Foss Overflow'21: My Experience

by Battu Ashita — 21/1/2022

In this blog, I will discuss my experience with Foss Overflow'21 and my contribution to the Knowledge Sharing Platform project.

Program Overview

Foss Overflow'21 is a month-long event organized by IIT Bhilai in collaboration with Google Developers. Students get to work on open sourced projects under the guidance of mentors and gear themselves for global open source internships like GSoC and Outreachy.

Project Idea

The main idea behind the Knowledge Sharing Platform project is to share class notes, previous year question papers and give feedbacks for the courses. Students get to both view and upload the resources.

Why I chose this project?

I love taking up challenges that help me learn anything new and expand my knowledge. I enjoy spending my time exploring new things and I always wanted to work on projects that make an impact. When the event was first announced, I was going through the available projects and found this project to be extremely helpful to college students. The tech stack for the project was also a little familiar to me and I wanted to get a deeper understanding of the concepts involved.

Experience

Right from the time I started drafting my proposal to the completion of the event, all my mentors were extremely helpful. I would like to thank Kumar Shivendu, Ashutosh Garg and Shivam for your guidance. One of my favourite lines is - "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising up every time we fall" by Confucious. There were times where I had to try different methods in order to implement a feature. Though it was not so fun in the beginning, looking back made me realize that I had received a deeper insight in that particular concept. This has kept me motivated till the end. I also had a great time collaborating with Ananya for this project. I am extremely happy to take all the learnings forward.

Achievements

I have worked on the frontend part of the project. Some of my major achievements for the project are:

  • Getting a better understanding of django and react concepts.
  • Creating a responsive UI that is user-friendly. The design is as follows: ui
  • Implementing a search feature to filter notes, previous year papers and feedbacks.
  • Creating forms to add new resources.
  • Learning how to deploy django-react applications on heroku. You can view the deployed project here.
  • Learning how to use the 'axios' library.