🚀 Introducing Pblog – A Dockerized TUI Blogging App

Kaustubh — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 13:49:17 +0000

👋 Hey Dev Community!

Let me introduce you all to my latest project: Pblog! 🎉

Pblog is a Dockerized terminal-based user interface (TUI) blogging application designed to make blog management seamless. It allows users to create, read, update, and delete posts efficiently while supporting similarity-based search and paginated fetching for optimized performance and to prevent database overload.

🤔 Why This Project?

I started this project as a way to learn Docker and how to integrate a database into a backend. Through this journey, I discovered how a database like PostgreSQL communicates with another container over the same network, and it was a game-changer! 🚀

✨ Features

📝 CRUD Operations – Manage Your Blog with Ease

Pblog provides an intuitive way to handle blog posts with confirmation prompts and error handling.

Create a Post 📝

Effortlessly add new blog entries.
Read a Post 📖

View detailed content with ease.
Update a Post ✏️

Automatically pre-fills previous content for quick editing.
CRUD with Confirmation ✅

A confirmation of work done.
Error Handling ⚠️

Robust validation and user-friendly error messages.

🔍 Advanced Search Capabilities

ID-Based Search 🔢

Retrieve posts using a unique identifier.
Similarity-Based Search 🧐

Find posts based on content relevance.
Paginated Fetching 📌

Optimizes performance by fetching posts in batches.

🛠️ Technical Details

Pblog is built using:

Docker 🐳 – For containerization and environment consistency.
Go 🚀 – Chosen for its concurrency, performance, and simplicity in backend development.
PostgreSQL 🛢️ – Reliable, scalable, and feature-rich database.
GORM 🔌 – An ORM that simplifies database interactions.
tview 🎨 – A powerful library for building TUI applications in Go.

⚡ Challenges Faced & Solutions

1️⃣ Switching Focus in TUI 🖥️

Problem: Initially, I struggled to shift focus between different sections of the TUI.
Solution: Using tview.Pages, I was able to split the TUI into different sections and switch between them dynamically.

2️⃣ Docker Compose Database Integration 🐳🔗

Problem: The app couldn't communicate with the PostgreSQL database container.
Solution: The issue was that the app sometimes started before the database was fully ready. Adding depends_on in docker-compose.yml ensured the database initialized before the app started.

3️⃣ Terminal Capture Issue ⌨️

Problem: The database logs occupied the terminal, preventing the app from displaying the TUI.
Solution: Running the compose setup in detached mode (-d) and then using docker attach on the app container ensured the TUI appeared correctly.

🚀 What's Next?

🔍 Search Filtering – Filter results through categories.

🔐 Authentication – Implement login and write permissions.

🏷️ User Preferences – Recommend posts based on tags.

💰 Payment Gateway – Enable monetization options.

🏗️ PostgreSQL Deployment – Deploy on a public server for worldwide sharing.

🎉 Conclusion

Thanks for making it this far! 🙌 This journey was incredibly rewarding as I went from knowing very little about Docker and database integration to building a fully functional application. If you find this project useful, check it out on GitHub and feel free to contribute! 🚀

👉 GitHub Repo

Happy coding! 😃

My Journey with Go and Two Practice Projects

Kaustubh — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:09:38 +0000

Hi Devs 👋

I’m thrilled to share my journey of learning Go and how it led me to build two practice projects. This has been a rewarding learning experience, and I’m excited to share my learnings with you all.

🚀 Starting the Journey

I began my Go journey with "A Tour of Go" and freeCodeCamp. I explored Go’s:

Data Structures: Structs, arrays, slices, and maps.
Dynamic Behaviours: Methods, interfaces, and type assertions.
Concurrency: Goroutines and channels.
Advanced Concepts: Generics, pointers, readers, and image manipulation.

For a long time I loved C but had to part ways with it as it didn't support OOP and was highly memory unsafe. That's where I found Go, which was similar to C but had all the features that I missed in C. Including some of the dynamic aspects that made me choose this over C++.

🌟 Task Tracker CLI

One of my first projects with Go was a CLI Task Tracker Tool, which made me practice JSON parsing and file handling.

Features:

Add, view, update, and delete tasks directly from the terminal.
Track the status of your task: pending, in-progress, skipped, and completed.
Data Persistence: Stores the tasks in a JSON file of the current directory.

Lessons Learned:

File handling with Go.
JSON Marshalling/Unmarshalling.
Taking command line arguments.

You can find the project here: CLI Task Tracker.

🌟 GitHub User Activity Tracker

Building on the momentum, I created GitHub User Activity Tracker, a tool for listing public GitHub contributions with just a username using GitHub's API.

Features:

Tracks commits, PRs, issues, and contribution history.
Provides an easy way to monitor and celebrate your GitHub activity.

Lessons Learned:

Using GitHub’s API effectively.
Structuring data and displaying it in meaningful ways.

You can check out the project here: GitHub User Activity Tracker.

Reflections and Future Plans

From understanding go's core concepts to applying them in projects, it was a great experience. These projects not only helped solidify my knowledge on go but also taught me how to build & read APIs.

What's next: I am building a Personal Blogging Platform that will store data on a Postgres database running on a docker container. This project will have an interactive TUI.

I’d love to hear your feedback on these projects! If you’re learning Go or working on similar tools, let’s connect and share insights. 🚀

DEV Community: Kaustubh

🚀 Introducing Pblog – A Dockerized TUI Blogging App

👋 Hey Dev Community!

🤔 Why This Project?

✨ Features

📝 CRUD Operations – Manage Your Blog with Ease

🔍 Advanced Search Capabilities

🛠️ Technical Details

⚡ Challenges Faced & Solutions

1️⃣ Switching Focus in TUI 🖥️

2️⃣ Docker Compose Database Integration 🐳🔗

3️⃣ Terminal Capture Issue ⌨️

🚀 What's Next?

🎉 Conclusion

My Journey with Go and Two Practice Projects

🌟 Task Tracker CLI

🌟 GitHub User Activity Tracker