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First 6 Months of The BORR Project

· 3 min read
Rohit M
Rohit M
Moe Programmer

The BORR Project started out as a community fork of OSSU to rebuild the community where people can come together, geek out, and support one another in a peer learning environment for computer science and math. Six months in, we’re excited to share our progress.

Repos & Discord Community​

  • We launched a new Docusaurus-based website. Compared to a GitHub README, it offers a significantly better user experience and allows us to organize supplementary information without clutter. Recent additions include progress tracking (inspired by The Odin Project) and global search.
  • Our Discord server leverages new community features like onboarding, forums, event channels, and AutoMod. We also recently activated our server tag.
  • Despite having only 91 members (at the time of writing), we observed 27% more activity in public channels over the last 6 months compared to the OSSU server.
  • We held active cohort meetings with consistent participation and organized a server event around the CodinGame Summer Challenge.
  • We launched our Study Hall, which gave home to numerous public study sessions and quite a few teamworks.
  • Because puzzle solving is fun, we also organized an event around Advent of Code 2025. Being our most popular event at this point, it proved to be nicely balanced between competition and collaboration.
  • We have started working on formalizing the governance structure of the project, and drafting the bylaws of the project. We are aiming for a governance structure that is open and collaborative, while not being too bureaucratic. We are taking inspiration from several prominent open source projects.

Curriculum​

  • We promptly addressed issues with courses affected by Coursera's removal of the audit option by identifying alternative resources.
  • We have seen familiar and new faces contributing to our repos, streamlining resource suggestions and fixes. The Preschool Math curriculum, for instance, received a complete overhaul.
  • We avoid a strict "lecture-only" policy, embracing books, articles, and other formats. For example, we recommend Dive into Systems combined with CS:APP lectures and labs as our primary resource, keeping the CS:APP textbook as an optional supplement since it is not free. This approach, suggested before students start OSTEP, helps students plan their studies effectively in the systems programming section.
  • The curriculum is actively maintained with frequent contributions on GitHub regarding courses, issues, and research suggestions. We've also added supplemental resources to many courses.
  • We have started the work of moving the CS curriculum to CS2023 guidelines, from the older CS2013 guidelines. We are having discussions on this topic in a dedicated channel on the discord server.

Roadmap for the Next 6 Months​

Beyond gathering user feedback and adapting to community needs, our key goals for the next half-year include:

  • Developing comprehensive "Setting Up Your Development Environment" guides, inspired by The Odin Project.
  • Creating a showcase board for students to share their curriculum work and projects.
  • Hosting more server events and group activities.
  • Completing the formalization of the governance structure and the bylaws.
  • Organizing focus groups (tutors, website maintainers, curriculum maintainers, etc.) and assigning roles.
  • And marketing! We plan to announce the Borr Project on Reddit, Hacker News, and the wider internet to acquire more users.

Join us in building a place where we can all geek out and learn together!