DEV Community: akshat thakur

I built an open-source certificate generator because I was tired of creating certificates manually

akshat thakur — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:34:07 +0000

I built an open-source certificate generator because I was tired of creating certificates manually

Every college event, hackathon, webinar, or workshop seems to end the same way:

Someone has to generate hundreds of certificates.

Then rename them.

Then email each participant.

It's repetitive, time-consuming, and surprisingly easy to make mistakes.

A while ago, I faced the same problem. What started as a small script to automate certificate generation slowly evolved into a complete project.

Today, it's called MailMyCertificate.

What it does

Upload your own certificate template
Import recipients from CSV or Google Sheets
Generate personalized certificates
Send them directly through Gmail
Process data locally whenever possible to keep participant information private

Why I made it open source

I wanted people to see exactly how it works, contribute ideas, and improve it together. Many schools, NGOs, communities, and hackathons don't have large budgets, so keeping it free and open felt like the right choice.

Things I learned while building it

Building the product is easier than getting people to discover it.
Good documentation matters almost as much as good code.
Privacy isn't just a feature—it's something many organizers genuinely care about.
Small UX improvements save users more time than adding dozens of new features.

I'd love your feedback

If you've ever organized an event or built tools for educators or communities:

What's the most frustrating part of certificate generation?
Is there a feature you'd expect that I haven't thought of?
What would make a tool like this genuinely useful for you?

Project:
🌐 https://mailmycertificate.tech

GitHub:
https://github.com/Akshatthakur22/MailMyCertficate

I'm always open to suggestions, bug reports, and contributions. Thanks for reading!




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Safexam.in

akshat thakur — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:26:11 +0000

I'm Akshat, one of the builders behind SafeExam.

The idea came from a simple frustration.

When conducting online exams, we found ourselves stuck between two extremes:

Basic tools that were easy to use but lacked meaningful exam integrity features.
Enterprise solutions that were powerful but often expensive and difficult to adopt.

We wanted something in between.

SafeExam was built to help educational institutions conduct online examinations with:

• Faster exam creation
• Better assessment workflows
• Browser-based integrity mechanisms
• Violation tracking
• Exam analytics

without requiring expensive enterprise infrastructure.

We'd love your feedback, questions, and suggestions.

How I Built Calcuzy.app in 4 Hours (And Got 120+ Visitors in 48 Hours)

akshat thakur — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 11:53:22 +0000

🚀 How I Built Calcuzy.app in 4 Hours (and Got 120+ Visitors in 48 Hours)

So a random idea clicked.
Not a big startup. Not a serious product.
Just a fun weekend build to learn SEO, ads, traffic, and how fast things can move on the internet.

I built Calcuzy.app — a super-simple “all tools in one place” website.
No big dreams. No virality expectations.
Just curiosity. 🤷‍♂️

But here’s the crazy part…

⚡ It got 120+ visitors within 48 hours — without posting anywhere except Reddit.

And it's not even something unique 😂
(There are like 1000 other “tool websites”. Trust me, I’m not pretending it’s special.)

But this experiment taught me something important:

🧠 Good SEO + clean performance + correct metadata = instant real traffic.

Here’s how I did it:

🛠️ The Stack (kept it super basic)

Next.js 14 (static export)

TailwindCSS

Zero backend

Google AdSense (testing phase)

SEO-first structure

Manual metadata for every page

100/100 PageSpeed on most runs (both mobile + desktop)

🔍 What I actually learned

This was the real point of the project:

✔ How SEO really works

Title tags, descriptions, JSON-LD, internal linking…
The basics matter more than fancy algorithms.

✔ How Google AdSense works

Still waiting for approval 👀 but learned:

placement matters

CLS matters

speed matters

compliance pages matter A LOT

✔ How fast small projects can attract real users

Google indexed it in hours.
Traffic came the same day.

That felt wild.

📊 Some Analytics Snapshots

(Feel free to show the screenshots you posted earlier.)

120+ visitors, purely organic.
No social posting.
No marketing.
Just SEO doing its job silently.

🤏 It's not a big project. But it taught me big things.

Most devs think:

“Small projects don’t matter.”

But honestly, building small things teaches you more than thinking about big things.

This wasn’t a startup.
This wasn’t an invention.
This wasn’t meant to “change the world”.

It was just a fun idea → shipped fast → learned a lot.

❤️ Want to try it out?

Feel free to test it and tell me what to improve →
👉 https://calcuzy.app/

Your feedback will help me learn even more.

If you’re reading this… build something today.

Don’t overthink.
Just ship.
Even tiny projects can bring big learnings.