GitHub GitHub Constellation India 2022, 25 May 2022

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From YouTube: How I built GitHub Wrap: Spotlight

Description

Every year, Spotify offers Spotify Wrapped to its users, we are sure you have received one too! In this talk, Harshil shares his experience building a similar project for sharing open source contributions - GitHub Wrap. An interesting storyline, you wouldn't want to miss!

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About GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Millions of people use GitHub to build amazing things together. For more info, go to http://github.com

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Hello, everyone thank you for tuning in. I am excited to share my journey and talk about github with you all today. My name is harshly agrawal. When I was in university, a friend took me to a tech community and that's when I got introduced to the community and my community journey got started.

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It motivated me to start a community on my campus and my search led me to the github campus expert program.

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Now I won't get too much into the details about it, but the program really helped me in a lot of ways. I became an active open source contributor and I also started enjoying the process of educating the community and helping them learn new things.

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This enthusiasm and passion led me to my current position in the developer relations team at anytime, now being in deveral, you often get the opportunity to try out new ideas and github rap was one such idea, so github rep was basically an idea that it was inspired by spotify rep.

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So if you are a spotify user, you might know what spotify rap is.

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But let me give you a quick introduction about what spotify app is, so at the end of every year, spotify analyzes, the listening habits of the users and it presents it in a really fun way. You can get all the uh your top artists, your top songs, your top genre and all those crazy fun facts.

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Now I haven't tried spotify rap myself, but I really love the idea. The idea to share all this analytics with your friend with just one click, will really blew my mind. You could share it on instagram or you can also tweet about it on twitter, and this is what encouraged me to think about and come up with an idea of github rap. I was thinking of creating something similar for the open source contributions that we make.

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So, let's take a quick look at githubgrab.

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So to get up, the idea of github rap is to get all the contributions that you made in the last year, so the user enters the username clicks on wrap it. There is a bit of processing going on behind the scenes and you get an image which displays all the result out. There you can also simply click on the tweet button and it will tweet it on the twitter now as developers.

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I know we are more thrilled to know about how tools work, so there were already a similar kind of projects available out there, but they were different to what I had in mind and most of them were written in code. I wanted to challenge myself to see if I can create a project with as less code as possible.

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After all, I work for a low code at automation, startup, so n10 was the obvious choice of tool in my arsenal and the next service that I used was cloudinery.

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A cloudinery provides a cloud-based image and video management services and it you and using the cloudinary transformation api. I was able to generate those images now with these two services in place. I had my app up and running. However, I wanted to do more. I wanted to add a reverse proxy so that, when a user makes a request to the github wrap url, it gets forwarded to my internet and workflows, and I ended up using cloudfire workers to give you an idea of the whole flow.

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A user would make a request, low, code.land, slash, gh, rep, slash, which would go to the cloud fair workers based on the request, cloudflare workers would process the information to an attend.

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Nadine would check what this information or what this request contains, and if it needs to generate an image, if it needs to generate an image, it would call the transformation api generate that image and then pass it on to cloudflare workers, which would then display the result to the end user.

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However, if we just wanted to uh render out the landing page- and it then would not make the call to uh the cloudflare api, but it would just return the landing page to cloud file workers and the cloudflare workers would forward this response to the user.

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Now I wasn't expecting so much love coming in from the community, and I was really thrilled to see the see see all the direction that it got even github uh tweeted about this uh on using their official handlers, and I also got featured on the production newsletter.

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Honestly, I was surprised to see all this love and this taught me a lot of things.

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The first is the obvious one just to ship it, even if you think it's not ready just go ahead and ship, it share it with the community and get their feedback.

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There's always going to be that feature you want to add before you shape your project, if you ever run into that dilemma, remember to just ship it now, even before the project was actually created. I was talking about this on twitter and I was sharing the process of building the project.

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I also teased my followers that I'll be launching something soon. I think that also gave me a good uh follow up on my product and launch now. Building in public helped me stay committed to the project and help me help me keep on teaching the community of what I was doing.

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So, if, like me, you have the project that is still on your to-do list or just in your head start building in public trust me, you will enjoy it and as soon as I launched github on product hunt, one of my colleagues messaged me and he reported a bug, and I was a bit scared. I was like I tested it out before launching it, so why is it not working now- and this taught me the third lesson it's to fail fast, but to recover quickly.

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So, instead of just taking a pause over there, you know just terminating the project. I went ahead, I debugged the issue and I was able to fix it in just a few minutes. The incident taught me that it's okay to fail, but it's not okay to fix it.

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So these were the three essential learnings that I got from this project. Now as a student, I believe you are at an advantage. You have an advantage to experiment and build cool stuff with the resources available to you, and I am a bit jealous because you have the github student developer pack, which contains tons of resources that you can use to build any such projects so use your creative freedom to build anything and everything with all the tools you want.

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Github rap gave me a lot of exposure. People who I admire and look up to were talking about it. I got invites to talk about the project on podcasts and live streams, and it helped me to reach a wider audience and gave me the confidence to create such more projects.

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So if you have a crazy idea that you think is not a worth trying out trust me just give it a try, share it with the community and you might get some unexpected good results, but what's next with this project, so getting the feedback from the community.

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I have come up with a couple of more interesting ideas and I am working on improving the project and this project inspired me to create another project. That's oss comment, so I am working on oss commit with the aim to help and encourage people to contribute to open source projects.

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I am again building this project in public, so you can always check it out check out the progress for this on my twitter and even the wrapper for this is public on my github account. So if you are building a project, please do share it with me. I would love to know.

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I would love to know about it and help you, so you can always hit me up on twitter if you want to re and if you want to read more about github rap, do check out my website. I have written an article with bit more details and thank you for joining in. I am looking forward to listening to your story in the next github constellation have a nice day.