DEV Community: NuelDotDev

Who is the builder?

NuelDotDev — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:31:57 +0000

The year 2020 was the beginning of something new for me and for many. With no school and everything going on around the world I was forced to find something else that kept my mind sharp and active and for the most part, I found it, Coding.

But it was more than that, the euphoria I felt when I saw Hello World render on my browser after writing a H1 tag and figuring out index.html

All of it was surreal, and it led to a journey I couldn't have ever imagined, from building projects to learn for the fun of it, to learning languages, even to working with others and just building for myself, that feeling was always there.

I believe it still is, but I think it's fading slightly, not as visible to some as it is to others, but I think that spark will be gone soon, but I don't say this from just looking at myself, I'm looking at everyone else, and I'm confused.

I think you already know where this is going...

Fast forward.
It's 2026, we've got AI writing more lines of code than ever before and every developer has now become a project manager. Say what you will, but that's fucked.

One could say it's just morphing, becoming something different, the next evolution of this path. And I agree, except, it isn't happening in a way that keeps even those who are up-to-date and learning the T&As of this evolution in the chain. It's alienating it's own participants.

Almost no one can build without AI support anymore, and while this is no different from autocomplete, at least with autocomplete, you had the line in your mind, you just needed to get it written faster.

Here, you have the idea, and that's pretty much it. Take the AI away and that beautiful computer you call a brain begins to scramble and break, losing it's focus and it's ability to actually build because you're more concerned about the destination, the overview, instead of the little steps it takes to get there. You're becoming a spectator to a building you supposedly are the architect of.

So I ask, what are we actually doing?

Where are the learners and where is the learning?

We tell ourselves our value is in the ability to envision the outcomes, but I think that's cope. How do you have value if you cannot create the outcome? What's the point of envisioning if you can't get it done?

With every new update, it seems more and more like people building things to put themselves out of use, and maybe this is my ignorance speaking but, I just can't make sense of it.

The world I fell in-love with has changed, and change is good, not always, but it is. The issue now is that I see us stagnating ourselves to accelerate our tools. If that isn't a recipe for disaster then I don't know what is.

Once upon not too long ago, every week there was a new framework, another developer's way of fixing one issue and introducing or disregarding many others. We had to figure out what tool was best for the job and it took a level of technical know-how, this didn't come from magic boxes, it came from trial and error, understanding trade-offs, etc.

Now, everything is built with the same framework or library or language, and if it's not NextJS, who am I kidding, it's definitely NextJS.

So when we are no longer tinkering and playing around, who's learning?
When we are no longer building and figuring things out, who's learning?
When we aren't reading errors or researching and only reading status updates from a bot we gave instructions a couple mins ago for a feature, then who's actually doing anything?

It won't be long till many don't know what a React hook is, and maybe this is me romanticizing the days and nights I spent learning, reading and watching, searching up stack overflow, even clicking google's second page because I can't find what I'm looking for, but wasn't that the whole point?

I understand that to some, they may read this with an attitude of defense, saying "I use it to aid my work," and even I have the same mindset, but the line between aid and crutch if left for long enough gets blurry.

In trying to understand this industry wide shift, I've come to wonder what the product truly is, is it the tool or the developer who uses it? The developer who can't build without the tool is a customer forever and if convenience is such a luxury, would we be trying to get it into everyone's hands?

Low quality wallpapers are a pain, I'm trying to fix that.

NuelDotDev — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:21:32 +0000

I love switching wallpapers a lot, the feeling of intention when I look at my desktop is something I yearn for and like many, I often get my images through Pinterest, but this led to a problem.

See, Pinterest is not really an image host. What you're seeing in your feed is almost always a thumbnail; a compressed resize of the original. When you try to save it, that's what you get. The actual image lives somewhere else, could be on a different site or maybe even gone entirely.

The technical reason: Pinterest crawls the web, indexes images from other sources and serves them fast at scale, they generate their own cached versions, smaller and optimized for feed browsing, not for your desktop. So that beautiful pin you saved? is just Pinterest's copy, not the original.

I figured this out the hard way, many beautiful looking visuals, but when that "set as wallpaper" button is clicked, it looks blurred, a bit off.

App's right here if you'd like to take a look: Poster

One would say to use other platforms, get 4K res, but not many have been able to capture the same level of aesthetic comfort that Pinterest has. My solution was simple, build an app to help. I mean, how hard could that be right?

The Journey

I did a bit of brainstorming, things I would love to have on a wallpaper application, asked a few friends, even downloaded some competitor apps to see what they had going on, and finally arrived at what I thought was a realistic scope.

Pt. 1: Expectations

I envisioned something a bit straightforward, something that could do these:

Connect to my account, use and access my boards/pins
AI Upscale the images that make me cringe
Act as a central library for all my wallpapers
Implement Unsplash API cause Unsplash is GOATED

but as we all know, "straightforward" almost never happens in our line of work.

So, I got to work.

My package manager of choice? pnpm
My building framework? electron

If you have experience here, you already know that those two don't mix well together, and that was the start of what I thought would be a disaster. More on this later

Pt. 2: Building

I ran the pnpm command, created the project with React within Electron, forgot to configure tailwind but styling wasn't the issue, the real headache was figuring out how Electron actually talks to the OS.

The first problem was understanding how to access user's files since the user would be uploading images they wanna use (at least at the start).
This led to me having to how to work localfile:// alongside file paths on the system, except, whenever it was time to display the files, it never did!

Fixed the problem by having to take out a couple of leading slashes. The full protocol handler ended up looking like this, and the fix was embarrassingly simple:

js// before
//C:/Users/nuel/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg  ❌

// after
C:/Users/nuel/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg   ✅

pathName = pathName.replace(/^\/+/, "");

And if it wasn't a silent pathing bug, it was something else. The weeks that followed felt like my codebase was yelling at me from every angle.

The pnpm feud: had to switch to npm entirely, this was after I tried fighting a losing battle but ended up realizing that the two are just not compatible.
Native dependencies: packages like sharp have opinions about your environment. Getting them to build correctly inside Electron took more time than I'd like to admit especially with pnpm.
The AI wall: the plan was server-side upscaling via Replicate, billing setup got in the way. Pivoted to local AI upscaling instead. Not what I planned, but keeping it on-device means no API costs passed to the user, so maybe it worked out.
The Unsplash block: turns out Unsplash explicitly restricts their API for wallpaper applications. That whole integration plan was dead on arrival. Painful but still Goated
Auto Updater Setup: Maybe the biggest hassle of them all, config was totally alien for an electron noob like me but I figured it all out in the end.

Every feature was a burden to implement, with each one passed came another, but slowly, the pieces started sticking together.

Pt. 3: The Reality

What Did Poster Actually Become?

Well, not everything I planned made it. Pinterest integration? Still figuring it out. Cloud storage? Probably coming when accounts become a thing. Replicate upscaling? I want it, just need to make sure the app can foot the bill first.

But what's there works, and I'm proud of it.
After the first few versions I realized the performance wasn't really great, especially if one had a multitude of images, the scrolling got choppy. A wallpaper library means you're potentially throwing hundreds of images at the screen at once, so Poster renders thumbnails instead of full images, and anything outside the viewport just stops existing until you scroll back to it. Occlusion culling. Keeps things light and here's where things stand:

Free

Local image library
Slideshow mode

Poster Plus

Time-of-day scheduling, morning, afternoon, evening, night. Different wallpaper for each.
Local AI upscaling, low-res Pinterest save? Run it through before setting it. The difference is real.
Boards (coming soon)

To wrap it up

Poster itself is very different from what I initially had in mind. Half the features got cut, one got blocked by an API policy, and a few turned into something else entirely.
But it's out. It works. And I use it every day, which was the whole point.
If you're on Windows and would love to try it, give it a download. It's Free with the Plus tier as a lifetime payment. If something feels off or broken, tell me. I'm still very much building this thing.

Yours truly,
nueldotdev💫

Learn to program (The lazy way)😉

NuelDotDev — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 20:18:17 +0000

Coding can be hard, especially as a beginner, so many fields to get into, so many projects that could potentially be built but there's just you, trying to find your way through all the noise the best way you can... Or rather—The best way you think. Let's face it—learning to code sounds like hard work. It can be downright intimidating and overwhelming but there's a better much more simple and lazier way to approach coding.

Not the kind of lazy that involves doing nothing, but the smart kind. The type of laziness where you learn just what you need and automate as much as possible. As Bill Gates once famously said,

I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

The above words perfectly encapsulates the work or mindset of the current programmer/developer, building software in today's world is about finding easier ways to do things, so why don't you find an easier way to learn? (Spoiler Alert: There's no easy way) Here are some things you might want to employ to make yourself a better learner and developer

1. Do Your Research

Many people make the mistake of getting into whatever's trending, myself I started with python cause 4 years ago that was all the rave, but these days I find myself working more with JavaScript. It's nice to stay up-to-date with things but also work on what feels best for you (Received this from a mentor I met at a tech conference)

2. No Need to Reinvent the Wheel

With multiple tools and libraries out there, there's no need to reinvent the wheel, take advantage of tools like Google or Stack Overflow, even most recent, ChatGPT and the likes. It's not about memorizing solutions, it's about finding them when they're needed.

3. The Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)

According to Wikipedia, The Pareto Principle states that;

For many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few").

How does this relate to programming? Well, it comes down to understanding foundation. Take for example; functions, loops, statements, variables, etc. These are all basic to most if not all programming languages out there, once you understand the basics, the issue goes from “learning a language” to “using a language”

Languages are not the solution, they're an expression of it.

4. Break It DOWN!

This cannot be stressed enough, and personally—it gets on my nerves when I see people trying to fix problems without thinking through the steps (I do this all the time😂)

When trying to build a page, first consider the contents, this will lead to thinking of how to build the contents, and soon after, the entire page will come to life. Instead of “build a website,” break it down into “create a header,” “add an image,” etc. Progress in tiny steps feels less like work, and you get results faster.

5. Build Projects

Building projects might seem like a no-brainer for anyone who's learning to code, but as a survivor of tutorial hell, it's not that simple.

I always meet people buying courses, asking for course recommendations watching tutorials for days and yet somehow do not always seem to make progress. Now I will admit that as someone who spent my time learning code from YouTube and the marvelous creation we call the Internet, I've never understood why people spend so much money buying this or that.

The easiest way is to build as many projects as you can on your own, best part is, they don't need to make sense, and they don't need to be complete, you'd be surprised at the amount of side projects experienced devs have just laying around from their learning days that will never know what it's like to be deployed.

Now don't get me wrong, YouTube accounts like Traversy Media, TechWithTim, Dennis Ivy and a host of others played such a vital role in my learning, but staying with tutorials only made me dependent on them, I got over it by building with a tutorial and then rebuilding alone from scratch but you can always find your own model.

6. Cheating Helps!

It's not about memorizing solutions, it's about finding them when they're needed.

Remember this line from number 2? Let me expand on it.

This could come in different forms.

Whether it's putting things in notes, or bookmarking websites containing resources that could be used. At the end of the day, making them accessible is the most important, for me it was building a notes app just so I can save ideas and stuff, then there's notion templates, and some of my friends even use Google Keeps, writing can help you a lot when it comes to thinking as a developer but also in finding solutions too.

Then there's Ctrl C + Ctrl V:
I cannot count the amount of times I've needed to build something in some specific way and the host of side projects I built in the past come to the rescue, whether it's playing with a database or doing something different with authentication, a lot of the time, you end up repeating code in various projects, and this is where having a boatload of side projects can help, it shortens the time and gets the job done.

There's also reading documentation and just asking AI for help, this makes your work faster and easier.

Bonus Point!

Read your errors!

You'd be surprised at just how easy it is to fix that bug or issue you've been facing, I certainly didn't know I could solve it by reading my errors but apparently we are in a generation of technology where our technology can help us become better developers, so the errors are important...

This is a no-brainer for people with experience but for those who are still finding their feet, it's a habit they'd have to get into.

Conclusion: Laziness Is About Working Smarter, Not Harder

All-in-all, the idea of “lazy” programming isn't about being lazy in a negative sense, it's about aiming for efficiency and leveraging the existing tools to get the job done the best way possible.
Learning to code the “lazy” way is all about taking some strategic shortcuts, humor, and persistence.

Let's connect 💙

You can follow me on X, Instagram & GitHub

Code, Commit, Deploy: My First Django Deployment

NuelDotDev — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 01:27:56 +0000

Hey dev.to,

Since my last post in which I covered my starting as a backend developer with Django

Starting Django as a Beginner

NuelDotDev ・ Jul 7 '22

#beginners #python #django #webdev

I can say I have accomplished a few things. I have solidified myself in Django, I am more comfortable with languages, built multiple personal projects and most recently, explored the world of mobile development with React Native.

But the most worthy feat, is the one in the title.

In The Beninging

(not a typo btw😆)

It was mid 2023, I was desperate to learn something new, I looked at my options, trying to figure out what would be the best step forward, AI but it didn't feel right, other frameworks like; Reflex (Pynecone), Streamlit (Which I used while playing with ChatGPT prompts) and a bunch other stuff.

But there was an itch that wasn't being scratched, it was my need to see things placed properly and working as they should, and so I settled on React... I had touched it once or twice in the past but I believe I had a better understanding now.

I was wrong.

The issue was simple, I had little to not-so-competent knowledge of JavaScript, so thinking back now...

I had to re-evaluate my plan, React had me questioning my life choices more than a multiple-choice test with no correct answers.
I just couldn't get it!
My method was simple, build an entire working project with vanilla JS, none of the fancy, just learn the dang language.

So I embarked on the journey you are hopefully still reading on.
It took me sometime to get things sorted, and just like all of us, I HAD ISSUES. From figuring out what to do, to finding a method of implementation, to surprisingly the least stressful part- The Deploy.

I will cover that in a minute, but let's talk about the project first.

The Project

Multiple projects came to mind, as it was not my first attempt at building something with JavaScript solely on the frontend, I already had somewhat of something feasible. A quotes web application called "Quotiva". It's a passion project I started with the mindset of deploying and completing, but circumstances at the time didn't let that come to fruition (I'd like to add that I plan on returning to work on it, we'll see how that goes).

So here I was months later, without any zeal of trying something new, I open up my wallet and I've got no cash... In that moment, it hit me, every impulse purchase I made within the last week, had accumulated to running me dry, yes I still live with my family, but I do desire the ever attractive and beautiful Financial Independence. Then I thought to myself, "Let me build an expense tracker, it'll help me personally so why not?"

Those words, coupled with my guilt of getting myself broke, sparked something in me, and within a week and some days (this consisted of drawing out a plan, finding a design and stuff) I had built a functioning expense tracker --> SpendWise, code wasn't perfect, it had a lot of repetition (I broke DRY, I'm deeply sorry), the functionality was not as good as my sleepy eyes thought, but I somehow convinced myself to believe the words, "This is fine."

The Deploy

Yay! You made it this far. Let's not stop here, PLEASE?

Emotion

It was night, if I can recall correctly, it was probably around 1 towards 2AM. I felt happy, overjoyed, a sense of achievement equal only to what I felt when I wrote my first line of code, it was exhilarating, it was...

[Okay see here's the thing, I have searched for the past 10 minutes for a word that accurately describes the feeling, but anyone who's felt it, knows it, this is the best word I could find... I don't think it really captures it, cause I don't think there's even a word, but, Let us advance forthwith, gracefully continuing on this journey, unwavering in our resolve.]

It truly was... EUPHORIC

Online and Running

Python Anywhere was the easiest to get started with, almost 6AM at this point, and I thought, "Why not just deploy it?"
I don't remember it being hard, I followed some tutorials on YouTube, but looking back, it kind of was, I did get it up and running that night in maybe an hour or so, that could probably be because I was Cloud 9 high.

Over time, I have worked on the code, added more to the UI, changed a bit of the workflow and the project and even recently pitched the mobile app to my mind (Still waiting for feedback).
All-in-all, it was a process that I will definitely never forget, and it has helped my confidence as a developer, and it's all happening cause I realized...

Conclusion

Having a project online and hosted especially as someone trying to gather experience is exciting but also a bit scary. On one hand you've got something that says, "Yeah, I made that," but there's also that feeling of, "Is this really good enough?"

In my experience (I do not have a lot), it's to JUST DO IT. what's the worst that could happen?
I often bring it up when I attend a tech event or conference here and there and the reception I receive is overwhelmingly positive.

From a personal perspective, it's not great, but I believe few years down the line, I may come to see it as a watershed moment in my career (hopefully tech works out 🤞) thanks to this project, I've gained an ability to maintain a codebase, I am not perfect, but now I know what I am doing and how I should be doing it in a way that isn't to different from the original code I am working with, cause of this I began writing .md to record changes I have made along the way as I realized I kept forgetting what I had updated or deleted, this would lead to commit messages like this:

With all that said, I guess all this does is point out why it's important to just build, and deploy if you can, for a backend dev like me, it's more than just what it looks like cause I have to make it function, so in those terms, I am one step closer to being a fullstack dev? Maybe😅

Alas, if you have followed this all the way here, then THANK YOU
I might be writing a lot more, maybe about React Native, so who knows😄
Hope I didn't bore you to death, but then if I did, you wouldn't be reading this right now... YAY Written media I guess [looked it up, it's Blog media? Cause apparently Blogging is a type of media

SEE YA LATER READER!!👋

Starting Django as a Beginner

NuelDotDev — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 00:43:46 +0000

Hi, I'm Nuel and thanks for clicking.

Before I get into it, I'd like to clarify some things...

I'm a seventeen year old in his little corner of the world and this is the first time I'm taking web development serious, but, more on that later...
Unlike many writers here, I am inexperienced and relatively new to this world of programs and code but as I've recently learnt, all that matters is your level of motivation(especially in this industry).
So I've decided to document my progress here on dev.to, and I'm starting with, as the title suggests: Django. So without further ado, I begin.

Why I Picked Django

Honestly speaking... I don't know, I did a bunch of research and figured if I was going to take the step and start my career, I should probably start it with something I'm familiar with.

Quick Backstory: I started coding with HTML and a few days after, I got into CSS, later did a bunch of JavaScript(but that didn't sit well in-between my ears) I forgot about webdev completely and started chasing a different dream: Software. Python looked cool, so I hoped on it's train, I've been on and off with python for a year now, but I'm very comfortable with it, and that brings me to Today.

After a thousand google searches and many self-targeted questions, I realized I could keep pushing towards a software development career but at least I should start something first(cause the first step's important right?) though it wasn't planned, my knowledge of HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript left me with no other option but to go back to webdev, so that's what I did.

I decided to start working on backend and Guess what!?
Lucky me, python works backend. Did a few google searches and found the best frameworks to be Flask and Django.

While Flask is a very popular framework, Django seemed like it suited me best, and of course as a beginner I had my doubts, but being that I'm pretty comfortable with python and that Django seemed more popular than Flask, I decided to use it.

Note: This could also be due to the fact that the Django website made an impression a year ago when I accidentally visited it and didn't even know frameworks existed but we'll just act like that never happened, okay?

Installing Django

Installing Django would be as easy as 'ABC' given that you follow the instructions on the Django website correctly, if you're like me who misses a line or two every now and then, it's going to be HELL.
I literally ended up downloading a beta version of Django, had to uninstall and then install the most recent released version just to find out that nothing really changed, phew! I'm so glad I set it up successfully though, but, let's move on.

Learning Django

So Django's finally been installed and I'm one step closer to achieving my goal right? Sadly, no. I'm going to have to learn it now, but I don't think it's going to be that hard, I mean there's literally tutorial pages on the site that walks you through creating projects with it(given you follow the instructions properly of course) but remember when I said I don't do that well? Yeah, I did it again and every now and then I've got these errors that shouldn't even be happening. Either way I like to see it as a learning curve and who knows? Maybe it'll all work out... maybe

Thank You for taking the time to read, it's my first post here and I wrote it with the idea that most who read it would be new and to try my hand at writing, anyways, thanks for reading and I'd probably be posting more about my journey. Once again...

I'm Nuel and thanks for clicking!