DEV Community: AliyuAlbako

The Inconvenience Machine

AliyuAlbako — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:06:24 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge

What I Built

I built The Inconvenience Machine — a deliberately useless, AI-powered web application designed to make simple digital interactions unnecessarily frustrating, confusing, and hilarious.

It combines modern web technologies and AI to create features that actively work against the user:

An unclickable button that avoids your cursor
An AI excuse generator for avoiding responsibility
A reverse search engine that confidently gives wrong answers
A bad password generator (security not included)
An emotionally unstable dark mode
A decision ruiner AI that gives terrible life advice

Every feature is carefully engineered to solve absolutely nothing — beautifully.

Demo

aprilfool-green.vercel.app

Code

AliyuAlbako / inconvenience-machine

React + Vite

This template provides a minimal setup to get React working in Vite with HMR and some ESLint rules.

Currently, two official plugins are available:

@vitejs/plugin-react uses Oxc
@vitejs/plugin-react-swc uses SWC

React Compiler

The React Compiler is not enabled on this template because of its impact on dev & build performances. To add it, see this documentation.

Expanding the ESLint configuration

If you are developing a production application, we recommend using TypeScript with type-aware lint rules enabled. Check out the TS template for information on how to integrate TypeScript and typescript-eslint in your project.

View on GitHub

How I Built It

This project is a full-stack application built with:

Frontend

React (Vite)
Tailwind CSS
Canvas Confetti (for chaotic feedback)

Backend

Node.js + Express
REST API architecture

AI Integration

Google Gemini API (@google/genai)
Custom prompt engineering to generate:
- absurd excuses
- useless search results
- terrible life advice

Key Engineering Decisions

Fallback Mode:

The app works even without AI by returning pre-defined nonsense — ensuring reliability during demos.
Chaos Engine:

UI progressively degrades (rotation, blur, spacing) as users interact more.
Deliberate UX Anti-Patterns:

Every component is intentionally designed to violate best practices — but in a controlled and humorous way.

Prize Category

This project uses Gemini AI not to solve problems — but to intelligently create problems.

Instead of productivity, the AI generates:

absurd excuses
confidently incorrect answers
terrible decision-making advice

It demonstrates how powerful AI can be applied creatively, humorously, and unpredictably.

The Inconvenience Machine is a playful reminder that:

Just because we can build powerful tools…

doesn’t mean we should use them responsibly.

Built with unnecessary effort for absolutely no good reason.

Tech and Africa -Northen Nigeria

AliyuAlbako — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 19:46:40 +0000

This is a submission for the WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience

My cradle in Tech was inspired by my lovely Mom when she sent my younger brother to learn basic computer knowledge in a local learning center where the just teach computer appreaciation (computer usage and basic application software like office package). The first day my brother my brother resumed the learning center he came home and suggested that he can not continue, that the training is for people like me. That was how I replaced him. That was how I fell in Love with computer machine from the first day I resumed.
Even to learn something as basic as computer appreciation was a challenge due to lack of resources and power supply. It reach a point that almost all the students could not continue with the training due to the aforementioned challeges. By then what drives was the passion to learn, therefore, I and one of my friend had to be buying fuel using our own money to fuel the generator just for to use the computers.
Right after then I only confined myself within the realm of Computer appreciation, using typesetting to earn money to cater for myself, conducting research work for graduating students.

Coding Journey...

Before 2019 I dont even know what is the full meaning of HTML in fact I don't even know that such term exist talkless of know how to write Hello World using any programming language, do I even know what is programming alnguage by then?
Growing up I wanted to be a Medical Doctor, but one thing lead to another I am now a graduate of computer science. I developed passion for programming right from school. I always stands out within my classmate when it comes to coding. Then, my classmates used to ask me, how will that brings me money, because when you start learning coding, money should not be your drive because you wont find yourself doing anythin lucreative with it.
Passion brought me to this level that many look up to me to learn coding skills even though I did not reach the level I wanted to reach up to now.
I always what my people to have quality tech skills. Because people around here are yet to see the full picture of potentials that tech industry holds I do offer free trainings to my immediate community with the little I had, limited resources and support mingled with economic hardship.

Africa is Underrepresented

well, I don't know whether I am speaking for the rest of African Countries but surely, I am Speaking for Nigeria especially northen part of Nigeria where the population is congested, women are under-informed and lack of resource persons to take tech education to the next level and the opportunities available for in the global space comes with marginalization, tell me why I should present an English proficiency test before I can be able to study in UK or USA and this test is not affordable to many of us.
We are trying to talk to the women folk to get involve in tech in dialy basis, but talking is not enough if they did not see us giving them something practically. I just hope we get the resources needed to make tech education accessible and affordable.
Finally, I am open for questions and partnership

Flash Learning- a platform for users learn and thereafter take a Quiz

AliyuAlbako — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 22:35:31 +0000

This is a submission for the KendoReact Free Components Challenge.

What I Built

Flash Learning levarage the kendoReact Free Components to achieve its seamless fuctionality and workflow, ranging from components as simple as button to the complex as grid. In flash Learning, visitors of the sites will have the opportunity to take short learning tour through fliping cards and thereafter take the quiz. The project used the KendoReact Grid to mimic a leaderboard which I believe will be improved even after the contest, because it is exciting and easing working with KendoReact Components

Demo

below is the link to the App and the screenshoots

The App:
https://flashcardslearning.netlify.app/

The Screenshoots:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tBAUQCO9qPUtkRrCl4CtGHfbvlLJE6N8?usp=drive_link

Repository:
https://github.com/AliyuAlbako/quiz-app

KendoReact Experience

The free KendoReact Components are more than enough for a project on the go and even the intermediate, therefore I utilized the theme and internal functionality of the components made my projects takes its shape for the time been. example, like usind the dropdownlist to list the country/province region to be selected, grid component for the leaderboard and other components the can align with what I built

Python is Harder than Java....

AliyuAlbako — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:19:02 +0000

This is a submission for DEV Computer Science Challenge v24.06.12: One Byte Explainer.

Explainer

When I started programing, there is this notion going round that "Java is harder than Python". Python is my first language, after hitting some millstones in python, I started java.
From the onset I found java so difficult to comprehend but going deeper, I found java so accommodating, crystal clear and self-explained.
In many occasions I will have to go back to Java to understand many concepts that I couldn't understand in python, especially oops and its sub-concepts.
Python is vague and Java is Verbose.