Gemini and Cloudinary

About two weeks ago, I was given the wonderful opportunity to work with an API known as Cloudinary. This was all thanks to Major League Hacking connecting me with individuals looking to conduct research on the user experience in utilizing this API for useful work.

To begin, I'll briefly describe what Cloudinary is.

As the name implies, it is a cloud hosting service, with a focus on images and video data. It provides a suite of APIs that allow for you to upload, modify and receive image/video data in a variety of different manners. By that, I mean you can easily alter mundane characteristics -- like width, height -- but you can also apply filters and other effects on the fly. The API will automatically produce a unique URL based on the specifications you provided, allowing you to serve the URL to users as needed.

Cloudinary also provides AI-based features, that can be used to help edit, or provide summaries of images and videos. All of this is exported through an SDK that supports a variety of different languages. For me, I only knew Python with great detail, so I elected to use that language.

Sadly, that's part of my big critique in that the reference for Python's SDK was not fully fleshed out. Luckily, Google's Gemini came to the rescue! I have recently become accustomed to Gemini as google has graciously provided a year subscription for free for current university students. Once I was able to get my feet wet with Gemini, I quickly found that it was able to produce good results much faster than I had experienced with OpenAI. This allowed me to easily fetch documentation by simply directing Gemini to getting it from cloudinary's website, and also providing new examples of how to utilize the API.

Without Gemini, I likely would not have been nearly as productive.

Moreover, I found that Gemini is a much stronger coding assistant than ChatGPT. Especially for lower level languages, like C and C++. With Gemini, it can actually spot the occasional memory access violation, and actually gives GOOD suggestions on how to optimize code. Even if sometimes I disagree with the analysis.

All in all, I've had a great time exploring Gemini and Cloudinary! I definitely encourage you all to do the same.