Three weeks into MLH Fellowship!

So yeah, I know its’s been a while since I last posted a blog. But I come bearing some exciting updates!! Before we get started, I just want to clarify, this post isn’t about how to get into MLH Fellowship rather me talking and sharing my experience. So, who’s excited to hear? or in this case read about it?!

The beginning

Let’s start from the very start. MLH Fellowship started in the summer this year as an internship alternative for students who lost internship opportunities due to COVID-19 so that they can get hands on experience for working in teams and real life projects.

I got to know about it through one of my friends, Gagandeep. My application got rejected then. It wasn’t really much of a bummer for me because I already had 2 projects going on simultaneously so, I thought it was for the best. Once the first run of MLH fellowship concluded, It was announced MLH Fellowship will run three times every year and then an opportunity knocked on my E-Mail. I received an e-mail from MLH to re-apply for Fellowship and since I also applied last time my application will be fast-forwarded. And now here we are.

The first day

Well, I guess I was so excited before my first day, I forgot I had to sleep. At some point, sleep took over, and I slept. I woke early, set up an actual proper workspace so I don’t have interruptions while our Pod meetings. The hype was real, and Pod 1.1.2 aka Hack Sparrows didn’t fail to deliver.

On our first day, Swift (CEO @ MLH) and Kunal (our Pod Leader) welcomed us, and then we had a different and kinda unique introduction where we were split into pairs, the pair had to get to know each other and introduce the other person to the whole Pod, which is something that I felt was unique. We then decided a name for our Pod, my Pod members came up with some great names such as Object-Oriented Owls, Hack Sparrows, and Programming Puffins. We ended up choosing Hack Sparrows🤩 (great name? I KNOW!). Another thing that excited me was the diversity in our Pod both in terms of culture and technology stack. I mean just imagine the possibilities!!

The first sprint

Later that day, we were divided into groups of three(4 teams each consisting of 3 members) to start our first hack! The topic was Education and the engineering focus was Git/GitHub, which meant we had to make most out of Git and GitHub, have a good documentation and we’ll be judged based on our usage of Git and GitHub as well. I was paired up with two awesome people, Dipanwita who’s into Robotics and Mondale, who specializes in iOS app development. We took our time to come with an idea(Note to self: Don’t spend way too much time ideating) and jotted down all the necessary details. We all were trying to balance things between college and the fellowship. We started hacking on weekend(Note to self: it’s a bad idea to start hacking as late as on a Saturday night when the first demonstration is due on Monday(morning!)).

We initially thought about using firebase and cloud functions as backend of our application, which could have made things easier for us but it required a Billing account. We then decided to switch to Flask and MongoDB(big oofs, struggling and all-nighters ahead), and thought about building our own API from scratch(We ended up calling our selves Team Chaos because of the sheer amount of mess we created). Mondale came up with the name Tech About It for the app.

Thanks to support from Dipanwita(who had worked with Flask and MongoDB), YouTube and my mostly underrated ability to consume tutorials at 1.75x, we were able to implement a crude Login and Signup system with JSON Web Tokens with some other important endpoints over the weekend while Mondale worked on the frontend.

For Monday’s demo, we had a basic App welcome UI, and a sort of working API. We got feedback on the project from the Pod and Kunal and got to know some things we could work on. The final demo to select a team for Finals was on Wednesday. We ended up creating a good backend by Tuesday evening and later pulling off an all-nighter(Night time for Dipanwita and I, different timezones oof) where all three of us spent most of our time working together trying to connect the backend with the App. We simultaneously started another mini sprint while Mondale worked on App where, I started to build a react web app(which is my strong hold) for the Project.

By 5:30 in the morning, we were completely drained and decided to call it a night(or Day XD). We decided we’ll wake up by 8 AM and fix whatever issues we were having then. We ended up following the plan(somehow), and demonstrated our project in the meeting which started at around 9 AM. Later in the meeting, we talked about things that we could have done better and things that we could improve upon in the future, sort of like self reflection. From our Pod, Team Transcribio won and was selected for the finals! 🎉

Team Transcribio from our Pod ended up winning the first sprint of explorer Batch!! 🎉🎉

If you’re interested in our idea or project, you can check it out here. We decided that for now we may not be able to work on it further given our busy schedules, but maybe later on we’ll take it forward with better UI and more robust backend.

Checkout Mondale’s GitHub here and Dipanwita’s GitHub here.

Conclusion

Overall, my first sprint was really fun and a great learning experience for me. I learnt about how to properly communicate and work in teams with time zone differences and why it is so important to communicate with each other. I tried to come out of comfort zone and talked with other Pod members as well. I also learnt about Flask and MongoDB, how to implement a crude authentication system and pulled off a mini sprint for a react based frontend in less than 12 hours. I guess that’s something in itself given that all of that happened in less than 10 days.

Currently, We’re on Sprint Number two. More updates on that and my interaction with Pod mates in next post! See you all later, take care! Peace.

DO NOTE: MLH doesn’t ask you to go as far as pulling of all-nighters etc., you should have a definite routine and work according to how much time you have been asked to dedicate over the week. For me personally, I’m habitual of doing things like that and generally prefer this route(pun intended, those who know, know).