DEV Community: Aswin

Introducing Dolphin - new way to make Android Apps using React.

Aswin — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:46:39 +0000

🤔 “Why does learning mobile app development feel way harder than building for the web?”

Most beginners today jump into coding through web dev because it feels fast, visual, forgiving, and honestly… fun!

But the moment they try building Android apps, the vibe suddenly changes:

new languages, heavy setup, long builds, and tons of steps before even seeing a single button on screen.

It just felt like something is unnecessarily complicated.

Meanwhile, vibe-coding and AI tools have already opened the doors for normal people to build decent web apps - so we wondered:

“Wait… what if making Android apps could be as simple as building a web app?

What if it’s not ‘hard’, we’re just doing it the old way?”

And like any good maker-brain moment, we didn’t think too much - we just tried building it.

🐬 Introducing Dolphin (Open Source, Beta)

A fun experimental side-project by me & Adhil Shan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adhil-shan/)

Dolphin is our small attempt to let people build Android apps using React + Vite while still accessing native features.

Not claiming it’s perfect, not claiming it’s the future - just curious enough to try and … it works. 😅

It’s open source, still Beta, and honestly there’s a lot to figure out - but we thought it was cool enough to share now instead of “one day when it’s ready”.

🎉 But… I didn’t stop there

I am also working on a vibe-coding tool built on top of Dolphin so that anyone can build Android apps in a simple, straight-forward, “just type what you want” kind of way.

More updates soon - this is just us having fun, building things we wish existed.

If you wanna try, break, laugh, test, or contribute - the repo link is down below, give it a star⭐ to show support.

GitHub Repo : https://github.com/adhilshan/dolphin

#Dolphin #OpenSource #SideProject #HackItTillItWorks #FunProjects #React #Vite #AndroidDev #React #Android

Windows notepad is WOW!

Aswin — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 04:33:58 +0000

The notepad in windows is one of the few pre-installed software that i genuinely love using. So to who ever made it, hats off 🙌.

How I made my own QR-code generator.

Aswin — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 17:31:08 +0000

🔥Intro

Hey there🤚.So in this blog I will be sharing my experience in creating an online QR-code generator going through the steps I have gone through and the technologies used along with the issues I encountered.

💡 -->

A while back when going through some fun modules and use cases available in Python , I came across a module using which one can create QR-codes pretty easily🤷‍♂️ and after playing with it for a while I thought can I make a web-app out of this ?🤔
As a person trying to figure out the ocean of web-development I quickly started researching about the possible ways to do so.
And to be honest it led me nowhere😅 mainly because I didn't spent much time on it because I was tired af due to all the assignments , exams etc from the collage. After a long gap....I finally took the idea to my head and decided to do it.

I decided I use Python itself in the backend via Flask(especially because using Python would allow me to reuse most of the code from my previous project Small Heart🤫).

So after figuring out how to do it.. I started to code it out using HTML and CSS to built up the design that I prepared in Figma.

Some changes have been made along the way and I am pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

Well now the frontend part is done I shifted my focus on the backend.

So I created the main function which will create and save the QR-code depending on what the user have entered. Also I used a deEmojify function and a duplicate_name_check to remove emojis and "/" s from links if entered by the user as these comes in the way of saving the QR-codes.
NOTE : The emojis and "/" are removed only for saving part it will be as it is while encoding into the QR-code✌.

Also I tried making a function which will run everytime the site is loaded deleting the previously created QR-codes. But.... it didn't worked as expected..😪. So I left it there for a future update... seems like a future Aswin's problem😆.

So I made it responsive using CSS media queries✨
Then hosted it using Heroku🕊.
Honestly it took a lot of time to deploy it cause of some unknown bugs.

Demo🧨

Check out a live demo of it here 👇.
Obsicode-Designer💜

✨Features :

🔭 Yes it is Open-Source. You can check it out here on GitHub.
📺 Dark themed.
🤖 No account creation or login required.

⭕Cons :

🤍 Currently in its 1st version(as of 3/13/2022).

💜✨Other

The name OBSICODE is pretty random inspired of Obsidian😉.
You better don't scan the logo😁.

Obsicode-Designer is created using Flask as mentioned already.
A python module named qrcode is used to create the QR-code.

With that said I would love💘 to know all of your suggestions and opinions on this. If you are interested in making any changes or improvements to it , feel free to check out the GitHub repo -- Obsicode. Simply star it if you like the idea, it will encourage me to do a lot more projects. Last but not least I would like to apologize for the long gap(reason mentioned already).
And always Stay Safe and Keep Coding🎊.

(web-app)Open-Source URL-Shortener built using Python.

Aswin — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 11:20:29 +0000

🧨How it started.

Hey there🤚.

Long story short , I recently joined here and I came over a post by @liyasthomas where he created a URL-SHORTNER which is open-source. As a person learning web development I was fascinated by it. But the thing that I noticed while going through the GitHub repo was that he have clearly mentioned not to put any sensitive links as all the links are publicly visible.

So I decided to make my own version of it but with some personal touches.

With my previous experiences in Python I already knew to write a script which can shorten a URL using some Python modules. So I sat down to make it into a web-app using Flask. Hence Small-Heart💖 was born.

🎀Demo

Check out a live demo of it here 👇.
Small-Heart💖

Note -- The site is hosted using Heroku's free version so increased traffic can make the site lag a bit.

✨Features :

🔭 Yes it is Open-Source. You can check it out here on GitHub.
📺 Simple UI(not the best😅).
🤖 No account creation or login required.

⭕Cons :

🤍 Currently in its 1st version(as of 1/23/2022).
🔆 Not a fully responsive web-design.

🖤Behind the scenes

Small-Heart is created using Flask as mentioned already.
A python module named pyshorteners is used to shorten the URL.

Last but not least a bit of JavaScript is used in the web page to make it much more user friendly(at least to an extent).

I clearly want to mention that the inspiration of this project entirely came from @liyasthomas 🎉. I surely recommend everyone to check out his post as well.

With that said I would love💘 to know all of your suggestions and opinions on this. If you are interested in making any changes or improvements to it , feel free to check out the GitHub repo -- Small-Heart. Simply star it if you like the idea, it will encourage me to do a lot more projects. And always Stay Safe and Keep Coding🎊.