HashPix
HashPix (currently defunct) was an image-search and aggregation service that aimed to consolidate all image tagged with the same hashtag. It was my first attempt at proper web application development and, by all measures, a pretty decent one.
HashPix was the second MVP I built from scratch and it helped me figure out a lot of frontend paradigms. I've always had 'aesthetical-blindness' and designing the simple, bootstrap-powered interface for Hashpix was just what I needed to slay the demons of front-end web development that I've battled throughout my hobbyist-life.
d.ustb.in
The d.ustb.in (currently defunct) was an online short-fiction magazine that was named so because it is supposed to be "the author’s best friend" and it is where "most of your story-ideas go to rest".
d.ustb.in was where I realized how truly difficult it was to run a publication - especially one that is made available to readers free-of-cost. I managed the whole thing (mostly) by myself - from sourcing volunteer-editors, to managing submissions, to scheduling a publishing pipeline, to trying to spread the word. I did it unfailingly for a year but didn't manage to find enough money or motivation to continue maintaining the project.
@updt_me
@updt_me (currently defunct) was a mini-project I quickly bootstrapped after HashPix. It was born out of a really simple idea - push RSS feed updates to Twitter DMs. The mechanism was pretty straightforward - you tell @updt_me what RSS feeds you wanted to follow and @updt_me would send you a DM whenever an update was pushed to the feed.
@updt_me helped me learn quite a bit about RSS, PubSubHubbub, XMPP, and other web-syndication technologies during this project. Even ventured briefly into making a WhatsApp bot but got shut down because the API I was using was an unofficial reverse-engineered port of the WhatsApp service.
