DEV Community: Mehedi Hassan

Building things to solve your own problems

Mehedi Hassan — Tue, 12 May 2020 21:56:29 +0000

I have been planning to write a post like this for a while, but never actually got to it. So here it goes.

Most of us on this community are developers to some extent. And chances are, you have probably made something to benefit your own workflow at some point in your life. That something could literally be anything -- a simple script, a function, or even a full-blown app. But a lot of us don't tend to realise the benefits of publicising our fun little creations.

I am sure this has been said by hundreds of people, but if you make something to solve a problem you are facing, there's a very good chance someone else out there is facing the same problems. And when you make something to help solve that problem, you should try to make it available to the world. I guess that really is the beauty of open-source: so many of the popular open-source projects nowadays are made by someone facing the same issues as everyone else.

To be honest, when I was around 17, I actually did not realise this at all. One evening, I was working on this WordPress site for a client and needed a bunch of random stock images to fill up the thumbnails for all the automatically generated posts I had used to test the WordPress theme I was working on. I could have just manually downloaded 20/30 images one-by-one from Google or Unsplash, but that'll take a lot of time and probably is not the best use of my time. And I knew I would need random images like that for other projects, so I thought I should just make a script that grabs and downloads random images from Unsplash.

1 hour later, I had this little Node.js script that did exactly that. And instead of just keeping it on my machine, I just ended up putting it up on my GitHub. Keep in mind, I was 17 when I first made this, and I basically didn't have anything on my GitHub, so I was just trying to grow my profile. A few weeks later, I was randomly checking my GitHub and noticed the project had a few stars on Github. A year or two later, more people had found the script and used it. (I also just released v2 of the project and it's now on NPM if you want to check it out).

The project has around 250 stars at the time of writing this, and that's by no means a "popular" project. You will find countless other repositories and projects that are much more popular, but that's not the point here. What really matters is the fact that people actually found this random little script I made to help my own workflow and used it to improve their own workflow. And I think that's really beautiful.

Fun fact: a senior engineer from Squarespace had even contributed to the project, which I thought was really cool!

And this is not the first time I have seen something like this happen: a few weeks ago, I wrote about my GitCleanup project here, and more than 120 developers have used it so far to clean-up their GitHub profile. When I was building the app, I had people telling me "who will want to bulk delete their repositories?". Well, turns out, at least a 120 developers. In other words:

So the main takeaway here is that whenever you build that little something to help your own workflow, it doesn't hurt to share it with the rest of the world. Even if it sounds stupid, there's a good chance someone else in the world will benefit from it at some point. So go ahead and put that little script up on GitHub.

If you like this little story, make sure to follow me on Twitter for similar stories! :D And thank you for reading!

Cleaning up your GitHub profile

Mehedi Hassan — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 13:37:54 +0000

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was busy re-organizing somethings on my portfolio. I also wanted to quickly clean-up my GitHub profile at the same time, as I had lots of repositories for personal projects that I never actually started working on or repositories that I created while following a tutorial, etc. Point is, my GitHub was full of repositories I didn't need, and they were just taking up space unnecessarily.

So I decided to get rid of those and delete the repositories one-by-one from the GitHub website. The process was time-consuming because I had to individually delete the repositories, and GitHub requires you to confirm the repository name before you can delete it. All in all, the process felt like something that can be easily automated.

Like one does, I did a quick Google search and found a tool that supposedly lets you bulk delete repositories. The interface of the app was incredibly confusing, and it ended up deleting repositories that I actually wanted to keep. So what ended up happening is that the app deleted the repositories I wanted to keep, and kept the ones I wanted to get rid of.

🤬💀

I had lost the repository for my biggest project, and because it was part of a forked network, you can't simply recover the repository from your account. I had to reach out to GitHub Support to get the repo back, but even then, I had lost all the years of releases I published on that repo. Long story short, my day quickly turned into a massive nightmare.

And then it hit me: there has to be a better and reliable way of doing this. With the free time I had because of lockdown, I decided to make my own app that lets you bulk delete repositories. My focus with this app was to build an interface that is incredibly simple to understand and use.

I started looking into the GitHub API to get started, and the endpoint for deleting repositories is pretty simple. So I quickly started making a React app that lets you view your repositories separated by Public and Private repositories. From there, you can select repositories you want to delete, and delete them all at once with a single click. The interface of the app, once again, is really simple and lets you clean-up your GitHub account with just a few clicks and without any of the hassle. There's a search feature to search for repositories on your profile, and there's a dark/light theme as well.

Meet GitCleanup: gitcleanup.com.

The app is completely open-source on GitHub, and you can even deploy your own instance on Heroku:

This was a fun little project for me, and I hope it's useful to the community ☺️

Building a news feed with Firebase

Mehedi Hassan — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 12:13:32 +0000

Hey everyone,

I am currently building a React Native application for a college project. The app is a simple social network that lets you do the basic things and uses Firebase to store user data.

Like every other social network, the app will have a timeline/feed for each user and users will be able to follow each other on the platform.

Now, how would you go about building a (fairly) scalable news feed with Firebase?

My current implementation stores the timeline for each user, and whenever someone they follow posts something, the timeline field gets updated. This is obviously not scalable at all, as it would use up a lot of resources when a user has millions or thousands of followers.

Would really appreciate any kind of help here, this has been a tricky solution for me to solve :)