It is a matter of immense pleasure for us to be able to launch “CB Labs”, an idea we had been toying with for quite some time now.

At Coding Blocks, among other things, we enthusiastically support and promote free and open source software development, and take pride in being hosts of events such as Google Summer of Code meetups. And in a way, our influence rubbing off, many of our Android and Web Development course graduates have taken to contributing to FOSS projects, and a few of them even starting to work on their own apps, webapps and games, which have become popular among their friends.

To both, be able to have a platform to reconnect with our former students, and in general promote and foster open source development projects, we are starting off a tiny effort called Coding Blocks Labs.

Coding Blocks Labs

So, what is it ?

CB Labs is nothing but a collection of a handful of open source web and mobile app projects. Some of them are tools we at Coding Blocks require and will use ourselves, including some tools and games to make the process of learning to code easier. There would also be projects pertaining to the life of college students (who happen to be the largest chunk of our students)

While we are seeding CB Labs with a few projects of our own, if you are working on any project of our own and want to make it a part of CB Labs, you are more than welcome.

Awesome, what are the projects ?

To begin with there are a few projects like -

  • Code Quiz
    • Webapp : A an admin dashboard where people can register and login. Those who have admin access can add new questions.
    • Android : An Android app, which anyone can use. People get a question every day, and get points based on how fast they answer it after seeing it.
  • URL Shortner
    • An URL shortener, with link follow analytics, written in NodeJS.
  • Algorithm Visualiser
    • Android and Web apps to visualise various algorithms and their data structures

More projects will be made part of CB Labs. Keep an eye out on lab.codingblocks.com

Knock, knock, how do I get in ?

As with open source projects, there are usually no doors (or Windows, lol). Stay informed about the projects via the labs page and if any project interests you, check out it’s github repo.

You should find ample number of issues and bugs to start contributing to. We’ll try our best to keep all projects under CB Labs well documented, and easy to get involved with. (And if not, then documentation is a task itself, that you can pick up)

For many students who often wonder what projects they can start with, after having just learn some new technology like Android app development, we hope to provide a good place to start. Also for those who have recently started working on their very own projects and are looking to showcase it and collaborate with others, CB Labs could be a great platform.

I hope that via Coding Blocks Labs we’ll not only be able to reconnect with our previous students, but also create a community of open source developers, working on solving actual problems around tech education and lives of college students.

Happy Coding