Background and Reasoning

Chemical PFD was the project I pursued during my fellowship at IIT Bombay, under their FOSSEE initiative. The project was to build a simple chemical process flow diagram tool to enable Chemical Engineering labs primarly at IIT Bombay to construct PFDs for their experiments. The future scope of the tool included the ability to simulate the PFDs and determine various chemical process metrics.

Implementation

The project initially started with a pre-lim requirement to build a simple tool to draw a network of circles to demonstrate proficiency in PyQT. Like the pre-lim project, Chemical PFD was built using PyQt5 and Python. It also uses FMan’s Build System (FBS) to enable faster iterations with a more robust build process. I worked in a team of 2 in a Pair Programming process, with me focusing on the GUI elements and my teammate focusing on the diagram engine. The project was built in a span of 2 months.

About FOSSEE

FOSSEE (Free/Libre and Open Source Software for Education) project promotes the use of FLOSS tools to improve the quality of education in our country. We aim to reduce dependency on proprietary software in educational institutions. We encourage the use of FLOSS tools through various activities to ensure commercial software is replaced by equivalent FLOSS tools. We also develop new FLOSS tools and upgrade existing tools to meet requirements in academia and research. The FOSSEE project is part of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India.

Fun Facts

• Was coined the best software on the FOSSEE 2020 presentation panel.
• The questions I wrote on StackOverflow while learning PyQt5 and FBS are my biggest contributors to my StackOverflow score.
• This was my first professional experience, and it was paid 🎉.