All of this started in the eleventh grade in high school. My friend Vishnu and I were in a lot of classes together and we handwrote lots of notes that we would share with our classmates. Eventually, we started taking our handwritten notes and typing them onto our computers. Math and sciences required equations, so we chose an easy-to-use Markdown editor that supported KaTeX (a variant of LaTeX), StackEdit.

We made a small GitHub Pages website that hosted our notes and shared it with our class, and we called it TISB Notes (after our school). Our notes started gaining traction as more students found them invaluable. We distilled large amounts of information into bite-sized, digestible chunks that helped our friends retain critical concepts. Some used them for last-minute exam prep, while others followed along in class. In no time, TISB Notes had a growing community.

With over 100 active users, the simple GitHub Pages setup wasn't enough. We needed something more robust, and our shared web development knowledge provided a natural path forward. Our vision was to streamline the creation and publishing of peer-reviewed notes for the IB and IGCSE curricula, while ensuring accessibility. We decided to create a web application that would bring our notes to life. We decided to use Flask, a web framework written in Python, as our backend, and HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end design.

We spent late nights in our dorm rooms designing the interface of the web application as well routing the back-end pages. The biggest challenge was automating the process of creating notes on StackEdit and publishing them on our application. After a month of intense collaboration, our web app was ready.

All it needed was a name that encapsulated the speed and efficiency with which students could learn and revise.

And thus, drum roll please, Blitz Notes was born.

I still remember the first day, or night, I should say. At around 2AM at night, Vishnu and I published Blitz Notes on the internet. For about half an hour, we simply just stared at our Google Analytics screen to see if anybody had clicked on our website, even though we hadn't even advertised or plugged it anywhere. After an hour of frantic waiting, we finally saw a region on the world map turn blue, Croatia. How this person managed to even find our website was beyond us, but it was enough to keep us content for the night. The next morning, we plugged the website to everybody we knew at school, and got more than a thousand views. We were ecstatic.

In the following months, we continued to have our notes free and accessible by anybody, and we saw a rising demand for other students to contribute to our notes. We started appointing subject leads for each subject that would review notes that coming in from contributors around India and publishing them on our website. We even added a Disqus section below each chapter that we covered so we could correct any errors and get feedback.

Today, we have a team of 50+ contributors from all over India, boasting an active user base of 25,000+ users from all over the world. Our main users stem from India and United Kingdom, with the United States coming in for a close second. We have aggregated 1,500,000+ views since February 2021. Vishnu and I have since graduated from high school and we're pursuing undergraduate bachelor's degrees in computer science from the University of Waterloo and Georgia Institute of Technology, respectively.

Blitz Notes was pivotal in laying the foundation for my passion for computer science. This project gave me a glimpse into the potential of technology in education. What started as a simple initiative to share notes became a movement, sparking my commitment to making learning accessible to all.