Role: System Designer & Architect
Context: Designed during my time as President & Co-founder of the Synapse student association at BMSCE

Overview

SynapseDrive is a structured, collaborative knowledge system I built to serve the Synapse community—a student-run academic group within the Department of Biotechnology. The core idea was simple: enable scalable, semantic knowledge sharing without requiring anyone to learn Git.

It mimics version control principles through precise naming conventions, templated contribution protocols, and a hierarchical folder architecture that naturally self-indexes. Over time, it became a collective intelligence layer for academic content, lab documentation, and event history.

System Philosophy

The system draws inspiration from version-controlled environments like Git, but strips away technical barriers. Instead, it uses:

  • Naming determinism: Every filename encodes structured metadata.
  • Predictable hierarchy: Semester-based and role-based separation.
  • Peer-level write access: No gatekeeping; instead, structure enforces coherence.

This design supports:

  • Chronological traceability
  • Modular additions
  • Semantic search via native Drive tools
    All while remaining accessible to any student with basic digital literacy.

Key Architecture

1. Top-Level Structure

  • Internal documents/ → Org-level resources (budgets, alumni DB, event logs)
  • Semester-X/ → Subject-wise folders for academic content
  • Root files like Synapse_naming_schematic.png and Question Paper Naming System.png act as system primers.

2. Naming Convention for Question Papers

Each paper is named using a composite key:

[ExamType]-[SubjectCode]-[CourseYear]-[PaperYear]

Naming Schema I came up with for versioning and future ease of de-duping.

For example:

SP-BIN-Y19-D22

Where:

  • SP = Supplementary
  • BIN = Bioinformatics
  • Y19 = Course code year
  • D22 = December 2022
  • Optional suffixes like TA/TB/TC handle set variation (Paper A/B/C)

This system allows any student to instantly locate past papers by semantics rather than memory or guesswork.

3. Templates and Checklists

  • Files like TEMPLATE-links&resources guide contributions with sectioned units.
  • Study_Checklist tracks per-subject progress across units.
  • Lab manuals (e.g., FBL_EXP_2, BCL Manual.docx) follow a shared format, allowing reuse and annotation.

4. Organizational Logging

  • All Synapse-led events are archived with standardized reports:
    e.g., Career development report, AI in drug delivery report, Contagion Workshop Report
  • The Alumni DB folder contains updated sheets and contact logs, helping build long-term connectivity.

Design Patterns & Behaviors

  • Semantic Foldering: Mirrors academic structure, reducing ambiguity.
  • Community Enforced Consistency: Students adopt the naming pattern out of clarity, not compulsion.
  • Minimal Friction for Contribution: No forms, no admin barrier—just follow the pattern.
  • Self-Sustaining: New contributors onboard themselves by mimicking existing patterns.
  • Temporal Scalability: Adding Semester-5, D23, Y21 files requires zero redesign.

Reflections

SynapseDrive was less about “storage” and more about encoding cognitive hygiene.
It became a space where student contributions didn’t just accumulate—they compounded.
Even years later, students could retrieve past exams, track lab evolution, or pull documentation of how events were run—all without asking anyone.

It’s one of the earliest systems I designed where structure replaced supervision.
No enforcement, no bloat. Just a recursive, scalable logic—and people respected it because it worked.