My Wootech Mentorship Program Experience
As the title of this blog suggests, through this article I want to share my journey and learnings as a mentee under the Wootech Mentorship Program 2019.
But first of all, What is Wootech?
WooTech, standing for “Women Wooing Technology” is a global community that aims to provide mentorship platform to women in technology and guide them in their career. The mentorship platform is open to everyone including students, working professionals or just anyone curious about technology. Woo-Tech aims to:
- Encourage and involve more women in technological fields
- Help students build careers by matching them with mentors in the professional fields
- Help professions/non-students seeking to move into a technical career by matching them with students
Today, a lot of us are looking for mentors (consciously or unconsciously) to learn through their experiences and help us to make out the best of our potential. It happens especially in the tech field where we have so much to do, which also many a time becomes a reason for not doing anything at all. I was also in a similar situation and henceforth ended up applying for the Wootech Mentorship Program 2019. Finally, in December I got my confirmation as a mentee and led to the beginning of the program.
Mentorship Program
The Wootech Mentorship Program 2019 began in the month of December. I had Nancy Chauhan and Bharat Kumar as my mentors and 3 team-mates (Kriti Bindra, Nivedita, and Sonali) with whom I was going to work together on a project. The program was 8 weeks long with the deliverables and timelines set by our mentors.
About the Project
The project was basically an online web application DINE-IN for a restaurant, that allows the customers to check-in, see the menu, place an order, check order status, make payment and it enables the hotel management to change the restaurant menu, receive the orders, share order status and then deliver to the concerned table.
Project Outline
Customer Side:-
- Customer Details form
- QR code scan route
- Menu Page to order and check food cart
- Payment Page (with an option of canceling order)
- Checkout Route
Hotel Side:-
- Registration page for Hotel Manager with proper authentication and authorization
- Login form with proper authentication
- Orders Page
- Hotel Menu (Add/Update/Delete)
Tech Stack
To implement this project we unanimously decided on the tech stack: Flask (backend), React (frontend) and SQLite DB.
I was mainly supposed to be working on the Customer side functioning of the application which was concerned with the customer check-in using table QR codes, order management (placing order), check-out (after the payments).
Weekly Report
Week 1
Understanding the expectations of the project from the mentors. The project outline was explained to us by Nancy, and we gave our inputs of what we could add.
Week 2–3
Our mentor gave us a good time (around 2 weeks) to become familiar with the technologies that we had to work on and learn as much as we can. During this time I researched and learned about the tech stack of our project. I also made a demo project to learn about Flask, read some articles and blogs as well. Then began the contribution period.
Week 4–8
By this time, full-fledged coding and contribution period started. This is when we applied what we learned until now and also learned new things simultaneously. We contributed to the official GitHub Repo of the DINE-IN project. We used to code on our local copies of the project and push our code to the original GitHub repo. I faced a lot of issues too sometimes, but it all was worth it. Overall, I learned not just about the tech stack of our project but also about Git (version control system) and collaborating through Github.
During all this time, we maintained a Google doc to document what we were doing every week throughout the program. We also had two online meetings every week to discuss our progress and roadblocks(if any). We used to discuss the tasks to be accomplished further. Overall there was always good communication from both sides.
Conclusion
While going through this program I realized that learning while making a project is indeed such an effective way to learn any new technology. I even learned a lot about Git and GitHub. Since we were a team of 4 people, we had to collaborate through Github and it helped me realize it’s importance as well as how it is used.
This program was a memorable experience for me. I hope to be part of many more such programs. Through this program, I got to know some amazing people including my mentor Nancy Chauhan and my fellow mentees. They were all extremely humble and supportive people!
Thanks a lot for reading my experience. If you like the blog, don’t forget to leave some claps and share any feedback as well.
Also, if you want to check out this is the DINE-IN’s GitHub Repo: https://github.com/WooTechnology/DINE-IN
