Building random shit for fun, (and making a girl happy while at it)
Posted on by admin
Long overdued, and only my third post here.
So as some people know, I built Instasyncer a while ago, partially for fun, but mainly because I needed it. Long story short, Instasyncer is this awesome (Note: I’m extremely biased about this) site that lets you sync your Instagram photos to Dropbox in real time. Really. You upload onto Instagram, within minutes, it is in your Dropbox folder. You have to sign up for Instasyncer though (Yes, I had a guy who asked me why his photos weren’t syncing when he didn’t have an account). Does mainly one other thing, which explains the title, but that’s for the later part of this post.
I built the whole thing on PHP/Codeigniter, and used MongoDB for the database. The MVP was hacked together in about 26 hours, although the better part of the 26 hours was spent on doing other stuff (like sleeping, talking to friends). Did all the OAuth stuff myself, just for kicks, and basically did every part of the website myself, for kicks of course. Instasyncer uses the Bootstrap framework for the front end, and I didn’t really dabble much in Javascript. Used a bit of jquery here and there to achieve the dashboard loading, and the lightbox gallery, and lastly the feedback system. Tech stack covered.
So, nothing too fanciful, it’s a really simple app, and I have absolutely no fucking clue why the boss wanted me to write a blog post on this. But since he insisted, I thought I might add something that all geeks might want to know. Building stuff is cool. But we don’t think so. But I’m here to tell you right now that others think it’s cool. And it does help when you are trying to impress a girl (guy, if you are a girl. it actually does work. story here) ;)
That last sentence caught your attention right? =P
Ok awesome. Now that I have your attention, this was what happened. My girlfriend was quite impressed with the fact I had actually wrote a web app to solve a personal pain point (I think), and when she mentioned that she would like an easy way to view her Instagram photos on her computer screen, well, I guess didn’t she expected me to roll that feature out in a few hours. She was impressed, and touched that I actually coded a feature that she only said she would like to have, and I had no intention of doing in the first place.
So, see, coding does have it’s perks. Now, I can’t wait to see what apps you guys create over the next few weeks :) And let us know what you have done so that we can share the love.
(Disclaimer: This worked for me. May not work for you or the target you have in mind.)