@akshajdewan102

shipped always-on bot, a slack bot that never clocks out. you slash it a command and it fires back a joke, a dice roll, a live cat fact, or an 8-ball verdict. i wrote it in javascript on @slack/bolt in socket mode, so it connects over an outbound websocket and skips the public-url handshake. the reply logic sits in one file as plain text-in, text-out functions with no slack code, which lets me unit-test the whole brain without a workspace (15 tests pass). it runs on hack club nest as a systemd service that restarts on crash and boots on startup, and it's held a live connection for over a day. i gave it a status page and a health endpoint too, so there's a url that proves it's awake.

gave akshOS a proper visual overhaul. redid the whole css so it's got a warm paper look now, cream background with a dotted grid, thick black borders, and hard shadows behind the windows instead of the soft blurry ones. put it on space grotesk and space mono and made everything lowercase.

added two apps too. paint is a little canvas with a color palette, brush sizes, an eraser and a save-to-png button. and you can right-click the desktop to drop a sticky note now, drag it wherever, and it's still there when you come back. threw a couple easter eggs in the terminal too, try sudo.

also rewrote the readme so it actually explains the thing. play with it here: https://downbeatfoil.github.io/webos/

Built Astro Tab, my NASA APOD new-tab page, following the "Give Your Website a Pulse" guide from start to ship. I scaffolded a vanilla Vite project, cleaned out the demo files, and wired up a fetch to NASA's APOD API — send the request, .json() the response, then drop the title, image, and explanation into #app, with the key kept safe in a .env (and .env.example committed) read via import.meta.env. The trickiest bit was media handling, since NASA doesn't always send an image; some days it's a video or YouTube embed, so I build the media tag in a variable first ( vs vs ) and set innerHTML exactly once instead of overwriting it and losing the title. On top of the base guide I added a date picker so you can pull up any past APOD (same fetch, just &date= appended), and styled it as a dark space HUD with Orbitron/Space Mono fonts and clip-path: polygon() zigzag strips down the sides using body::before/::after pseudo-elements that hide under 600px via a media query. Deployment was its own lesson: set base in vite.config.js, stored the API key as a GitHub Actions secret, and let the workflow build and push to GitHub Pages on every commit to main. Live at https://downbeatfoil.github.io/nasa-apod-site/ and code at https://github.com/Downbeatfoil/nasa-apod-site.

AkshOS — my operating system that runs in the browser 🪟

I built a little desktop OS that lives entirely in a web page — no installs, no accounts, just open the link. It boots to a lock screen with my name, then drops you onto a desktop with draggable, resizable windows and a taskbar, exactly like a real OS. The apps all actually work: a Terminal with real commands (help, whoami, date, open, theme, joke), a Notepad that autosaves to your browser, a Calculator, a file explorer, a clock, and — my favorite part — a built-in Snake game that saves your high score. There's also a theme switcher with 6 wallpapers that remembers your pick between visits. It's all vanilla HTML/CSS/JS with no frameworks, so the whole thing is just three files. The trickiest bug was an invisible boot overlay that was silently swallowing every click until I realized the hidden attribute was losing to a CSS rule — one line fixed it. Try it yourself (no password, works on any browser): https://downbeatfoil.github.io/webos/

Always-On Slack Bot — shipped and running 24/7
Wanted to build a Slack bot that never goes offline and just answers whatever you throw at it. Got it done this week.
I used JavaScript with Slack's Bolt framework in Socket Mode, so the bot talks to Slack over a WebSocket instead of needing a public URL. It has 10 slash commands so far: /ao-help, /ao-joke, /ao-quote, a magic 8-ball, a coin flip, a dice roller, /ao-time, and /ao-catfact which pulls a random fact from a live API. I kept all the reply logic in its own file with zero Slack code in it, which let me write real unit tests for it (15 of them, all passing).
The part I'm happiest with is the hosting. Rather than a free web host that falls asleep after a few minutes, I put it on Hack Club Nest as a systemd service. It auto-restarts if it crashes and comes back up on reboot, so it's genuinely online around the clock. I also gave it a small status page so there's a link you can actually open: https://bot.akshajdewan102.hackclub.app
Things I learned the hard way: Nest containers are just plain Debian, so I had to apt install node and git myself before anything would run, and Socket Mode needs two separate tokens (a bot token and an app-level token) which took me a minute to figure out.
Next up: a few more commands, and maybe a small database if I want it to remember anything between messages.