13 Mar
I recently applied for the Code for Gov Tech (C4GT) mentorship program and I will try to walk you all through my thought process and experience throughout. C4GT is a community initiative that encourages students like myself to contribute to Digital Public Goods (DPGs). DPGs are basically open source software, data or AI models that can be used by anyone. Furthermore, the community can come together and contribute to the above said technologies and make them better.
I got to know about C4GT on unstop, later I also realized that I had gotten an email about it as well. Maybe because I was a part of Skill-a-thon 2.0 where we had to create a product that would solve a problem related to education/upskilling and we came up with a great idea that would help people who would want to purse alternate trades like carpentry, lift repairing, beauty, etc but, more on that in another post. This did give me an opportunity to play around with the Beckn protocol and helped me learn alot about how it worked. Beckn was one of the technologies that was a part of C4GT, and is also the underlying layer of ONDC(if you’re unfamiliar with them, check out some of the work they’re doing).
But, I did not choose Beckn as a project, I am going to pause here for you guys to let that sink in. Jokes aside though, choosing the project was the most crucial part of the program. I had to choose a project that aligned with the technologies I already knew about, help me expand my horizon by forcing me to learn other technologies and also have fewer participants which would increase my chances of getting selected. I had to eliminate the projects that did not have Reactjs as their main stack as it wouldn’t make sense for me to completely learn a new stack. I also eliminated certain projects like Quiz Generator, etc. because they were in the easy category and would attract more candidates. At the end of browsing through all the projects I chose Yaus. Because alphabetically this is the last project, a lot of candidates might not have even gotten to the end of the list and that would only work in my favor.
Introductions were intimidating, a lot of the candidates were from really prestigious colleges, your IITs and whatnot. Some of them were even working individuals. I usually have a very confident personality, but I have to admit, seeing all these brilliant minds coming together to discuss the future of DPGs and me being a part of that conversation was kind of scary and even gave me the infamous imposter syndrome. I was scared of being dumb, I was scared of not understanding what my fellow peers are trying to communicate, I was scared of ruining code that already works. But this eventually improved, the mentors were as welcoming as they could be and I was able to set up the project eventually after asking some really embarrassing questions on the discord server. This made me realize that I shouldn’t be scared of being dumb. We used to use the print statement repeatedly to display the same text when we first started coding, but later realized that we could just use the loop instead. Not knowing something will only help you learn more and will eventually help you grow as a developer/programmer.
If you are still reading this, I really appreciate your patience. Yaus (Yet Another Url Shortener) was the project I chose for my proposal. We could apply for 3 projects if we wanted to, but I chose only 1 because I wanted to dedicate all of my time towards understanding and working on it. The project was based on the React stack and had Postgres as its backend, this was something that I was familiar with. It also used technologies like Nx, Hasura, GraphQL and PostHog. These were the technologies that frightened me but in a way filled me with excitement. A large part of my time at the start went on understanding and learning about how these technologies worked, reading up their docs and watching YouTube tutorials. I got to understand what a Monorepo is and how big companies like Google and Microsoft manage their gargantuan codebases. I also got to learn more about analytics, and how they are a big part of digital products. It isn’t enough to make good software, you must also understand how the general public reacts to it.
Yaus is not just a url shortener, it’s much more than that. It has features that would allow users to have a seamless experience with deep view and deep linking and also allow them to control the behavior of the link based on what OS(Android, iOS, PC) it’s being used on. The links will also be able to transfer analytics data to the app or website it is being redirected to. Simply put, the devices will be able to communicate with each other via links, which is really cool. Think about a video on YouTube reviewing a new phone that has just been released in the market that has an affiliate link on it. The consumer would not only be able to open the app or webpage of that product if they clicked on this link but would also be able to provide the app with information such as the source, pseudo location, the amount of time spent on searching for this product, how long it will take the affiliate to claim the sale, etc. This has even greater applications in the fields of marketing, sales and consumer behavior and psychology.
Working on this project was scary but at the same time exhilarating, I eventually wrote a proposal on how I would tackle the issues that were in the scope of the project, with detailed explanations on the technologies I would use and diagrams on how the app would work. I can say that I worked on this proposal to the best of my abilities and am feeling really good about it. I do understand that my brilliant peers have also worked on their own proposals. And even if I am unable to land the internship, I am really grateful for this opportunity. It made it possible for me to learn a lot of new technologies in a short period of time, which I otherwise would have spent a lot of time learning and still not be certain about. I would still like to keep on contributing to Yaus. I have gained much confidence through this experience and have become a better software developer/engineer.
Proposal: YausC4GT’23_smitJiwani
LinkedIn: C4GT
