add tags for filter and search
  5. Comments for blog posts

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