Projects

TL;DR I made my first full-stack app - a clock that displays LLM-generated rhymes/poems in addition to a normal analog clock. Check it out at clock.angad.me . Background I’ve wanted to learn full-stack development with JavaScript for a while. I kept putting it off, however, as I was unsure where to start. A friend of mine recommended I start with Express.js . Hack Club also had a workshop regarding Express.js, JsonDB . I decided to follow this along with the Simple Clock workshop to make a web-based clock that displays rhymes similar to the Poem/1 . For some background, the Poem/1 is a clock that displays the current time as an LLM-generated poem or short rhyme. In the beginning, I imagined the project wouldn’t be too complex as there only needs to be a single endpoint to request a rhyme. It turned out to be a slightly more complex project, but still rather straightforward. ...

Video demonstration Background Nearly two years ago, in August of 2022, I began work on Cross Blogger . Cross Blogger was my first Go project. Originally, I used it as an opportunity to learn about APIs and hoped that I might eventually be able to make it useful. At the beginning of 2023, I stopped working on it, however. I moved on to other programs and stopped using Go. I left it in a state where the program was usable, albeit useless. When I was first learning Go, I had not realized how important splitting code up into a multi-file structure is. Thus, the project’s code was contained in a single main.go file. Eventually, I realized that building projects with large file-structures is simple and makes programming significantly easier. This provided me with some motivation to come back to the project. It also gave me a project to do for Hack Club’s Arcade Hour. ...

Motivation I’ve seen projects where people bring x technology to devices that existed long before the technology existed. For example, while writing this, I learned about Web Rendering Proxy (WRP) which renders websites as a GIF or PNG but uses HTML image maps to allow the client to interact with the webpage. Email is a technology that’s been around since 1971 and will likely continue to be prevalent. Thus, making an email chatbot that used Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate responses seemed cool. In addition, with various educational institutions and workplaces blocking access to LLMs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, email could theoretically be used to bypass these restrictions. However, it probably would be more effective to just use another client that isn’t blocked. ...

The beginning I’ve been working on a project called Pystodon . Pystodon is a Mastodon bot that I started working on in August of 2023, nearly a year before writing this post. While developing it, I noticed that I had the opportunity to build it like a framework by focusing on customizability through code. This was my first time building a library-like program and I tried to focus on usability not just for people interacting with the bot but also anyone who wanted to customize it. ...