Web Apps

Over the years, I've often tinkered with python and django to create tiny web-apps that helped me scratch *very specific* itches. Most of them never ventured out of my Ubuntu VM but some of them did manage to find their way to the wider world.

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.