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

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.
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
Time management was really challenging since it's only the beginning of the fellowship
Working in different timezones was quite a task :P

Accomplishments that we're proud of

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

What we learned

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.
We all went through rigorous meetings and discussions in this phase, which helped us in understanding more about collaboration to an open source project.
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.
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
1.	Pawan Kolhe	Frontend Developer	@PawanKolhe
2.	Pragati Verma	Frontend Developer	@PragatiVerma18
3.	Lisa Chandra	Backend Developer	@lisa761
4.	Israel Adetunji	Backend Developer	@adisen