Papers: A rose tinted look-back
This is a story about https://papers.codechefvit.com/ , a project that started into 2end year of my college, and still remains the one that helped me grow as a developer the most.
I might release a separate article writing up about papers architecture and it's comprehensive journey for my club CodeChefVIT. This isn't that article. I wanted to give a personal, rather romantic, recount of the journey of papers, and along with it mine. I hope for it to help you get a sense of what you can hope to gain when you join a club, especially CodeChefVIT.
Papers started as a twinkle in the eyes of my ex-board; Abhinav and Nishant. I just came from cookoff and while I was spent I took up the opportunity to work on another project. Nothing much, just a week's work I was told. Papers 1.0 was released as we were prepping up for CATs, and I asked Nishant to look after it as my annual exams were gonna start.
As dewali approached, we were asked to give an idea to fix papers admin. I randomly spun up a new architecture; and was asked by my board to create it. I was just a novice, and I was asked to create frontend and backend for the admin side. I was surprised that I was given the opportunity and I still am grateful for my board to give me. The architecture I spun up on spot that day remains the base architecture for papers even now. The components I coded that week remains still in the codebase. This does wonders to your confidence as a programmer.
As devsoc ended I was given the rope of handling papers once again. This time I was given the opportunity to work with a team with freedom, and work with a team I did. I tried to make everyone understand the architecture as best as I could and the collaboration and reading up other's code told me more about working in a team, and it's advantages and disadvantages. We released this version as papersV2, the UI update
Fast forward, I am a SC now. This meant I got to work with our Junior Core. I made an interesting decision that day, I won't write a single line of code but help my JC create everything they can. I took their node sessions, did a internal survey to find the major issues, created groups within SCs to discuss how to divide work. Assigned them issues and reviewed their PRs. It was work I had never did before, management work. And it was fun. Again, I learnt somthing new.
Papers v3 released when I was made board. Just when we made it live, my ex-board realised a seemingly innocuous issue, the text on some texts was white in both light and dark mode. This resulted in the app being unusable for 3 hours after midnight. I checked the code, a rogue tailwind change by a JC had slipped through; and while I fixed it asap; the launch felt like a failure. Papers access released by twice in this time period, yet the bad taste left by the issue stays.
We increased our usage by so much infact we burnt through our vercel credits. We switched to amplify and since I was busy as my duties as a board, my ex-board Abhinav, migrated it to GCP. Someone DDoSed our servers in December and we got hit with an 8K bill. We polled in, most ex-board and board did, and paid money out of our own pocket to keep my AWS alive. That moment consolidated papers as something just not me but our whole community cared enough to pay for. We applied to AWS open source program and got accepted.
I kept assigning people issues and they kept on fixing it. It felt magical to see a product grow, and I finally started using it as a consumer. It felt cool to see the better positioning of sidebar, the new reports feature and so on. Here's how the project looks like right now:
Now, as I prepare to leave the project into new hands, trusting them with approving new PRs; it's hard. But if all goes to plan, this project will continue to teach people as much as it taught me.
All in all, massive Kudos to my ex-board for giving me the opportunity to work in this project, my team for giving such a great experience, my board for humoring my ups and downs, my SCs for believing in my guidance and working whereever I asked them to. And to the reader for reading up the post :)
Good luck for papers 4.0!