It’s time for an­other blog post, folks.

It’s August, that one month of the year which starts with de­pres­sion and a lotta cry­ing but ends with hap­pi­ness and joy. Depression be­cause August is when se­ri­ous ex­ams start, but then my birth­day comes up and a cou­ple more birth­days of peo­ple I know, and that’s how it ends in cel­e­bra­tion.

I’ve been lazy for the en­tire past month, ex­cept for the last few days of July. I was so lazy that I was even plan­ning to pub­lish a post called “I’m too lazy” but then I was too lazy to fin­ish the post and ended up delet­ing the en­try from my Notion table. That shows you the level of lazi­ness I was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing.

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For con­text, REHeader is an im­age header gen­er­a­tor that gen­er­ates a header im­age (kinda ob­vi­ous) from the text that you in­put and other op­tions. Jsoning, as some of you might know, is a node pack­age that stores data in JSON for­mat with­out the pos­si­bil­ity of be­ing cor­rupted.

I made REHeader within a few days of GitHub in­tro­duc­ing re­ally long Markdown de­scrip­tions for pro­files, and shared it on a cou­ple of places like Reddit, the Glitch Support fo­rum and a few awesome lists on GitHub. I lit­er­ally made it in a sin­gle day, us­ing Vue within EJS and Express; and the code is so hor­ri­ble (according to my cur­rent stan­dards). The CSS used to haunt me, un­til a few weeks back when I fixed it to make it look more aes­thetic.

Maybe as a re­sult of shar­ing it on places more than Jsoning, and also as a re­sult of it be­ing added to an awesome list, it got more stars than Jsoning. And I’m kinda em­bar­rassed about it. Not only is my most-starred repo a ba­si­cally use­less tool, it has re­ally hor­ri­ble code prac­tices that would give most peo­ple night­mares.

I worked re­ally hard on Jsoning, spent more than one day and yet some old pro­ject of mine gets the crown. To be fair, Jsoning is­n’t that bad, it got some pretty se­ri­ous num­bers on npm the other day.

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On the bright side, I com­peted in a hack night by TinkerHub and won the best in­di­vid­ual pro­ject! The task was to use a lit­tle some­thing called Dialogflow API, a speech recog­ni­tion API by Google that could do pretty in­ter­est­ing stuff with the in­put text, like de­tect the emo­tions in the in­put given to it. I used this emo­tion-de­tec­tion stuff, tech­ni­cally called Sentiment Analysis, and dis­played a meme based on the mood scores given to me. I had to code it from scratch within 5 hours. It was re­ally stress­ful; I kept com­mit­ting my .env file mul­ti­ple times which re­sulted in me re­gen­er­at­ing the API cre­den­tials more than thrice. The worst part about this was that I got no email about se­cret cre­den­tials be­ing pushed to a pub­lic repo, con­trary to how it’s sup­posed to be - and so I only came to know about this mid­way through the pro­ject.

Happy friend­ship day to all my friends out there. That’s right, I have friends!