Built a simple iOS app to download and view previous years’ question papers and solutions for reference.
As a backend developer myself, I don’t really like writing CSS and tweaking it for hours to make it look pixel perfect and make it work accross all screen sizes perfectly. Moreover I found while using a CSS framework (Bootstrap/MaterializeCSS) I am repeating myself over and over again writing the same CSS rules for different forms.
So here’s what I did, I built a library for Django to design forms in HTML using MaterializeCSS. The library defines template widgets for every form field which reduces the long HTML/ CSS code for a form to a single line of Django template code. Yes you read it correct, a single line of template code to render the complete form using MaterializeCSS!
During summer last year, I interned with a YCombinator(2015) and Google Launchpad(2016) startup - RedCarpet. So basically RedCapet offers credit to students for their personal needs such as mobile recharges, movie tickets, food, online shopping, etc. Now, this is a big deal in India as students have zero access to credit from banks - no personal credit cards/loans and there are no credit scores for the majority of the population as India is a cash-intensive economy.
Here I was tasked with building an iOS app for the same. And oh boy, it was pretty challenging. Every other day I stumbled across a fairly complex problem.
I built the app which has a chat which is backed by a resilient task queue which managed the sending and recieving of messages and uploading of other media to servers in a fail-proof way - basically anything that required a network connection, was done via this queue. The chat supports, along with plain text messages, media which includes - photos, videos, location, etc. Another interesting feautre to note was the inline forms in the chat message bubble. Other than the chat, it also had a trivial registration, profile, referral mechanism, analytics and the other usual stuff.
Built a crawler that scrapes the results of all students which are available on the website to AKTU. This scraped data is then used to perform analysis such as branch-wise performance, inter-college comparisons etc.