Forem: Pradeep CE

I built an AI-powered Twitter Bot in 4 hours

Pradeep CE — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 04:29:59 +0000

Coming off a busy day filled with client calls (I am a full-time freelancer / maker), I had a tiny idea: could I get AI to paint scenes from classic books?

I decided to see if it's possible for me to build something small around this idea. I copied a block of text from David Copperfield, pasted it into DALL-E, and found out it didn't work: it needed a more cohesive prompt.

So I put the block on text into GPT-3, and then had it generate the image prompt for me. I then copy-pasted this prompt onto DALL-E, and it worked surprisingly well! (image)

I thought spinning this into a Twitter bot would be fun, and did just that, while tweeting simultaneously :)

While this is just a fun little experiment, and essentially all I did was glorified plumbing — I know nothing about AI or ML, and this is just me integrating with different APIs — I would be delighted to hear what you think!

I Quit My Job to Become an Indie Maker

Pradeep CE — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 05:05:35 +0000

I finally did it: I quit my well-paying full-time job a few days ago to become an indie maker!

For context, I am a 28-year old Indian male. I am single, and don’t have any financial dependents. I live in Chennai, India.

I’ve always wanted to build things with software. I’ve always wanted to travel, see places, understand different cultures, meet interesting people, and gain perspectives… and I wanted to do all this while working on things that I loved. I was fascinated to learn many years ago that there was a term for this: digital nomad. And another word for someone building something on their own: indie maker. I am not one for labels, but I did identify a lot with these.

It took me a few years, but I’ve finally taken the leap of faith. My dream is to build a bootstrapped company as a solo maker.

Have you been through a similar journey? What advice would you give yourself if you were to do it all over again?

You can find the more detailed blog post here.

Lessons from BassDrum — Part Two

Pradeep CE — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 17:59:20 +0000

This post was originally published in my blog, Pradeep CE.

You are reading part two of a two-part series. Please consider reading part one, if you haven't already.

Just before midnight a few days ago, I launched BassDrum, a Chrome extension to watch PrimeVideo in sync with your friends. It's 100% free and doesn't require you to sign up to use it.

BassDrum lets you create secret "rooms" that you can share with friends. When someone in the room changes to a video, plays or pauses it, it is synced to everyone in the "room" instantly. BassDrum was built to help people relive the days where we could still have friends over and have movie nights. (A little bit of context here: I'm writing this in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.)

In part one, I talked about my experience building BassDrum — what worked, what didn't, and the mistakes I made.

In this post (part two), I'll detail my experience launching it — how it was received, what I could have done better — and the lessons I learnt along the way.

I hope this is helpful to someone out there, who's trying to build something on their own!

Launching BassDrum

I'll be honest here: once I got the sync working, I couldn't wait to get BassDrum out there.

Chrome webstore submission

I needed a few posters / banners for the Chrome webstore submission, but all I had were a couple of screenshots. So, I went on Canva and performed some drag-and-drop magic to get a couple of posters.

Then I wrote a good description, included upcoming features and FAQs in it, and added all these to the Chrome webstore submission.

I uploaded the extension, paid the fee, and was disappointed when it said that it would take weeks to review the extension and approve it. So fine, I thought, I could work on the launch while BassDrum was under review.

I thought a video was essential as well, to get the point across. But since I had no experience with video creation / editing, a couple of weeks seemed like a reasonable time (since this was a side project) to learn how. I had read a couple of posts on how to launch on ProductHunt, and my plan was to read up some more on it while the extension was under review.

But to my surprise, the extension was approved within a couple of days. And once I saw that it was approved, I just had to click "Publish", and the video never came to be. 😅

Announcing the launch

It was a very humble launch — I just published the extension on the Chrome webstore, and posted in a few places about it.

First, to my friends:

I posted a story on Instagram and WhatsApp.
I sent direct messages to a few people who had asked me about BassDrum earlier, and wanted to know when it would launch.

Then, to an extended social media:

I looked up a couple of Facebook groups related to PrimeVideo and posted in those.
I signed up for Reddit and posted to r/AmazonPrimeVideo, but the post was marked as spam. Figures.
I posted on ProductHunt, but it was more of an afterthought.

The landing page

I already had a "coming soon" type landing page up, and after publishing the extension, I quickly populated it by copy-pasting stuff from the extension description I submitted for the Chrome webstore. I spent all of 15 minutes on this, and it shows.

After I posted to ProductHunt, I also added the ProductHunt button to the site.

One thing I was pretty sure I didn't want to do, was collect people's email addresses. But I did want to hear from my users. So I took the middle ground, and encouraged them to tweet at me instead.

The response

Here are the raw numbers:

13 upvotes on ProductHunt.
15 users so far according to the Chrome webstore.
200+ views on the landing page.
100+ events (room created or joined) on the extension so far.

When posting to the Facebook groups, I took care not to sound like a salesman, and made it clear that I built BassDrum just for fun. I clearly mentioned that it was 100% free, and that I just wanted people to use it. I think a couple of these posts still got removed.

Since I didn't put any effort into a proper ProductHunt launch, and it was really late when I posted, I wasn't expecting any upvotes. It was heart-warming to see a few friends come and upvote it anyway. Almost all of the upvotes are from my friends, and I felt grateful to see that some of them had just registered — meaning they signed up just to upvote BassDrum!

Mistakes and lessons

Looking back, I should have put more effort and care into the launch. I was understandably eager to get it out there, but my saner self should have prevailed. If I were to do this again, I would plan for a week-long campaign after launch day — with posts, follow-ups and videos published at regular intervals.

I could have made the landing page much more helpful — possibly included some FAQs, and added a video demo of how BassDrum works.

I did not think through the marketing copy. Looking back, I should have written the website and social media copy from a user's perspective. If you read through the landing page, you will notice that I am focusing on what BassDrum does, instead of what problems it solves for the user. This is partly because BassDrum was a hard engineering problem for me, and it was only natural that I wanted to talk about how it works. Next time, I ought to beat that urge, and write as if I were the user.

Talking of copy, a couple of posts on Facebook and my post on Reddit got flagged. Lesson: next time, try to sound less like a scammer trying to sell to strangers (trust me, I tried this time too; but these bots are super-mean!).

I announced a private alpha on Twitter before the launch, but I could not find a simple way to ship it to the people willing to test. This would have been way easier to do for a web app, but is annoying for a browser extension. Lesson: don't invite people to test privately, unless you can ship to them in a convenient manner.

What next?

I'm going to take all the lessons I learnt building and launching this version of BassDrum, and apply it to the next version. I expect that BassDrum 2.0 will have chat features, and will support at-least one other streaming platform.

Harish, Viknesh, Vasanth, Naveen, Sanjev, Mukesh, and all the other wonderful people who were involved in the BassDrum story deserve huge thanks. You guys are rockstars! Thankyou!

Thanks for reading, and follow me on Twitter to see what I'm up to next!

Lessons from BassDrum — Part One

Pradeep CE — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 11:15:45 +0000

This post was originally published in my blog, Pradeep CE.

This series has two parts — you are reading part one, and part two will be available soon.

TL;DR: I built a Chrome extension to watch PrimeVideo in sync with friends. It was an awesome experience, and I learnt a lot!

Just before midnight a couple of days ago, I launched BassDrum, a Chrome extension to watch PrimeVideo in sync with your friends. It’s 100% free and doesn’t require you to sign up to use it.

BassDrum lets you create secret "rooms" that you can share with friends. When someone in the room changes to a video, plays or pauses it, it is synced to everyone in the "room" instantly. BassDrum was built to help people relive the days where we could still have friends over and have movie nights. (A little bit of context here: I’m writing this in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.)

In this post, I’ll detail my experience building BassDrum — what worked, what didn’t, and the mistakes I made.

In part two, I’ll talk about my experience launching it — how it was received, what I could have done better — and the lessons I learnt along the way.

I hope this is helpful to someone out there, who’s trying to build something on their own!

Building BassDrum

BassDrum started out as an idea well over a couple of years ago. I have discussed it with multiple groups of friends since then, but we never really got around to building it or researching it further. Time went by, and one platform after another started coming up with "watch party" features. Whenever I thought about this idea, I told myself that I would definitely build this out one day, even if just for that sake of building it out.

The stack

Then one fine day a few weeks ago, I was learning ReactJS, and wanted a fun little project to practice it with. BassDrum (although I didn’t call it that back then) seemed like a fitting idea for the task. I pitched this to a few friends, and they thought it was a good idea to build it — off to the races!

Initially, I tried building it as a regular React app (CRA). Turns out, this was not a good idea: the process for building a Chrome extension with React was not straightforward, and Webpack hit me in the face like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t make head or tail of it, and couldn’t wrap my head around the config files. This was way too many new things to handle at once, and I told myself I needed to tackle one problem at a time.

I pinged a colleague to ask if there was an easier way, and they suggested I use a boilerplate. A quick search revealed a couple of options. I tried both for ten minutes, and picked the one that seemed to make the most sense to me.

The first version

I wanted to do just one thing for the first version, and do it well. So I decided that I would implement the concept of "rooms", and build just the video syncing feature. I built the side-pane, added a few icons to make it look right, and matched the colours with the PrimeVideo theme. It was bloated, but it was alright.

I generated a UUID every time someone clicked "Create Room", and used that as the room’s secret name. Anyone could join that room using its secret name (the UUID). Every user had a UUID too, and joining was simply a matter of adding that user’s UUID to the relevant room.

I had no idea how to get the video’s state, so I called my trusted front-end-ninja and buddy, Viknesh, and he helped me figure it out.

Using Firebase as the backend, I was ready with a working prototype by the end of the day. The functionality that Firebase’s realtime database provided was exactly what I needed to sync data between the users in a room.

But, there was a problem.

Off to the races — literally

There was a significant lag in the sync, and it was painfully evident in my slow connection, playing two videos simultaneously (so that I could test the sync functionality). The lag was all the more evident because I was frequently updating the state with the video’s current time as it was playing.

At this point, I was just using the React component’s state to keep track of the video the room was playing, and its current time. If someone paused their video, then by the time the change was received by all users, the sender had already received another instruction. The videos would sometimes go back and forth between two states, in an endless loop.

Yup, race condition.

I tried restructuring my data model to work around these race conditions. I asked on Twitter, and tried a few different approaches. I ended up re-writing the extension over six times, but all the variants were either too expensive (lots of data to sync) or didn’t solve the problem (there was still a chance of race condition).

What ended up working was using Websockets as the communication channel, and a Starlette application to aggregate this data in the backend.

Mistakes and lessons

I think I spent too much time, too close, on the sync problem. At the peak of trying to solve it, I made little flash cards with all the problems and scenarios, spread them out on my bed, and kept looking at them for hours, trying to think of a solution. It would probably have been healthier to let it rest for a few days, and then take another shot at it. Harish — pushing me on as always, two years in a row now — and Viknesh listened to me rant on about this in true big-brother fashion, though. 😅

I was reluctant to switch tactics when my first shot was not working. Right from the outset, I wanted to focus on React, and that led to me spending a lot of time trying to make it work with Firebase. But hey, it was a good experience!

I’m proud of myself for not registering a domain name as soon as this idea popped into my head again. It was well after the first prototype was ready that I setup social media and bought the domain. Yet another domain saved from the zombie domain graveyard, yay!

It was extremely hard for me to get the sync working as I expected — I think this was partly because I’m self-taught, and I did not study any "hard" CS like algorithms. But I’m glad I kept at it even when it was too hard. The profound joy I experienced when it finally worked, was definitely worth it!

Also, lesson here for me: go back to the basics and learn some hard CS. Although I might not use it directly, I feel like it will give me good mental models to solve well-known hard problems like these.

It was overwhelming to see so much kindness from people cheering me on, even though this was just a side project! You guys know who you are — you are awesome, and I’m super-grateful! There’s a small surprise coming your way soon! 😉

That’s it for now. See you again in part two!

If you liked this post, then you please share / tag me on Twitter. Would love to hear what you think!

BassDrum: Free Online Watch Parties and Streaming

Pradeep CE — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 16:47:20 +0000

This post originally appeared on Pradeep CE, my personal blog.

I planned on shipping 12 side projects this year. As part of what might be a small step in achieving that, today, I introduced BassDrum as private alpha on Twitter.

What is BassDrum?

BassDrum, at its core, is a browser extension that you can install to stream movies and videos in sync with your friends.

What does BassDrum do?

In a nutshell, BassDrum allows you to:

Create a secret “room” with a hard-to-guess name.
Share this secret name with your friends to let them join your room.
Stream the video you want to watch, and have it automagically play for everyone in the room.
Play / pause / seek the video to have it reflected for everyone in your room.

That’s it! There are no accounts to sign up for, and no credit card details to enter!

You are not sharing your passwords or granting others access to your account. Everyone uses their own account for streaming, and BassDrum just syncs your video playback so that you can watch it together!

Where do I get BassDrum?

BassDrum is currently in private alpha, and is not available publicly (as of writing this). Head over to the BassDrum Website for the latest updates, and to see if you can get on the waitlist to try BassDrum before it launches for public use.

You can also find BassDrum on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Come say hi! 👋

How much does BassDrum cost?

We want to keep BassDrum free and accessible for everyone. At this time, there are no plans to charge anything for BassDrum.

What can I stream with BassDrum?

Right now, BassDrum comes with support for Amazon Prime Video. We plan to add support for Netflix, Hotstar and all your favourite streaming platforms soon!

The Way Forward

I hope that gives you a fair idea of what BassDrum is, and how it can help you. Please give it a shot when it launches — I’m eager for feedback, and would appreciate it a lot if you did!

I’m excited because this is my first side project of this year — looks like my mid-year check-in worked after all! I’ll be sharing the BassDrum journey in a series of posts, right here on this blog. The prospect of building something that people want to use, and having people actually use it… is fascinating!

Hope you all like BassDrum 🙂.