DEV Community: Arth

User avatars for your next project in 1 API call

Arth — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 02:15:18 +0000

Serverless Userpics

Open-source code: Github
Try live: userpics.devclad.com

Background?

I had been using Dicebear avatars locally for my app (DevClad) but then I came across a better set of avatars by Craftworks.design (a free set) and thought I should use them for all my projects.

Gist of it

So, long story short, I created a Cloudflare R2 bucket, uploaded 100 avatars, created a serverless Go function using Vercel serverless functions and voila!

Run curl -XGET 'https://userpics.devclad.com/api/getpic' and instantly get a random user avatar URL.

Why a URL?

So- why a URL? Why not streamed bytes directly in response?

It works for everyone this way.

✅ Case 1: Someone might be simply embedding the image. A permlink of the image is objectively better.
✅ Case 2: Save it to your own S3 bucket.

How does it work

✅ Case 1: curl -XGET 'https://userpics.devclad.com/api/getpic'
✅ Case 2: An example in Python (specifically tailored for Django) that works with userpics.devclad.com

def random_avatar():
    name = str(uuid.uuid4())[:8]
    with open(f"media/avatars/{name}.png", "wb+") as f:
        url = requests.get("https://userpics.devclad.com/api/getpic")
        response = requests.get(url.text, stream=True)
        if not response.ok:
            raise Exception("Could not get avatar")
        for block in response.iter_content(1024):
            if not block:
                break
            f.write(block)
    return f"avatars/{name}.png"

That's it. Feel free to open feature requests or whatever.
The repo is here - github.com/arthtyagi/serverless-userpics

Just launched an automated dev club!

Arth — Tue, 31 May 2022 18:11:14 +0000

Hey everyone 👋,

It is Arth from ConnectDome and I come bearing good news!

First, let’s get you acquainted with the subject.

What is ConnectDome?

A platform for developers to meet other developers 1:1 and team up on projects seamlessly.

🦄 “An automated feature-rich dev club on steroids.”

But, what does this thing do?

🤝 NETWORK:

Meet developers 1:1 every week.
- Our AI matches you with a compatible developer.
- Schedule a meeting with your match during the week.

🦄 BUILD AND SHIP:

Team up on projects
- We recommend projects other users are building.
- Easily apply to one of the projects you like.
Build a team for your own project!
- We recommend your projects to compatible developers.
- Easily evaluate and take in new members for your project.

All your teams come with features like member management, group chat, and video chat (next release) to get you started.

Import a Github project OR create a new one from scratch. It is up to you.

We will send you an invite if:

You requested one at join.connectdo.me
Or, had been invited to this waitlist by me.

Or, you can request an invite here and I’ll instantly send you one if you’re a dev :))

💲 Pricing?

Free for you as an early user ❤️

📹 Demo

(Demo has music in background; feel free to mute)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/r6Fu43r0Xpk&mute=1

I’ll keep you posted with any updates and cool ways to use ConnectDome!

Regards,

Arth

Co-Founder, ConnectDome

Twitter | *Support Channel - Discord
*

ConnectDome Week 1 Sprint

Arth — Mon, 09 May 2022 12:33:22 +0000

Summary

What did we do at ConnectDome during last week’s sprint?

Rust-Notify: A simple “open-source” service in Rust to announce new blogs on your Discord and send emails to your list via SendGrid.

https://github.com/connectdome/rust-notify

💡 We are building this primarily for internal use but we think anyone can use it with a slight modification and fit their use case.

💡 Why?
We host our blog on Vercel using Next.js to render our Notion blog. This means we are not able to send blog updates to subscribers automatically with this setup. So we needed something as a solution.

We were initially building this service using a webhook crate but after some issues with that crate, we rewrote the webhook from scratch.

Migrated to Django 4.0.4 that spawned an error regarding pytz for some reason so-
Switched pytz → zoneinfo and refactored our ML algorithms to reflect that change.
.ics - .ics attachment should now be in emails for meetings scheduled on ConnectDome.
HTTP→ HTTPS: We had an expired certificate for a while which we just updated.
Switched yapf → black.
An updated Docker setup.
- Code running on Docker gets updated on local change.
There was quite some work on the “product” involving talking to potential users, analyzing feedback, talking to potential investors, and other stuff but again, no biz-dev updates on here like we said on:

16-week sprints

We definitely could’ve done more and moved faster but-

It’s widely known that “moving faster” also means launching fast and launching whatever we have done so far because even our best attempt at a launch would probably not be as magical as we think.

The product is not going to be perfect by any means but that’s a part of reiterating and working on a product.

So I’m sure once we launch, we’d be able to move at 10x current speed since the biggest current mental challenge (the “perfect launch”) would be past us.

Maybe I’ve watched too many YC videos lol but this is true, regardless.

Anyway, Week 2 pre-day is on and it involves doing stuff like- writing this update that would serve as a good archive when looked back upon.

Current Product Milestone

SPA for developers on the waitlist
- React-ifying the codebase.

Current Estimate of next product milestone

May 25: SPA release.

Other

Marketing-quality demo video before releasing with a blog to get you acquainted.

Also, we’re now planning to have a backup deployment on AWS (our own config with EC2 instances and other services we’d manually choose) apart from the AWS Beanstalk production and dev environments that we currently use.

Beanstalk is great but having an EC2 instance that’s not floating would be helpful too and can serve as a backup.

Our 16-week sprints at ConnectDome

Arth — Sat, 07 May 2022 05:16:24 +0000

For this post to make any sense, you need to know what ConnectDome is.

It’s a platform for developers (like you) to:

meet other developers 1:1 every week and
team up on pretty cool projects seamlessly (saving you hours of manual work) using AI.

If this actually works (we’re trying to make it work haha), this would be super helpful with FoW (Future of Work) especially good for developers like us.

Anyway

💡 We are a team of three people including two co-founders.

And, we are doing a series of 16 sprints over the course of 16 weeks (May - August inclusive). We thought it’d be cool to make some of these updates public.

Our Objective

🚀 making every interaction on ConnectDome worthwhile. i.e. every interaction should align with our goal of fostering:

a work environment where the socializing aspect is automated and easy,
ability to work on ideas that are not necessarily open-source (not found on Github),
more eureka moments among developers than ever!

There are a lot of other milestones to hit in terms of our KPIs but that first objective is what we truly care about and are going for here.

Everything else is just a sub-task to get to that point.

Sub-goal: 💡 Grow to over 1000 users in our invite-only platform, have a 40%+ 30-day retention rate, add premium plans, and more!

Progress

Will post separate updates for every week’s sprint with a gist of how much progress we made and how far along we are from these product shipping milestones:

SPA open to developers on waitlist (requested the invite code). (~week 3 sprint)
iOS and Android apps. (~week 6 sprint)

There’s much more to dissect here but that’d probably make the updates less interesting so I’m thinking of keeping the following format here (won’t include any biz-dev updates possibly LOL):

[TITLE OF UPDATE 🚀]

[Gist of progress made, certain stuff we worked on]

[Current Estimate of next product milestone]

Other

The following is proving to be super helpful:

for work (and the community):

Techstars (their invite-only startup pipeline program) most certainly helps with the generous free mentorship sessions with mentors within and without. It’s not documented very well but it’s still mentioned in certain places including:

We got in through a different route, but well, it’s essentially the same thing.

for the sense of community:

YC SUS events
r/startup’s Discord server
Buildergroop on Discord
Gen Z Mafia on Discord
Our own Discord (for feedback)

Being purposefully surrounded by the community that makes up the thriving startup ecosystem serves as a reminder that that this simply is what’s required to get to point B.

Hopefully, this blog serves the single purpose of archiving a journey, nothing more or less.

Post Notes:

Does the idea for ConnectDome sound interesting to you?
Would you be interested in following our journey? (Genuinely, we do want to know why or why not!)

Old 1.0v Demo (2.0v we are working on is much better)

Advantages/disadvantages of poetry vs pipenv

Arth — Thu, 27 May 2021 11:09:47 +0000

You might be used to working with a virtual environment to isolate dependencies in a Python project, right?

Most people prefer venv or pipenv. However, venv lacks backward compatibility. Hence, for most people, pipenv turns out to be the best choice. Is that actually the best choice though?

The underdog poetry is identical to pipenv at the core, so which one should you use?

pipenv helps you lock down dependencies, easily manage your virtual environment, has backwards compatibility, dependency graphs, and more.
poetry is all that and offers extra tools that help you build and publish your packages to PyPi within few commands, resolve dependencies easily, and most of all, it's really snappy!

However,

pipenv can separate dev and build dependencies does this but it can get tricky.

Bottom line, if you want a dependency management system that just works, pipenv should be good enough but if you're on the hunt for an all round snappy tool, poetry is your friend.

Why use Flake8 to enforce PEP8

Arth — Thu, 27 May 2021 11:09:24 +0000

Flake8, as a tool, is a boon for those wanting to maintain clean, tight, and concise Python codebase. You might wonder, "If I want to maintain a clean and readable Python codebase, I might as well just use something like PyLint, what's so good about Flake8?".

Glad that you got curious!

You see, Flake8 is quite handy for catching errors and even though PyLint also helps to some extent with formatting, it can be tough to catch PEP8 errors with PyLint since it does not enforce PEP8.

Hence, if you plan on enforcing PEP8, Flake8 is the way to go.

Overall, reasons you might want to consider using Flake8 include :

It has got great support for plugins that PyLint can't even come close to including but not limited to doctoring style and type-checking.
Flake8 plugins are easier to write relative to PyLint plugins, in terms of, lines of code.
It enforces PEP8 which is, in fact, the whole point!

P.S I recommend using Flake8 with your CI as well. Also, you can always use Flake8 in conjunction with something like PyLint.

Solving networking specifically for developers

Arth — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 19:05:19 +0000

Note: Networking in this case refers to, “Interact with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts”.

So you have an idea but not sure how you’re gonna build it, right? You also think it has a large potential but you just can’t seem to figure how to build it all and manage everything ranging from public outreach to constructing a community all by yourself because unlike a lot of developers ( the ones you see flexing their rudimentary skills on LinkedIn for no apparent reason ), you don’t have reliable network of developers who’d be instantly willing to work with you, you’d need to twist some ends to make things sure, and that doesn’t provide you with enough assurance either. You want to explore new projects, and contribute to them but how do you even know what project is based good for your skill level instantly? And it’d be nice to have a direct chat with the creator of that project, right?

If you are that sort of person, the one who can relate to the previous segment, then you are not only well aware but rather proactively live the problem of broken networking for developers. There’s Tinder for dating, tuned matches using AI ( not sure to what extent it’s true that they use AI and not just those elo-rated systems ), LinkedIn for professional networking, Instagram for as the general social media but what about developers? Developers still have to resort to real life meetups, Discord servers, LinkedIn, and various forums to meet new developers and out of those developers, only a few connections are built on the premise of building something. We, at ConnectDome, acknowledge this as a problem because we believe that there should be proper networking models for developers as well, one where any developer could go on, find people to work with instantly on their existing projects as well as find projects to work on instantly based on their skills and experience.

As of now, we have released the alpha version of our vision for networking for developers, there’s still a long way ahead to implement everything we have planned ( some big stuff! ) but what we have right now uses AI ( machine learning algorithms ) to match you with the best possible developer available on ConnectDome that “you” can work with (based on your skillset, experience, etc ), the top notch project recommendations tuned for you, and a ‘Team’ feature for all the approved interested candidates on your own projects.
We think that this solution can solve a problem lingering unnoticed or rather, unaddressed for longer than it should’ve been. Meeting on forums is cool, but guess what’s easier and cooler? Matching instantly with the right developers and projects.

You can try all of this at https://connectdome.com/ absolutely free.

You can also join our community at https://discord.domecode.com/

This message is approved by the Founder and CEO of ConnectDome, Arth Tyagi.

Lessons from moving DomeCode to DigitalOcean

Arth — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 12:45:24 +0000

Well, for starters, DomeCode is a coding platform that unifies the coding experience by providing all relevant resources and tools in a single platform and this post is a result of us, at DomeCode, shifting from Heroku ( after exhausting free credits ) to Digital Ocean ( still on free credits ).

In this post, I want to emphasize the importance of choosing the right cloud provider for you and saving up money by spending on only what you and your application really needs. If you're profitable and have enough money at disposal, this post might not make a huge difference for you but for those of you out there who're starting out and are on a tight budget, this might help.

The guidelines to help you : ( not a huge fan of constraints but these are actually helpful )

Exhaust all the free credits from any platform you can get your hands on.
I went three months into Heroku for free until I got charged.
Examples include for the majority of you out there, Linode, DigitalOcean, Azure, AWS, and GCP. All of these entertain some sort of free credit program and you can just go ahead and take advantage of these programs so you don't have to worry about the costs but rather, just your code.
Don't go for PaaS unless you absolutely need to or you have the credits/money to. Exceptions include services that wholly PaaS like Heroku. However, if you're on DigitalOcean, avoid the 'easy deployment' options using 'Apps' if possible. If you can do the deployment and configurations ( along with some sysadmin stuff ) yourself, you can potentially save yourself over 50%.
Pay for only the services you need, this is a no-brainer but still worth mentioning that you should only pay for the plan that you know your application is gonna end up using the resources equivalent of. For example, if you've just started working on a Node.js application with 200 users with light usage, it makes no sense to pay $60/month in most cases.

In simple words, by moving Heroku ( $7/mo dyno + $7mo worker + $50/mo database ) to DigitalOcean ( $5/month — setting it all up ). This potentially saved over 90% of the initial cost ( $5 instead of $64 a month ).

With that being said, it's ultimately upto you where you want to spend your budget ( if it's low ), the cloud when you can rather redeem credits or other places that make your product better?

My Github - https://github.com/arthtyagi

DomeCode Blogs are here!

Arth — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 06:32:05 +0000

Well, after a long wait, DomeCode Blogs have finally arrived!

A new platform for blogging that's already integrated into a coding platform means TRAFFIC! If you're a budding technical writer, now is the perfect time to get on that train of thoughts that lead you to write the ideal blog post before traffic hits peak on DomeCode blogs.

DomeCode Blogs is more like a better version of Forem, the technology that powers Dev.to except-of-course it is tailored specifically for DomeCode. It will be open-source soon enough and will be re-packaged as a usable Python package ( Django ). People could integrate it to have a blog, a powerful one indeed on their website that allows new bloggers to chip in, hashtags, a high-quality search that costs less, etc.

There are still a lot of things to roll-out down the road for DomeCode, and each component ranging from Blog to Fusion ( https://domecode.com/fusion ) makes up DomeCode a unified platform for developers to access tools and resources efficiently. The fun part, we've made our significant codebase open-source.

More importantly, if you want to start early, apply to become a blogger at DomeCode using https://blog.domecode.com/apply, and I'll personally let you know about the outcome of your application.

If you are excited to work on DomeCode, you can drop a mail at iwantin@domecode.com or fill this form.

Github - https://github.com/the-domecode/domecode-opensource
Discord - https://discord.domecode.com
Reddit - https://reddit.com/r/DomeCode

Apply ( Blogger ) - https://blog.domecode.com/apply/

Whatya waiting for? Join the community already!

Watch tutorials and code in HTML, CSS, and JS from a SINGLE TAB!

Arth — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 00:14:35 +0000

✨ DomeCode's Fusion has auto-complete now as well! ✨
Fusion saves you from the hassle of :

opening a chrome tab for localhost
a tab for tutorial
code editor

https://domecode.com/fusion/ does all of this in a single tab!

Github: https://github.com/the-domecode/domecode-opensource/
Discord: https://discord.domecode.com/

If you want to work on DomeCode, join our Discord!

Do Github stars matter?

Arth — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 18:34:14 +0000

Pretty sure most developers have thought about this when building their open-source projects and then after a while realizing that their project got barely 2 to 3 stars and sometimes not even that.
Well, the answer is clearly yes. Stars do matter on Github projects. The stars project confidence and quality on a project, but it doesn't necessarily mean if a project doesn't have stars, it's not good or anything like that. However, a project with lots of stars is most likely a good quality project and something worth contributing to and to use in your project.

How do you get stars in the first place?

I was at the same place four weeks back ( still am in a way ) when I made the codebase for my coding platform ( DomeCode ) open-source because I felt like closed-source is more like an artificial barrier, and people should be able to use my code for their free and open-source projects.

Even though I have proven that I'm close to a saint, I should also state that this feeling is subject to change in the future, but presently, my project is well open-source and has gotten 47 stars so far. Technically, ~12 stars a week.

Either way, the point is it's good to have stars just like it's good to have money. In similarity with fiat currencies, the stars don't mean everything, but they do certainly mean something, and you got to have that if to ease your way through.

Cutting the shit and getting straight to it, these are the strategies to deploy in order to get stars:

Beg
Blog
Shit post everywhere
Ask your closest friends to do the same

Eventually, you'll get to 100k stars, and to be clear, this is what I want with DomeCode.

Oh, and DomeCode](https://domecode.com/) is essentially a platform that improvises over existing "code to learn" platforms by making the process of going from point A ( picking a language ) to point B ( getting good at it ) easily than ever by including tools and resources along with the whole-some community to make your experience better.

Feel free to support me in my journey by starring DomeCode on Github.

My Github - https://github.com/arthtyagi/
DomeCode - https://domecode.com/
DomeCode's Github - https://github.com/the-domecode/
My personal website - https://arthtyagi.me/
Discord - https://discord.gg/ZwTJPNB/

P.S This was partly satire for those of you who didn't get it. This post script, on the other hand, deems the whole motive of satire pointless.

How I built DomeCode, an open-source coding platform startup that got 15k+ hits on the first day and the key takeaways

Arth — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 19:14:36 +0000

What are we talking about?

DomeCode

What is it though?

DomeCode is a platform built to unify the coding experience of a developer. The use of the word developer is a little vague in this context so I’ll take the liberty to shed some light on the context.
Imagine you’re a developer who’s preparing for an upcoming coding competition, you’re not a whiz like some of the big names like tourist but you’re not a pure beginner either. You’re revising some programming concepts, typing your way practicing those concepts in the form of coding problems. You take a sip of your drink ( imagine any drink you like ), as you glance towards your notes and other resources you’ve compiled. You start to feel a little bland so you start listening to some lo-fi music which puts you in a little relaxed and upbeat mood right as it should. After almost an hour of this deep work session, you realize that you have finally accomplished something for the day and you proceed to append your todo-list and get that dopamine boost.

This whole process required you to :

Go to a lot of websites for collecting resources.
Taking notes in an application.
Planning tasks in another application.
A browser tab for the coding problems.
A coding editor.
A music app that also slightly made you want to listen to some lyrical music that might’ve taken away your focus.

But you're a lucky chap, you stumble upon this blog, realize there’s this platform called DomeCode ( https://domecode.com/ ) that does all of this in a single web-based platform ( going native on Windows and macOS in the future as well ) without requiring you to leave it.

On DomeCode, you can practice in six languages ( including Rust, C, C++, Go, Java and Python ), learn, take notes, discuss stuff on the forum, get to know them ( upcoming messaging feature ), join our developer community on Discord ( join using this ) and more.

A little more on the “more” part :

I have recently added two features. One of them is called “Creator”, it’s used for listing your products. It’s essentially a listing of the product that combines all the relevant information and all the other listings of the products and make it shareable with the public.

Demo Listing: https://domecode.com/products/domecode/

The other feature is called Fusion.

Fusion is a real-time disposable editor using which you can start learning front-end technology including HTML, CSS, JS with any YouTube tutorial of your choice in a single tab of a code editor and two browser windows like a memory hog.
You can try it here, https://domecode.com/fusion/.

Tl;dr DomeCode is an open-source platform to help you advance your coding journey with pre-existing resources to learn programming concepts ( in Python as of now ), take notes, plan tasks, practice coding problems in 6 different languages including Python, Go, Java, C++, C, and Rust. You can also discuss interesting stuff on the forum, meet other developers, and most all even get to listen to music conveniently without ever leaving this open-source platform to navigate to paid platforms.

Who am I?

I’m a high school senior from India and the founder of this platform.

How did this all start? ( and what happened during the development process plus a few key takeaways )

A few months back in April, I was working on some coding problems for Google Code Jam Qualification round and Foobar when I had an idea at the back of my head. I wanted to build something that takes the coding experience and blends it with the steps before and during that like learning a programming concept, practicing it, listening to lo-fi music conveniently, jotting down notes, and more in a single platform.

(https://github.com/arthtyagi/) but for the most part, I worked on DomeCode.

Also, built a simple yet fast autograder that just reads the solution files and compares them on the go without having to read anything from the disk, one of the major reasons why it was really fast.

I open-sourced it on Github and made it available as an installable Python Package here, https://pypi.org/project/django-judge/. It was well-received by the community I shared it with ( Python Discord and a few other places).

Just within the first 24 hours of the release of that alpha version, the platform got over 15,000 web traffic hits, sweet.

There is, however, one thing that needs to be fixed about DomeCode and it’s the outreach campaign, I have started to come up with some mailing campaign ideas and I’ll be starting the campaign in a few days from now. It’s extremely important to have a good retention rate and for a platform that’s new and isn’t big on advertising, it’s a little hard to have the same users coming back to the product and it’s one of the biggest reasons behind the mail campaigns, to have the users coming back to us. It’s something anyone just starting should keep in mind.

A few key takeaways from my journey for new founders of products especially along the lines of software ( web or otherwise ) should be :

Use the appropriate tools for the task, don’t use a tool just because it’s in the trend.
Focus on SEO for your platform, it’s really important to have your platform as the first result when users search for specific terms on the search engines.
Increase the user retention rate, you want users to keep coming back to you and use your product for as long as possible in a single session.
Focus on outreach campaigns for your product.
Put your experience building that product out there and try to make it interesting, it won’t please everybody but it would please a certain audience and they would want to use your product. Something similar to this, the blog post that you’re reading.
Iterate on user feedback. Listen to even the worst of feedback, prioritize it at some level, whichever you think would be appropriate and solve it no matter what. You can’t satisfy everyone but acting on the user feedback is only going to help your product after all. Don’t pay attention to the individual, pay attention to the issue.

These would be the most important takeaways from this blog post probably.

If you’re a developer willing to work on this platform, head on to https://github.com/the-domecode/ and start working on the issues right away if I like the way you code and your problem-solving abilities, you’ll be invited in the internal development team so there’s your chance to work in a new startup.

Thanks for reading this, hope you enjoyed it! Will do follow-up blogs reporting the progress of the platform if anyone shows interest in that sort of thing.

My Github profile: https://github.com/arthtyagi/
Organization Github profile: https://github.com/the-domecode/
The platform is live at https://domecode.com/