DEV Community: Vinit Patil

# NYC – Not Your Calc: Making Everyday Calculations Smarter

Vinit Patil — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 09:43:14 +0000

NYC – Not Your Calc: Making Everyday Calculations Smarter

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine.

What I Built

I built NYC (Not Your Calc), a project focused on making everyday calculations smarter and more accessible.

The idea behind NYC is to go beyond the traditional calculator experience and explore how technology and AI can make solving problems easier. Instead of treating calculations as just numbers and operations, the project explores a more interactive and intelligent approach.

I wanted to experiment with building something useful while learning more about AI-powered applications and open-source development.

Code

Check out the project on GitHub:

NYC – Not Your Calc

How I Built It

I developed NYC as a hands-on project, exploring how modern development tools and AI concepts can come together to create a useful application.

The project represents my interest in experimenting with intelligent applications, problem-solving, and building practical tools through software development.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation makes it possible for developers to learn, experiment, share ideas, and improve their work together.

Projects like NYC are part of that journey. Open-source development gives everyone an opportunity to explore existing ideas, contribute improvements, and build something of their own without starting completely from scratch.

For me, participating in Hacktoberfest is also about learning by building and becoming a better developer.

The Spirit of It

Every project starts with curiosity and a willingness to experiment. NYC is one of my steps towards exploring smarter applications and understanding how AI can make everyday tasks more interesting.

This Hacktoberfest, I'm excited to keep building, learning, and contributing to the open-source community!

Built with curiosity. Shared with the open-source community. 🚀

Quickshot Extension

Vinit Patil — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:46:12 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle

What I Built

QuickShot Extension — a browser extension that captures webpage screenshots or selected UI elements and uses local open-source AI to instantly draft product copy, listing descriptions, or social media blurbs directly inside your browser.

It solves a daily pain point for content creators, indie hackers, and e-commerce sellers who spend hours typing repetitive product descriptions or paying monthly SaaS fees for cloud copywriting assistants. QuickShot keeps content generation fast, offline-first, and completely free of recurring subscription costs.

Demo

Repository & Demo: https://github.com/vinitpatil-8/quickshot-extension

How I Built It

QuickShot Extension is built with a privacy-first, local-inference workflow:

Frontend & Browser Core: Built as a Web Extension (JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, CSS) to handle page capture and element selection.
Local AI Engine: Powered by open-weight models (like Gemma / Llama 3.2 running via Ollama or WebLLM) to perform fast, on-device text generation directly from page context without sending text to cloud servers.
Structured Outputs: Uses lightweight JSON schema formatting to quickly convert page inputs into clean, ready-to-copy marketing bullet points and summaries.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

100% Privacy & Security: Unreleased draft web pages, personal projects, and internal tools never leave your local browser session or machine.
Zero API Cost Overhead: SaaS writing tools charge $15–$30/month. Open innovation allows building a light utility with $0 running costs per prompt.
Offline Reliability: Works completely without an active internet connection, avoiding service downtime or API price lock-in.

My First User

Tested with a friend who writes listing drafts for digital products and indie web tools.

Feedback: "Being able to select an area on my staging site and get candidate headline copy without opening another tab or copy-pasting back and forth saved a ton of friction."
Next Steps: Requested a one-click button to directly copy generated text into the system clipboard.

Touch Grass RPG: Turn Screen Breaks into Retro RPG Quests

Vinit Patil — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 10:33:16 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass

What I Built
I built Touch Grass RPG, a gamified, retro 8-bit web app designed to encourage people to disconnect from their screens and spend meaningful time outdoors.

Instead of feeding endless screen time, Touch Grass RPG turns offline breaks into rewarding RPG quests. Users start an "Unplug Session" before stepping away from their device. While they are away, the app tracks their offline duration. When they return, they answer a couple of quick questions about their outdoor trip (e.g., visiting a park, spotting birds or flora) to claim EXP, unlock achievement badges, level up their virtual plant companion, and receive retro RPG quest lore logs detailing their real-world adventure.

Demo
https://github.com/vinitpatil-8/touch_grass

Code
github https://github.com/vinitpatil-8/touch_grass

How I Built It
Touch Grass RPG is built as a responsive single-page web application using React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Lucide Icons, and Framer Motion for retro arcade animations and particle effects.

The core experience revolves around a privacy-focused local architecture:

Local Quest & Lore Generation Engine: The app uses an open-source, client-side generation system to process user inputs upon returning from offline sessions without sending user location or habit data to external servers.

On-Device State Persistence: Player stats, level progression, badges, and quest history are saved entirely in localStorage, keeping the app 100% functional without an active internet connection.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Open innovation and open-weight models are critical for applications that track personal habits, wellness, and offline routines.

Complete Data Privacy: A user's time away, personal journal logs, and location habits stay entirely on their device. Open-source local inference ensures no personal activity logs are ever harvested or routed through proprietary cloud APIs.

Offline Trail Readiness: Open innovation allows lightweight AI and game engines to run locally in the browser or on-device. Whether you're deep in a forest, hiking a trail, or sitting in a park with zero cellular service, the application works seamlessly without relying on network pings or API latency.

Zero Cost & Accessibility: Open tools allow anyone to build and run scalable, gamified wellness applications without incurring expensive per-prompt cloud API fees.

I Built StudySnap for My Friend: Your Notes. Your Deadline. Your Plan. 📚🔥

Vinit Patil — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:36:32 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

Built it with a friend enrolled in hacktoberfest @shreya_raundale_20 💖

What I Built

I built StudySnap, a lightweight study-planning web app for a friend who often struggles with turning a large syllabus and limited study time into a realistic plan.

StudySnap takes:

📚 Subject
📝 Notes or syllabus
⏱️ Available study time
📅 Exam date

and turns them into an actionable study plan with priorities, a revision checklist, and practice questions.

I also added progress tracking, Focus Mode, Emergency Exam Mode, and locally saved previous plans.

The idea was simple: instead of building another general-purpose chatbot, I wanted to solve one specific problem for someone I know:

"I have an exam coming up. What should I actually study right now?"

Demo

The project is currently available as a local web app.

To try it, clone the repository and open index.html in a browser.

Code

GitHub Repository

StudySnap is built with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is intentionally dependency-free.

How I Built It

I wanted to keep the project extremely lightweight so that it could be opened and used without setting up a complicated development environment.

The application consists of:

index.html — application structure
styles.css — interface and responsive design
app.js — planning logic, interactions, timers and local persistence
README.md — project documentation

The planner is designed around the user's own notes and syllabus and avoids inventing topics that were not provided.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For a personal study tool, simplicity and control matter.

Using an open approach gives developers more freedom to understand, modify and extend the underlying technology rather than making the entire application dependent on a single closed service.

For StudySnap, the most important part was keeping the project lightweight and transparent enough that someone can inspect the code, understand how it works, and build on it.

Prize Categories

No partner prize category.

Built for a friend ❤️

devchallenge #weekendchallenge #hf26challenge