DEV Community: goyal-aman

Announcing Remembral - a project I built because I needed it, and now I’m opening it up to everyone

goyal-aman — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:59:35 +0000

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on something very personal for the last few months, and today I finally feel ready (and nervous!) to share it.

It’s called Remembral - private space that help people set instructions and guidance for their loved ones for their untimely absence. The way I've built it - there is no PII involved except email. Vault creator will get periodic check-ins and if they fail to confirm checkin linked dependents will receive emails. (Note: I am still figuring out how to send out emails cost effectively for reminders and email verifications)

The truth is: I built this because I needed it myself. I’m the “go-to” person in my family for anything financial or technical, and it terrified me (due a incident sometime ago) to think that if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, my loved ones would be left scrambling in the dark. So I started building a tool that solved my own problem and it slowly turned into something

This is also my first real attempt at building something and bringing it to the world. I’m not a funded startup. No team. Just me, trying to create something meaningful.

A bit of transparency:

Remembral currently costs me around 30 dollars / month. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s also not something I can sustain indefinitely on my own. I built this because I believe it’s genuinely useful, so I’ll keep it running as long as I’m able to.

So for now:

👉 Remembral is completely free to use.

👉 And if anyone finds value in it and wants to help keep it running, donations or support are genuinely appreciated, but absolutely not required.

I’m sharing Remembral here not as a startup pitch, but as a person hoping this tool can help someone else the way it helped me. If even a few people find it useful or give me feedback, that would mean the world.

Happy to answer any questions, and honestly thank you for reading this far. ❤️

Note: I'll open source it soon (probably by next weekend)

https://remembral.vercel.app/

— A very excited, very nervous indie founder

DocumentDB Load Balancing: A Key Learning from Our Load Testing

goyal-aman — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 17:37:37 +0000

Understanding the Load Balancing Issue
In a typical Amazon DocumentDB cluster, there is a primary node that handles all write operations and one or more read replicas to distribute read traffic. During our load testing, we observed that a single read replica was hitting over 90% CPU utilization due to high read requests.

To handle the increased load, we added another read replica to the cluster, expecting the load to distribute between the two replicas. However, the new replica remained underutilized, while the old read replica continued to handle most of the traffic.

Why Did This Happen?
DocumentDB does not balance traffic at the request level but rather at the TCP connection level. When a TCP connection is established, DocumentDB’s load balancer assigns it to one of the available nodes. Once a connection is created, all queries over that connection go to the same node. Since our existing connections were already mapped to the first read replica, the new read replica was not receiving any requests.

The Solution: Restarting Application Pods
The only effective way to distribute traffic across the newly added read replica was to restart our application pods. By doing this, we forced our application to establish new TCP connections, which were then distributed across both read replicas, balancing the load more effectively.

Key Takeaways:
DocumentDB load-balances at the TCP connection level, not per request.
Adding a new read replica does not automatically redistribute traffic.
To ensure proper load distribution, restart application pods to establish new TCP connections.

Understanding Ruby On Rails in 10 Tweets

goyal-aman — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 16:33:20 +0000

Introduction

Ruby on Rails is a full-stack web app building framework made with the Ruby programming language.

Ruby has clean, simple syntax without tons of parenthesis, brackets, or semi-colons

Github, Shopify, Calendly, ThePracticalDev, eggheadio & ConvertKit were built using Rails.

By the end, you will have a brief understanding of Ruby On Rails.

Will

@willjohnsonio

1️⃣ Ruby on Rails is a full-stack web app building framework made with the Ruby programming language.

Ruby has clean, simple syntax without tons of parenthesis, brackets, or semi-colons

@github @Shopify @Calendly @ThePracticalDev @eggheadio & @ConvertKit were built using Rails

15:55 PM - 04 Jan 2021

3 37
Will

@willjohnsonio

2️⃣. Rails use the MVC(Model. View. Controller) programming pattern to organize and separate your code.

This makes it easier to know where things are and how they are connected which gives you more time to focus on building features users need

15:55 PM - 04 Jan 2021

4 33
Will

@willjohnsonio

3️⃣. Models represent the data in your apps.

You define models to make sure any new models match before being saved.

You can also associate different models with each other. For example users and their comments and/or articles.

15:55 PM - 04 Jan 2021

1 26
Will

@willjohnsonio

4️⃣ Views is what gets displayed to users. It's written just like plain HTML

You can you embedded Ruby(eRB) to put Ruby code inside of your views to display data from the database. You can display multiple users username writing just one line of code!

15:55 PM - 04 Jan 2021

1 27
Will

@willjohnsonio

5️⃣ Controllers are where you tell your app what to do with your data and what to show to your views.

You can grab all users from the database and tell Rails to display them after a user logs-in or click a link to the user index page.

15:55 PM - 04 Jan 2021

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Will

@willjohnsonio

6️⃣. Partials are Views you can share to keep you from re-writing the same code multiple times.

A user sign-up and user edit are both forms with emails, passwords, etc.

You can write the form once and use it in any view with the render keyword and eRB syntax.

15:55 PM - 04 Jan 2021

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Will

@willjohnsonio

7️⃣. Helpers are another way Rails keeps you from rewriting the same code.

Rails has built-in helpers for common things like formatting numbers. You can make your own helpers in the app/helpers folder and use them in your views with eRB.

15:55 PM - 04 Jan 2021

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Will

@willjohnsonio

8️⃣. Testing is made easy in Rails.

A test folder is made with each new Rails app.

Each time you create a new model or controller it creates a test file as well.

Testing library minitest is built in. Use the test method with assertions to check for expected outcomes.

15:56 PM - 04 Jan 2021

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Will

@willjohnsonio

9️⃣. Gems are like plugins you add to Rails to gain new functionality.

Some gems handle complex things like authentication and payments. Gems are located in Gemfile in the root of your Rails app.

15:56 PM - 04 Jan 2021

0 20
Will

@willjohnsonio

🔟. Routing tells your application where things go.

Each path is linked to an action inside the controller.

The users path shows all users which is linked to the index action inside the controller. Which matches the users index view.

15:56 PM - 04 Jan 2021

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Concolusion

Ruby on Rails is, as I think of it, is very similar to Django and very fun. Coming across those tweets by @willjohnsonio on Twitter I couldn't resist sharing them here.

PS: You can find him here on twiiter and here here on dev

How To Create A Timeline To Track Your Achievements

goyal-aman — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 07:32:46 +0000

Introduction

Quite recently I came across a tweet by Florin Pop which talked about tracking your minor and major achievements using a timeline. It was an interesting idea.. how come I never thought about this. Thus, inspired, I set on to start creating my own version. In this article, you will see my journey from inspiration to creation.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1338752452158435329-883'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1338752452158435329&theme=dark" }

Tech Stack

What I wanted at the end was very clear, only the tech I needed to use was to be figured out. I chose Django as a backend .. because why not.. it provided easy to manage model-view-control architecture and out of the box admin panel and front-end was going to be simple Html and CSS, I am not a fancy man.. simple is fine with me.

Starting out

I started out by creating a simple Django project and then creating a timeline app. I planned to add more stuff to it moving forward so creating a separate app was good idea. further, I added card model with simply keeping heading, body, date as fields if anything else is ever needed like tags.. (which I plan to add later) can be added easily.

class Card(models.Model):
    """
    In timeline: Each achievement is shown in card
    """
    heading = models.CharField(max_length=55, default="I forgot to add heading..", blank=False, null=False)
    body = models.TextField(max_length=999, default="", null=True, blank=True)
    date = models.DateField(default=timezone.now, null=False, blank=False)

    def __str__(self) -> str:
        return f"{self.heading}.. on {self.date}"

once the model was done.. it was time to create some view to handle some behind the scene stuff. I wanted a timeline in which all the cards (i.e. achievements) are separated by years.. thus I needed to handle this.

For view, I went with class based generic view django.views.generic.View and defined my own request handling methods.. since I figured I might be needing custom things in future.

class CardView(View):
    template_name = 'timeline/card_list_view.html'
    def get(self, request):
        cards = Card.objects.all().order_by('-date')

        return render(request, template_name=self.template_name, context={'timeline_data':cards})

For my first approach, I simply tried rendering all cards to front.. which I soon figured is not gonna work. Since there is no way in Django(at least I couldn't find) that I can query the database in such a way that can give me cards separated by years. Hence, I added my own logic to handle this.

class CardView(View):
    template_name = 'timeline/card_list_view.html'
    def get(self, request):
        cards = Card.objects.all().order_by('-date').values()

        qs = defaultdict(list)
        for query in cards:
            card_year = query['date'].year
            qs[card_year] += [query]
        qs = dict(qs)

       return render(request, template_name=self.template_name, context={'timeline_data':qs})

I used defaultdict, very helpful tool.. saved me some if-else and try/except. If you are wondering what I am doing here - first I am getting all the cards in newest to oldest order fashion then .values() is converting it to list of dictionaries. I then created a defaultdict object.. in which each item has list as default value and added all the cards of the same year in a key-value pair. That's it.. that's literally the depth of backend code.

Moving forward, I am little too lazy to create my own frontend thus I looked around here and there and found a great timeline template just as the way I wanted - simple yet powerful ( check here ).

There was a problem.. it was using different css class for alternate cards left for odd ones and right for even. So, for me to use this I needed a way to use

counters in Django templates, and
find a way to if they are even or odd..since we cannot use simple %2 there.

Thus I did some looking around and found not one but two unexpected things .. together solving my problem. First is forloop.counter, as the name suggests.. it is a counter for for loops in django.. and second one divisibleby filter (literally Django has everything). Finally, my front end was looking something like this.. (I have trimmed irrelevant code)

<div class="timeline-continue">
    {% for year, card_list in timeline_data.items %}
        {% for card  in card_list %}
            {% if forloop.counter|divisibleby:2 %}
                {% include 'timeline/snippets/right_card.html' with heading=card.heading date=card.date body=card.body %}
            {% else %} 
                {% include 'timeline/snippets/left_card.html'  with heading=card.heading date=card.date body=card.body %}
            {% endif %}
        {% endfor %}
        {% include 'timeline/snippets/year_circle.html' with year=year %}                    
    {% endfor %}
</div>

and yes, I used snippets to follow DRY principle.. with left and right card snippets looking like this.
left card

<div class="row timeline-right">
    <div class="col-md-6">
        <p class="timeline-date">
            {{date|date:"F  "}}
        </p>
    </div>
    <div class="col-md-6">
        <div class="timeline-box">
            <div class="timeline-icon">
                <i class="fa fa-gift"></i>
            </div>
            <div class="timeline-text">
                <center>
                <h3>{{heading|title }}</h3>
                <p>{{body}}</p>
                </center>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

right card

<div class="row timeline-left">
    <div class="col-md-6 d-md-none d-block">
      <p class="timeline-date">
        {{date|date:"F"}}
      </p>
    </div>
    <div class="col-md-6">
      <div class="timeline-box">
        <div class="timeline-icon d-md-none d-block">
          <i class="fa fa-business-time"></i>
        </div>
        <div class="timeline-text">
          <center>
          <h3>{{heading|title }}</h3>
          <p>{{body}}</p>
          </center>
        </div>
        <div class="timeline-icon d-md-block d-none">
          <i class="fa fa-business-time"></i>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
    <div class="col-md-6 d-md-block d-none">
      <p class="timeline-date">
        {{date|date:"F"}}
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>

Honestly, it was it. It was just a matter of creating some cards in the database to check the final product. Which I believe came out well. You can see this final product here

Source Code

You can look at the complete code base here.

goyal-aman / portfolio

contains source code for my Legacy portfolio + TimeLine

Portfolio

Created my own portfolio using various update to date and latest methodologies.
Created a full CI/CD pipelines using Heroku.
It is indeed best project I have made so far. I learned a lot on how to handle production and developement environment.

Deployed

https://amangoyal.ml/

NOTE:

- use .env.example in portfolio directory to set environment variables correctly.

View on GitHub

credits :
Article Cover Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash