Digital Plots

  • Queue Management App Launched: Share Your Feedback!

    Just rolled out the Queue Management app with minimal testing (so be kind ).
    Check it out here: https://queue-manager-sunilbhaskaran.replit.app/

    Give it a spin and let me know what you think!

  • Coding with Replit AI Agent: My Journey So Far

    A lot has been happening lately with my Queue Management System (QMS), and I’m super excited to share the progress! 🚀

    I’ve been spending about an hour every day for the past week, and honestly, Replit AI Agent has blown me away. After a certain point, it started understanding the context so well that I barely had to do anything!

    Replit Designed the Home Page (Yes, Seriously!)

    Here’s the cool part—I didn’t even prepare the content for the home page. Replit handled it all. It analyzed real-time use cases and automatically generated relevant content. No downtime, no hiccups. If you’ve got an idea, you don’t need to know how to code—Replete takes care of it for you. It’s like having your own AI-powered developer!

    Where We Stand Now: The App Structure

    We’ve now got four roles in the app, each with a well-defined set of responsibilities:

    🛠️ Super User

    • Create organizations and assign org admins.

    👩‍💼 Org Admins

    Org admins have the power to:

    • User Management:
      • Create users who progress through multiple steps in a process.
      • Create step admins who manage these users and advance them through the steps.
      • Each step admin manages their assigned steps efficiently.
    • Process Management:
      • Create, edit, or delete processes.
      • Assign steps to processes and manage them dynamically.
      • Add users to processes and track their progress.
      • Remove, advance, or mark a user’s step as complete.
      • Access a report panel that displays user stats and the step where each user currently stands.

    🔄 Step Admin

    • Remove, advance, or complete a user’s step in the process.

    👤 Normal User

    • View a report on their progress through the queue—without even needing to log in!

    Why Replit AI Agent is a Game-Changer for Developers and Non-Developers Alike

    Replit is more than just an AI agent—it’s like a low-code/no-code platform that empowers anyone to build functional apps without diving into complex programming. Whether you’re a startup founder with a vision or someone exploring AI-powered automation in business processes, Replit can bring your ideas to life.

    With AI-driven content generation, real-time decision-making, and seamless process management, this tool is perfect for building scalable applications without the usual headaches of traditional coding.

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  • Replit AI Rocks!!

    What do you call that constant anxiety while standing in a queue, fearing that someone might cut in line? I could ask ChatGPT for an answer… but honestly, some questions aren’t meant to be answered.

    Every time I’m in a queue, my mind drifts to a queue management system—because why not? But let’s be real, I’m too lazy to code one myself. Then I stumbled upon Replit AI and thought, “Why not give this AI coding agent a shot?” And oh boy, I was blown away by how efficiently it handled the task!

    With just half an hour of effort spread over 4 days, I had a working prototype—including multiple changes to the database schema! I mean, that’s faster than waiting for my food delivery on a Friday night.

    AI Coding Agents Are Here to Stay!

    Here’s what my prototype can do (hold your applause till the end, please):

    • Super users can create orgs and org admins.
    • Org admins can:
      • Create and manage queues.
      • Define steps associated with each queue.
      • Create users and assign them to queues.
      • Move users from one step to another until they complete all steps.
      • Generate real-time reports on users at each step.
      • View reports of users who’ve completed the queue.

    Not rocket science, I know. But for something built in 4 hours with minimal bugs—that’s pure magic!

    The Cost? A Cool $10 Per Month

    • No downtime.
    • No “server is taking a nap” moments.
    • No “Oops, something went wrong” drama.
    • And definitely no hair-pulling over performance issues.
    • Zero crashes. Nada.

    Tech Stack Breakdown (Because Nerds Like Us Care)

    Here’s what’s powering my queue management system:

    Frontend:

    • React (TypeScript): For the slick UI.
    • Shadcn UI: For a polished, modern look.
    • TanStack Query: For state management and data fetching magic.
    • Wouter: For lightweight client-side routing.
    • WebSocket: For real-time updates (because who likes delays?).
    • Tailwind CSS: Because CSS should never be painful.
    • React Hook Form: For smooth form handling.
    • Recharts: For eye-catching data visualization.
    • Date-fns: For all the date-wrangling needs.

    Backend:

    • Express.js: Holding the server fort.
    • PostgreSQL: For data that doesn’t disappear.
    • Drizzle ORM: Making database operations feel like a breeze.
    • WebSocket (ws): Real-time magic at work.
    • Passport.js: Keeping authentication tight.
    • Cookie-parser & Express-session: For cookies and session management.

    Development Tools:

    • TypeScript: Because type safety matters.
    • Vite: Lightning-fast dev server and builds.
    • Zod: For schema validation that won’t disappoint.
    • Radix UI Primitives: For accessible, high-quality components.

    Full-Stack Goodness at Its Finest!

    • Real-time queue updates with WebSocket.
    • Role-based access control (super_admin, admin, user).
    • Organization-based data isolation.
    • Historical analytics and reporting that actually make sense.

    I’m definitely sticking with Replit AI for future projects and will keep you all posted with the results. You can check out the system [here].

    Stay tuned for more AI magic!

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  • Napkin.ai

    I found it to be a great time-saver. Turn your text into visuals in no time!

    Try it out.


    Napkin.ai

  • Grooming great backlogs

    Having a prioritised backlog helps to have a solid roadmap for the product. It’s like gardening. Care and grooming is necessary. We will discuss some of the best strategies here.

    Ensure that the bugs, change requests, and enhancements requests are logged in to a system. Jira is very useful. It’s Ok to keep it in something simple as an Excel sheet – but always make an entry of it. I am referring all of them bugs in this post.

    Analyse from where they are coming. That will help you to bucket them and prioritise easily.

    Dev team – for example, clearing of a technical debt. Suppose, you use an outdated API, you may need to upgrade it. MacOS releases a major update every year – an outdated API can give performance issues; this could be applicable for iOS / Android platforms also. You could specifically have dedicated sprint for this.

    Bugs from pre-release – Pre-release users do a great job in testing the product, before its release. Most of these bugs can be prioritised during the feature development itself. In doubt, wait for the product release and see the real user reaction. Then take a decision.

    Quality Engineers bugs- QEs test the product – mostly new feature. Prioritise this during the feature development itself. Feature development can be considered complete only after these issues are fixed.

    Customer Support – Customer Support executives know customer pain points. These bug come after the product release. The severity of the bugs can be easily determined based on the customer call volumes. Prioritise for the very next product version release.

    Bugs from user forums – Again, number of comments and votes helps in prioritisation.

    It makes a lot sense to attach a priority for each bug. Internal QE team generally are trained to get the priority correctly. For rest of the sources, review the bugs and get the priority correctly. It will help you to assign the bug to each release that are coming up and then filter to create meaningful dash boards.

  • Analytical insights from product documentation

    Do you track any analytical data of your product’s user documents? This data can give you some important insight about your users. To reiterate, the need to visit a user doc, is a design issue. Something is not quite obvious. An average user won’t like to complete reading the documentation before starting with product. (I agree – this could be different if your product has to deal with something very complex, such as a programming language.)

    As a best practice, find the average page views of your docs.
    Monitor it periodically. See if there is a spike in page views. If there is, analyse further.

    See if the spike is associated with an event – For example, an important announcement or a product release. Analyse from where the traffic comes from. Is it from the product itself or through a web search? If it’s from the product itself, the corresponding product page, from where the user selected the Help menu has an issue – mostly it’s associated with a bug in the specific release.

    Analyse, if at all the traffic comes from a different page that’s wrongly linked.

    Try to have a Like button or a Comment option in the user document. These will help you to track user sentiments; in other words, effectiveness of the document.

  • macOS Catalina issue with Nikon tethering on Lightroom Classic

    While tethering, Nikon cameras may not get detected. In this case, if you connect a camera with an SD card to the computer, the photos in it is not displayed in the Import window.
    It happens on macOS Catalina 15.2. Ideally, when you install Lightroom Classic 9.1 and open it for the first time, you should be asked to grant permission for Lightroom Classic to access Photos.  If you unintentionally deny access, you may face this issue.

    To solve the issues:

    1. Go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy.
    2. In the Privacy tab, select Security.
    3. Ensure that Lightroom Classic has permission assigned to Photos, Full Disk Access, and Files and Folders.
    4. Restart Lightroom Classic.

  • Lightroom Classic 9.0 is released

    Lightroom Classic 9.0 is released.
    See the What’s New page for more information.

  • Lightroom Classic 8.2.1 is released

    Lightroom Classic 8.2.1 is released today.
    For more information, see the What’s New doc.

     

  • Lightroom Classic 8.2 is released

    The Enhance Feature
    Using this feature provides you an image with better resolution. Right-click the image and select “Enhance Details” in the context menu.  This will create a new DNG file with “-enhanced” appended in the file name.

    Better Tether support for Nikon cameras
    In Lightroom Classic 8.0, the Tether experience of Canon cameras is greatly improved. In 8.2, you will find better experience for Nikon cameras in terms performance and reliability. You can also control camera shutter speed, aperture and ISO using the Tether bar. Other Tether plugins should work as they used to work in the earlier builds.

    In 8.0, there was an option in Tether settings that allows to save an image optionally in a Canon camera: Save to Camera.
    This option is removed in 8.2.

     

Coding with Replit AI Agent: My Journey So Far

A lot has been happening lately with my Queue Management System (QMS), and I’m super excited to share the progress! 🚀 I’ve been spending about an hour every day for the past week, and honestly, Replit AI Agent has blown me away. After a certain point, it started understanding the context so well that I barely…

bhaskaransunil's avatar by bhaskaransunil

Replit AI Rocks!!

What do you call that constant anxiety while standing in a queue, fearing that someone might cut in line? I could ask ChatGPT for an answer… but honestly, some questions aren’t meant to be answered. Every time I’m in a queue, my mind drifts to a queue management system—because why not? But let’s be real,…

bhaskaransunil's avatar by bhaskaransunil