DEVLog - January

A new month starts, and it’s a great time to review what I achieved last month.

January was a nice month with exciting new projects and the end of others. It is pretty amazing the variety of projects there are out there, and how they just appear in front of me just to be taken…

Drawmatic Beta is Almost Here

Last year, one of my brand new projects was Drawmatic, a tool to create diagrams of any kind. From easy schemas with vertices and edges to engineering diagrams and tools like simulators or no-code systems. The framework is working better than expected, and the first tool (a system to create architecture diagrams) will enter beta in the first quarter of this month!

Testing chicken legs feature on a Drawmatic diagram

Yearbook

In January I finished my first semester as a university professor. It was a great time, and I learned a lot of new and fascinating things. To celebrate the end of the semester, I created a yearbook on GitHub where my students were able to contribute by writing a program in StepCode (the programming language I invented last year). I used it to teach them programming fundamentals.

To achieve this, I had to implement a GitHub Actions workflow to run the generated code. Then, a bot automatically updates the new files with the PR number. A small script makes a request to the GitHub API to get the user data from the PR creator and puts the image in the yearbook.

Perhaps it sounds too complicated, so here is the repo where you can check out the scripts and workflows yourself.

GitHub - RolandoAndrade/yearbook202415

Clase de fundamentos de programación UCAB 202415. Contribute to RolandoAndrade/yearbook202415 development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

SignatureAPI

One quarter ago my journey in SignatureAPI started, and now we are quite close to launching the first version of the product, which I expect will have a great impact on how digital signatures are handled in today’s world.

I’m not sure how much I am able to tell, so I will just give you the news once the product is open for everyone.

Valentine’s Day is Coming

Another small project I had was the creation of a small app to ask a close friend for a date.

The app (made with Vite and React) is pretty simple. It was also useful to introduce myself to Telegram Mini Apps. It is surprising how easy it is to create an app for this platform. Just create a website and chat with a bot. Uncomplicated and straightforward.

Valentine's Day app demo - increases acceptance button size and reduces decline button until only accept is available

There are many SDKs to implement more complex apps, but I am almost sure that 90% of all the apps that people would like to implement can be integrated with Telegram using this approach.

You can check the app online or by using the Telegram Mini App link. I consider this could be a great project if I am able to create the views in a customizable way since it would not require huge infrastructure and could have relatively huge demand.