It started in the dead of winter. My mom could not find that heavy jacket she had packed away last year. We turned the house upside down, but it was nowhere to be found. I realized I had the same problem. I’m constantly looking for that specific square piece of wood, a box of 2.5-inch galvanized screws, or where I left my IRFZ44N MOSFET transistors for a circuit I was building. ...
“It started with a battery-powered doorbell…” The Spark: A Doorbell in the Cupboard My journey into hardware and automation didn’t start with complex microcontrollers or cloud architecture. It started with a simple observation. I had a Gaurav Brand doorbell lying unused in our cupboard. It was battery-powered and had a very sensitive latch switch. I realized I could repurpose it. The problem was simple: our water tank would often overflow, wasting precious water. I rigged up a system where the rising water level would trigger the sensitive latch of the doorbell, ringing the bell and alerting us to turn off the pump. ...
Every developer has that one daily task they secretly despise. For me, it wasn’t writing docs or fixing bugs—it was the daily “swipe-in” on our HR portal, let’s call it “Gx-HR” (you know the one). Here is the irony: I physically go to the office every single day. I am there. But remembering to open the app and click “Sign In” at 10:00 AM? That is a mental load I simply couldn’t carry. ...
A high-energy, real-time quiz application designed for live competitions. This full-stack project enables users to create quizzes, host game sessions, and compete with friends in real-time, featuring instant scoring and dynamic leaderboards. Key Features Live Multiplayer Sessions: Join games instantly using a unique 6-digit PIN. Real-Time Interaction: WebSocket-powered communication for sub-second latency. Dynamic Scoring: Points awarded based on speed and accuracy, with streak bonuses. Host Controls: comprehensive dashboard for managing players and game flow. Responsive Design: Seamless experience across desktop and mobile devices. Architecture The system is built on a microservices-inspired architecture to ensure scalability and performance: ...
I recently built a Real-Time Quiz App (check it out live at quiz.utkarshjoshi.com), and while the coding part was fun, the deployment was a whole other beast. I wanted a professional-grade CI/CD pipeline, but I had one strict constraint: it had to be 100% free. This is the story of how I hacked together AWS Free Tier, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and GitHub Actions to build a robust deployment pipeline without spending a dime. ...