Fellowboard

Explore new resources and share interesting ones with Fellowboard!

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Inspiration

Beyond just contributing to open source projects, the MLH Fellowship offers opportunities to learn new skills and develop new connections. With over 20 channels dedicated to tech topics in the Discord channel and with workshops happening nearly everyday, there's a lot to takeaway from these 12-weeks. And it can also be incredibly overwhelming to manage it all. That is where Fellowboard comes in.

What it does

Fellowboard is a platform for fellows to continue curating resources while organizing them in a manner that best suits their needs.

There are 3 "pages":

  1. Explore: here, users can view all public posts and all private posts created by themselves. This page is for fellows to share resources for everyone to benefit from!
  2. Dashboard: here, users can view all of their pinned posts. We wanted a way for fellows to cherry pick resources that are most meaningful to them. (e.g. one fellow may be interested in technical interview prep while another may wish to learn a new language)
  3. Contacts: here, users can find contact information about other fellows, all of the mentors, and even the MLH Staff

A lot of resources have already been passed around in the discord channels as links or as workshops posted on Youtube, and we don't want them to go to waste! So we their API's to populate posts in the database. If users wish to add their own posts:

  • The user can choose between a regular note, a Youtube video, or a Github Issue/PR
  • With regular notes, users will be prompted to input a title, description, and URL
  • With YouTube and Github posts, they can simply enter a URL for best user experience, and the data will be autofilled.
    • There will also be a confirmation page just to ensure that the content in the preview matches their intentions—this also allows us to raise a warning when the URL is invalid.

How we built it

We built Fellowboard using a MERN stack deployed on Heroku at https://gary-fellowboard.web.app! Node.js and Express bind together to serve the backend, MongoDB provides a NoSQL database to store all fellows and their posts, and our frontend is built using React.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a couple of problems throughout our project. One of the big challenges we had to deal with was deploying our project to Heroku, as most of us had never worked with Heroku before. We ran into some issues with our build process, as well as some API routing and CORs errors during deployment.

We also had some difficulties integrating our back-end API with the front-end, as many of us had never used React Hooks before. The move from React Components to Hooks was definitely a challenge at first, but we managed to figure things out!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Functional!
  • Very modern UI design!
    • We wanted to use an illustration for the landing page. While there were lots of resources online to do so, we felt that none of them matched our message, nor did they feel personal. So we're proud to say that the illustration was created ourselves (hence the same color palette as the MLH Fellowship)
  • Lots of focus on UX
    • We put a lot of thought into the user experience as this was what prompted Fellowboard to be made. Things as small as making the search bar and navbar sticky, adding a button to scroll to the top, or providing visual feedback when adding multiple tags separated by commas made a huge difference in our opinions!
  • Cool feature to prepopulate youtube/github data from link
  • Search feature!

What we learned

  • React Hooks!
  • How to use Redux!
  • Lots about API calls and storage with a database!

What's next for Fellowboard

  • Dark Mode
  • Infinite Scrolling
  • View profiles of other fellows
  • Drag and drop!

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