2025 · Education platform
PapersbyCodeChef-VIT
Two million visits and counting.
Overview
Papers is where VIT Vellore students find previous years' question papers for every course in the college. It holds more than 2,000 papers, is actively used by 40,000 to 50,000 students, and sees up to 10,000 people every exam season. It has crossed two million visits.
On the surface it's a simple website: search for a course, filter by exam, slot and year, and open the paper. Underneath, it's two applications. The public Papers site is what students see, and a separate admin portal is where uploads are reviewed, tagged and published. A Gemini-powered pipeline reads each uploaded paper and extracts its course code, exam type, slot and year automatically, so the library keeps growing without anyone filling in metadata by hand.
Uploaded papers were originally stored on Cloudinary and have since moved to Google Cloud Storage.
My contribution
- 01
Restructured the Gemini-powered extraction backend that reads uploaded papers and pulls out the course code, exam, slot and year, making it much more efficient and reliable.
- 02
Worked heavily on the admin portal, the internal tool where papers are reviewed, corrected and published before students ever see them.
- 03
Helped keep the platform fast and stable through exam weeks, when traffic spikes and every bug lands in front of thousands of students at once.
Gallery
Challenges
It was the biggest codebase I had worked on at that point. Next.js and several other parts of the stack were new to me when I joined, so I was learning them while shipping real features. I'm comfortable with them now, but back then it was a huge undertaking.
The deadlines were real. Papers matters most during exams, so bugs show up exactly when students need it. More than once, I was fixing issues in the middle of exam week, with thousands of people refreshing the site waiting for a paper to load.
That pressure taught me to read unfamiliar code quickly, make small, safe changes, and ship fixes without breaking anything else for the people depending on it.