Delightful professional (free) music by Joseph McDade

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When I was looking for intro music to use in Dev Blabber podcast series, I came across Joseph McDade‘s work which was recommended by a famous podcaster. As one can see on his website, he’s produced only a handful of tracks. But each one of them is literally high-quality and professional. Clearly, a lot of effort and hardwork has went into creating such fantastic pieces. Hats off to the guy 👏🏻.

I ended up picking On The Verge, an ambient-rock piece from his first batch. Go check it out. And while you are there, check out his other tracks as well. If not for creative use, then for your own enjoyment.

Flutter experiments

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During my time spent on App Brewery’s Flutter course, I created not one, not two, but 12 (twelve) apps. That’s a bunch! All apps are simple, nothing complicated, except the last 2-3 ones which have slightly complex widget trees. Creating in Flutter is fun, I have said that before. It’s fast and enjoyable. I will continue this journey by creating at least a couple of real-world apps.

Here’s a list of all my Flutter experiments so far:

  • I Am Rich — replica of the eponymous sensation of bygone era; dead simple and 100% static
  • Mi Card — your professional contact card, as an app; another static one
  • Dicee — simulates rolling of 2 dice; introduces state
  • Magic Ball 8 — a magic ball simulator; takes the concept of stateless and stateful widgets further
  • Xylophone — simple app with beautiful sounds; introduces Flutter packages and playing audio
  • Quizzler — a pretty quiz app; introduces modularizing & organizing code
  • Destini — a Bandersnatch-style decision-based game; solidifies OOP concepts
  • BMI Calc — a body mass index calculator; introduces routing and solidifies creating beautiful UIs
  • Clima — a weather app; introduces using network & location APIs and solidifies routing
  • Bitcoin Ticker — displays exchange rates for popular cryptocurrencies; solidifies what we learned with Clima
  • Flash Chat — a real-time chatting app; introduces Firebase as a backend and adding authentication
  • Todoey — a simple TODO app; introduces complex state management using Provider pattern

My Restaurant Reviews — a WordPress plugin

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Screenshot of My Restaurant Reviews widget

This post is long delayed. It should have been an announcement but will now be a backstory.

Back in May (4 months ago!), I did a website redesign for SkewerSpot, our family business. SS is a cute little restaurant/cafe in Jalandhar, Punjab, with a wide selection of snacks and waffles. We specialize in waffles, all sorts, especially stick waffles. Earlier the SS website was a pure Bootstrappy static thing. The design had become outdated, and it was difficult to maintain. So I redid the entire thing in WordPress. It looks pretty neat now, go check it out!

At that time, I was faced with a very specific problem. We have our online presence on Zomato, Swiggy, Google Maps, Instagram and Facebook. We get reviews on all these five platforms. I wanted a way of showing reviews/ratings from these sources in a unified interface. To address this specific problem, I created a specific WordPress plugin. It’s called My Restaurant Reviews (or ‘Mr.R’).

I wanted to create this as a dirty, cowboy-style plugin for my own website. But I soon realized it’d be cool to have others also benefit from it, since a lot of new-gen restaurants are cropping up each day that perhaps face the same problem that I did. So off I went to the awesome WordPress Plugin Handbook, read it cover-to-cover, and got to work. Within a couple of weeks, I had the first working version. Writing code in PHP again was nostalgically pleasant experience. I learned so much about the internals of WordPress, my respect for the platform and its code quality increasing everyday.

Anyway, in early June I finished it, and submitted it for publishing on the great WordPress Plugins Directory. What a scary name, haha! Thankfully, it was accepted after a short review. I’ve heard that there’s a rigorous review process for all plugin and theme submissions, and some contributions are rejected daily for not following their coding standards. Didn’t happen to me 🙂

You can find and install it on your own WordPress website or blog from its official plugin page. Source code is on GitHub. There’s still so many improvements that can be done, especially in terms of adding support for more review platforms (currently only Zomato and Google Maps are supported). See TODO. With my arms spread, I invite ya’ll to help me take it to the next level.

Dev Blabber Ep 1: Building an Open-Core Startup

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The first-ever episode of a brand new podcast series called Dev Blabber. It’s an initiative that I came up with as part of the awesome Digital Futurists community, where a bunch of geeks, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives discuss technology and software like crazy.

There was a discussion last week in the Coding channel—one of many channels within the DF community, and the one that I lead—regarding the topic of our next knowledge-sharing session. 4 topics were proposed, ranging from React performance optimization to cybersecurity. But this one, about building open-core startups, rose as the clear winner. While deliberating the format of this session, I thought of making it in the form of a podcast. The idea was instantly liked by most in my channel, and thus was born Dev Blabber.

I hope you enjoy this episode, which being the first one is very loosely structured and borderline chaotic. At least it’s true to its ‘blabber’ name.

P.S. More details about DF and how to join are coming soon. Watch out!

Someone should fix how GitHub counts contributions

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A snapshot of my GitHub contributions

I have been doing a lot of commits lately. Sadly, none of my dozens of commits are included in my total contribution count on GitHub. Why? Because all those commits were to a forked repository. It’s 2019, and I think it’s plain stupid.

I love GitHub, but if there was one thing I’d like to fix about GitHub it would be this. It’s understandable why GitHub made this rule back in the day when they were introducing the contributions map/tracker thingy. Perhaps it was a decent guard against simply copying someone else’s work and adding a few minor commits here and there just to boost your “score”.

But it’s 2019; it’s modern times. Just think about it. One could be forking from a base/boilerplate repository that contains non-substantial code to build something substantial on top of it. This is exactly how I have been using forks lately. As part of following along the Flutter bootcamp-style course, I created a bunch of forks from the course creator’s boilerplates and transformed them into proper apps. I deserve to be recognized for that! It’s as simple as that.

Here’s what GitHub’s documentation has to say about how contributions are counted:

Commits made in a fork will not count toward your contributions. To make them count, you must do one of the following:

1. Open a pull request to have your changes merged into the parent repository.
2. To detach the fork and turn it into a standalone repository on GitHub, contact GitHub Support or GitHub Premium Support. If the fork has forks of its own, let support know if the forks should move with your repository into a new network or remain in the current network. For more information, see “About forks.”

Why are my contributions not showing up on my profile?

Those two options are not plausible every time, since:

  • Opening a pull request in the parent repository just does not make sense when the upstream is intentionally boilerplate. Asking its author to merge your commits into it would be like asking them to publicly publish the solution to their puzzle.
  • Contact GitHub support? Really? Who has the time and patience to do that when you’re working with dozens of forks?

GitHub, if you are listening at all, PLEASE FIX THIS!