A couple weeks ago, I surrendered my MacBook to the Apple Store for a screen repair. Due to part shortages, the timeline for me being able to use my MacBook again was at least a week. When I thought about what I could use to get some work done, I realized I already have a computer with me that's (theoretically) just as powerful, my iPad! It has the same CPU as my laptop, it's more portable, and has extra features like cellular. So, I got a keyboard for my iPad and set off to see if I could exclusively use my iPad for the next week.
The past couple of days, I've been building RSS Lookup, a simple tool that allows you to look up the RSS feed for any website or blog. Usually, websites will have a link to the RSS feed somewhere on the page. However, if you’ve ever tried looking for the RSS feed of a site but can’t find it, you can paste the URL into RSS Lookup, and it will go out and find the associated RSS feed automatically.
This past weekend, I attended HackGSU X with Sai and Sohum, where we built BitMedic. BitMedic is a patient management system that gives patients control and portability of their medical data. Out of the 37 projects submitted, we won first overall. However, the path to get here was definitely not without its challenges, so buckle up as I revisit the roller coaster that was this project.
A few weeks ago, GitHub added nicely formatted open graph preview images with a repository’s name and a few different stats like stars and contributors. I thought it looked cool, so I decided to build my own implementation for my blog posts.
The past decade, a major storm has been brewing. As the online platforms that we use every day have grown, so have their misinformation and echo chambers. Although in the past this issue has seemed distant and intangible, earlier this month we got a glance at what our future could look like if nothing changes.
This past weekend, my friend Akash and I attended Unihack, an international hackathon with a focus on solving civic issues. I've never attended a hackathon, so this was all new to me, but this was Akash's fourth hackathon. Going in, I was looking forward to building another project and playing around with some web development.
DNS records are a pain to manage. Each provider has its own UI, it's hard to make changes to multiple domains at once, and you can't easily revert changes. A few months ago, I was researching some DNS management tools and I came across DNSControl. DNSControl stores all of your DNS records in a single JavaScript file and saves it in git, and lets you deploy your records to production in one command.
Last Friday, Cloudflare had a major outage which took down a good portion of the internet for about half an hour. While Cloudflare is an awesome service and they have a generous free tier, it begs the question whether so much of the internet should be centralized under one company, so I wanted to see what it would take for me to make my own CDN.
When I was building this blog, one of the decisions I had to make was where to host my media. One of the options was to just upload everything to my GitHub repository and deploy it along with the site, but in the long term that can get clunky because Git isn't ideal for handling tons of media. I also wanted to manage my media and photos separately from my website's GitHub repository, so I went with Amazon S3, Amazon's object storage service.
For a while now, I've wanted to build my own website and blog. The past few years, I've had a generic HTML5Up template up on my domain saying "Coming soon," which has been an ongoing joke to my friends because it has said the same thing for years.
One piece of cybersecurity advice that comes up time and time again is to use a VPN. VPNs, or virtual private networks, encrypt the internet traffic between you and your VPN provider, securing data from your internet provider and local network as well as hiding your IP address. Through clever marketing, VPN providers position themselves as an all in one tool to secure yourself online. However, the reality is a lot more complicated.
Last summer, I attended Georgia's Governor's Honors program and I started a project with my friend Akash called GHBuddies. Essentially, after hall checks at 7:30 PM, you are required to have a buddy if you want to leave your dorm room. Most of the time, everyone split up and it could be hard to coordinate with other people if you wanted to go somewhere. Sometimes I got stuck at the dorm room and had to do something on my own or wait and see if anyone else was planning on leaving the dorms, hence we got the idea for GHBuddies.