Google Summer of Code 2023 — The Palisadoes Foundation

Five months on one branch,
merged back eight times so it never went stale.

Talawa Admin is the browser console community groups use to run themselves. I rebuilt it screen by screen over Google Summer of Code — 27 pull requests across two repos, none of them landing as one big rewrite.

Walk the branch history See the screens change

27pull requests, all merged

8merges back into develop / master

258commits across both repos

33Sass partials in the theme layer

01 — the constraint

They didn't hand me a design. They handed me rules.

Incremental, screen at a time. Reusable layouts other contributors build on. Every screen size. A weekly cadence the community could see. Honest, greyed-out placeholders instead of dead ends. The hard one was staying incremental on a branch that had to survive five months of six other people writing features into the same codebase — which is the story the timeline tells.

02 — proof

The same screens, seven months apart

Drag to compare. Both sides are real screenshots pulled from my own pull requests.

Before — Organisations list — Before: a flat wall of cards, no search for admins, nothing to tell you it was loading. After: search for every role, shimmer while fetching, an empty state that explains itself.

After — Organisations list — Before: a flat wall of cards, no search for admins, nothing to tell you it was loading. After: search for every role, shimmer while fetching, an empty state that explains itself.

See all four pairs →

03 — the branch

Eight merges, drawn as they actually happened

A git-graph of every PR across both repos — the redesign lane running alongside develop and master, merging back in on a cadence rather than disappearing for months.

Open the full timeline