Unicode is an initiative started by 5 senior-year students of Computer Engineering with the aim of fostering the spirit of open-source development among their peers and juniors, helping them build a rapport with each other, and promoting knowledge transfer whilst building a sustainable community.

The idea was to emulate a summer-of-code in a longer, localized, and more interactive manner. Teams included multiple students at the sophomore and junior level communicating for the most part over Slack, Hangouts, with the occasional in-person meeting. Each team was guided by a senior-year undergrad who served as an advisor and reviewer for the team progress.

The hierarchy ensured the most of the learning and programming was the responsibility of the sophomores who also owned their product completely. They had internal teams focused on frontend, backend, and REST API each of whom reported to the junior-year undergrad students who handled the mjore granular tasks pertaining to the project. We hold weekly/bimonthly calls to discuss next steps or take collective decisions - this is moderated by the seniors. In this manner, Unicode turns into a highly structured organization that was able to successfully drive multiple projects to completion, to a level where even the sophomores who were just beginning to learn the technologies are now perfectly comfortable working in a professional setting.

Starting off with minimal knowledge of Django, React, and Android, our students have built 3 webapps and 2 Android applications over a semester of remote collaboration. In a moment of pride for us, all of them have received offers to work/intern with companies spread across the country.

Our Students

While Unicode is only a year old, we have students working on some amazing projects across the globe. Here’s a list of some of the companies and organisations we have worked with: