DEV Community: Arpan Pandey

Introducing Dev Army Knife

Arpan Pandey — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 11:15:37 +0000

Developers are the ones who are the driving power behind websites. However, for a long time, developers have been facing a lot of issues with the task they are supposed to do. Every time they face a situation like this, they have to stop what they are doing and start looking for a suitable tool to do that particular task. This toolkit aims at solving this issue and helps developers to get their work done.

What is the Dev Army Knife?

Introducing the Dev Army Knife, a toolkit for developers to do various tasks. Whether it may be generating a QR code, editing a few lines of code without the editor or joining two words without any delays and with high quality, the Dev Army Knife is here to help you. Inspired by the Swiss Army Knife, this handy toolkit includes many useful tools for developers to use in day-to-day tasks.

From The Docs

Dev Army Knife is a toolkit for developers (frankly anyone) to do various day-to-day tasks. It is like a Swiss Army Knife for developers, hence the name. It provides you with a lot of tools to simplify your workflow and increase productivity. At the time of writing, it has about 10 tools. It also gives you access to a tool called devTools Wiki. It is very helpful in getting a brief overview of various tools and help you choose a tech stack.

Where can I find it?

The main application is hosted by good folks at Netlify over here:

https://devarmyknife.hackersreboot.tech

The docs(also hosted by Netlify) are over at:

https://dakdocs.hackersreboot.tech

The Github repository for the application is over at:

https://github.com/Arpan-206/DevArmyKnife

The Github Repository for the docs can be found at:

https://github.com/Arpan-206/DAKDocs

How Dev Army Knife Rocks?

Dev Army Knife provides you with a minimalistic, dark-themed interface. It is meant to get out of the way for you to use it freely by not over-complicating things. We also place no trackers or advertisements, it is a true non-profit project. Most of the processing is done on the client-side which means rarely any data reaches us or any third party and the processing is ridiculously fast because there are no delays or redundancy. It also allows you to host an instance of it yourself.

What all features does Dev Army Knife have?

Tailored🕴️

Dev Army Knife is a tool made by a developer (high school student 😉) for developers. So, it has been tailored to developers (at least me lol).

Dark Mode 🕶️

The whole app is in Dark Mode. Like, who even use Light Mode nowadays anyway.

Fast ⚡

Almost all of the app is rendered Statically (except the Wiki and keypair-generation). Also, all the tools are client-side, so no sending requests or server overloading etc. Also, our friends over at Netlify are known for being fast.

Mobile-Friendly 📱

The Application is designed to be very mobile-friendly. This goes a long way in maintaining usability across devices. Especially with things like Code Editors.

Self Hostable 💻

You can host the web app yourself if you don't trust me or my providers. (But, seriously, why would you not).

Secure 🔐

The app is very secure since no data is stored with us or a big corporation. Yes, no trackers, no ads, no data harvesting.

PWA Support

The toolkit is a PWA (Progressive Web App). It can be installed just like a native application but is very light. You can use most of the core tools offline after installing the PWA. I worked very hard to include this because a lot of people face a problem like weak connections. This adds to accessibility for the user and a rich native-like experience.

My Favourite Modules

out of all of the tools provide some are my absolute favourites, for example, I enjoy playing the Trivia Quiz and the QR Code Generator is what I use a lot with various customisations.

What hit me that I built this project?

Well, to be honest, this is a project idea that was in my mind for a long time. I wanted to create a suite of tools that I use quite a lot and thought other people also would. So yeah this is one of those projects which you want to build but don't know how or think if it would be worth the trouble. Then when this Hackathon was announced I immediately got an adrenaline rush. I have my exams in a week and yet I spent around 8-10 hours/day building this coz why not.

How did I build it?

Warning- I might have gone into too much detail, but I use my blogs to pour myself into words so it is what it is. Feel free to skip tho.

I was itching to learn Next.js and Tailwind. I am a mostly Python user but I wanted to learn JS and React. I went through the amazing courses on freeCodeCamp. But for learning Next and Tailwind, I thought it would be better to learn by building, so that's what I did. I used this project as an excuse to learn them. I first looked up if Netlify even supports Next.js and to my delight it did. Not only that, it does so without any additional configuration on my end, so I guess that is a plus. It took me more than a week of getting up, attending classes, working on it till about 10 PM and going to sleep to get it to a presentable state along with the documentation and all of that. But, now boy am I proud!

How and where is it deployed?

Y'all already know that I deployed everything on Netlify since you have come this far, even if you didn't you certainly do now. Elaborating on that, I first deployed it under a free account on Netlify and it is quite nice for a free tier. Then I found out that they have a great plan for open-source projects. So I thought why not give it a try. And they approved it very quickly. So there we are.

How do I actually use it tho?

Just go to the app and select the tool you want to use and Voila! It's that simple. If you want to know in detail how a particular tool works, you are most welcome to read our documentation and trust me it is not boring.

How to host it myself?

You are more than welcome to host it yourself. For that you have 2 options:

Host it directly on a server. You can follow the instructions over here.
Using Docker. You can follow these instructions.

Open Source Commitment

Our entire codebase (including the docs) is entirely open source under the MIT License. We are welcome to contributions to the project and the docs. But, we ask only that you adhere to the project's Code of Conduct and Contributing Guide.

View on ProductHunt

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dev-army-knife

Final Words...

Thank You for reading! I want you to think of Dev Army Knife as a Swiss Army Knife for your daily dev tasks.

I would love to hear/read your views on the Project. Did you enjoy using it? What tool do you use the most? Any feature requests or complaints? Feel free to mail them to me at arpan@hackersreboot.tech or join our Discord Server. You can also join discussions on Github. Take Care and see you in the next one!

Hello V-Lang

Arpan Pandey — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 06:13:26 +0000

V-lang is an extraordinarily powerful language that can help you create a variety of applications. Its features are very unique: it can be used to create web servers, cross-platform UIs, OSs etc. It is so powerful and compact that the whole compiler is only 10MB.

What is V-Lang?

The V-Lang is a very very fast language at both performance and compilation. The language and the binaries it creates are very very small in size (like in KBs mostly or some KBs). The language supports multiple Operating Systems and also allows you to cross-compile for other platforms. The language itself is very new but has managed to help in the creation of so many blazingly fast frameworks, tools and a lot of other good stuff.

Features of V-lang

V-lang has completely blown my mind with all these features it can offer and that too at this young age. Let's get down to discuss some of them.

Performace

The author(s) have claimed that V is as fast as C and we all know that, that is quite saying something. This is because of the unique ways in which it manages memory, has built-in serialization without runtime reflection and a whole host of other features that the creators of this masterpiece have managed to fit into it.

Fast Compilation

V compiles ≈110k (Clang backend) and ≈1 million (x64 and tcc backends) lines of code per second per CPU core. (Intel i5-7500, SM0256L SSD, no optimization)

V is written in V and compiles itself in under a second.

V's official website

V is very fast to compile and even complex programs take barely a second to compile. If that is not fast then I don't know what is. Also, it can be attributed to the minuscule size of the binaries that it produces.

Innovative memory management

V avoids a lot of unnecessary allocation in the first place by using value types and string buffers thus promoting a simple abstraction-free code style.
V also has this great auto-free engine that frees about 90-100% of objects at compile time via adding the necessary free commands. Most of all, this system is completely optional and you don't need to change a thing in your code (like Python, JS etc)

The small and easy-to-build compiler

The V compiler can be bootstrapped in under a second, yes you read that right, in under a second. The V compiler is only 10 Mb and can be built in nearly 0.3s.

C Translation

For all those who want to use V but already have projects in C, the V compiler can also translate (rather transpile) your C code to V and vice-versa.

Hot-code Reloading

We (especially web-devs) are way too used to hot-code reloading and to help y'all, V has taken care of that too, so enjoy the experience.

Powerful Graphics Libraries

Fancy graphics required? Look no further, V has:

Cross-platform drawing library built on top of GDI+/Cocoa Drawing, and an OpenGL based graphics library for more complex 2D/3D applications.

(For normies like me, they are both very powerful graphics libraries)

This library also gives us a ton of features like:

The ability to load complex 3D objects using textures
A Camera for moving and looking around
Skeletal Animations

Heck, they are even planning to support DirectX, Vulkan, and Metal.

Native cross-platform GUI library

Want to develop Great GUIs for multiple platforms and that too with one codebase? Again, V has got your back. You don't need to embed Web pages or hacks like that (cough, cough Electron). The V-UI package uses native GUI toolkits to help you develop easily and effortlessly.

Easy Cross Compilation

It is very very easy to cross-compile programs in V to run them on other platforms. Again quoting the official website,

To cross-compile your software simply run v -os windows. or v -os Linux. No extra steps are required, even for GUI and graphical apps!

Painless deployments and dependency management

You don't need complex Makefiles, headers, scripts etc to build a project, even the largest of V Projects can be built using v ..

It even has its own package manager called vpm, to install something all you need to do is v install [package].

Running it everywhere

V can emit human-readable C, thus enabling the great platform support of C with tools like GCC, Clang etc. The optimizations by GCC/Clang can thus be greatly utilised with V.

In fact, V can call C Code and any language with C-interop can call V Code.

Code formatting with vfmt for consistent style

V also gives you a tool to format your code out of the box. This helps maintain code style and best practices across packages. Also, no more code style debates. Just run:
v fmt -w [file_name].v

A built-in code profiler

Want to know all your function calls, average time per call etc in detail? V gives you a profiler to help with tasks like these to help debug, make reports etc.

JS Transpilation and WASM Support

V can also be very easily transpiled to JavaScript and also be compiled to WASM for all your web related needs. Just run:
v -o hello.js hello.v

Automatic documentation

V also provides vdoc, a tool that can generate documentation directly from the source code. Thus, eliminating one of the biggest developer struggles and helping us focus on the code itself.

Built-in testing framework

V has a built-in testing framework to help with testing your code more easily and without relying on a third party for that. All you need to do is prefix a test function with test_ and then use the familiar assert keyword.

Built-in web framework

V also provides an excellent web framework out of the box called vweb that can do a lot of the heavy lifting that you may need to write performant, compact and powerful web servers.

Built-in ORM

V also features an excellent ORM that absorbs the best qualities of many ORMs. It provides a lot of features while staying minimal and performant. Also, you can just write V instead of SQL while interacting with databases.

What kind of tools will I need?

V just works with awesome support for many of the popular code editors like VSCode, Sublime Text, Vim and others. The V Team and the community have created a ton of tools in pure V. These tools help the overall experience and showcase V's ability as a great and mature language. Some of them are:

Vinix- An open-source Operating System that can already run GCC, Bash, V etc.
Volt- A 300Kb native desktop client for Slack, Discord, Skype, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and more.
VSQL- A single-file SQL database written in pure V with no dependencies.
Gitly- Open-source light and fast alternative to GitHub/GitLab, written entirely in V.
Vorum- Right now it's a very basic forum/blogging software, but in the future, it will be a full-featured light alternative to Discourse. The V forum runs on Vorum.
Vgram- A bot library for Telegram Bot API.

Where to get V-Lang?

Oh, so you are interested in using V-Lang? Even if not, trust me you should definitely try it out. The official V-Lang website over at:

https://vlang.io/

Conclusion

V-lang is a great new language for doing all kinds of tasks from web servers to native GUIs, shell scripts and whatnot. It will be interesting to see how its future shapes up and how the community reacts to it. Is it an interesting and powerful tool? Absolutely. Should you try it? Again, absolutely.

See you in the next one!

Introducing Formee

Arpan Pandey — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 07:55:09 +0000

Introduction

Formee is a tool that provides an easy way to create, edit and manage forms from the command line. It uses a powerful GraphQL API (provided by Hasura) and strives to make the process of working with forms as easy and simple as possible. I made this because I use google form quite a lot, but don't want to leave the terminal. So, I started work on creating Formee. Formee provides a simple, yet powerful interface for you to create, view, deploy, fill forms. Deployed forms also have a web version so every respondent doesn't have to download the CLI.

What's Hasura and how was it used?

Well, Hasura is a platform that creates GraphQL queries for databases and handles security, authentication etc so we don't have to. In this project, Hasura is used to deploy the forms, handle authentication etc, i.e, pretty much the backend. I just created the tables, connected a database and set permissions. Due to Hasura, the only backend I had to make was the JWT Generator for authenticating the client requests.

What does the app do?

Well, pretty much, everything related to forms. You can:

Create Forms
Try them without deploying
View Raw Form Data
Fill them from the CLI or the web
Deploy a form to our databases
View responses to a form
Store responses from a form in a JSON, YAML file

How do I create a form?

It is quite easy, just follow the following steps to create and deploy a form.

Install the CLI
Register or login to the CLI (Only logged in users can deploy forms for obvious reasons)
Create a form (It will give you a YAML file)
Try the form to see if everything looks like you think it should
You can fix typos etc manually in the YAML file created earlier
Deploy the form (It should give you a form ID, this can be used to fill the forms)
Voila! You are done.

It looks complex, can you first tell me how to use it.

Hmm, I have written a whole section in the docs for you on how to get started. Visit by clicking here.

Documentation

You can have a look at the docs here.

https://docs.formee.hackersreboot.tech

The Code

The Code for Formee is split into multiple GitHub repositories.

Feedback

You can submit your feedback to the application by visiting https://formee.hackersreboot.tech/form/18 or just filling up the form with ID 18 from the CLI. I would love to know your opinions, suggestions etc.

View on ProductHunt

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/formee

Final Words

I had a blast making Formee and would love to hear what y'all think of this little project of mine. Creating things, solving problems and learning new technologies is what I love and it involved all of them. So, it is very much worth it. A big thanks for the opportunity (by the means of this hackathon) to the Hashnode and Hasura teams.