July 2022 Review - Gained access to OpenAI - DALL·E 2

July has been a busy month, and surprisingly productive in retrospect. Here are some of the highlights.

Gained access to OpenAI - DALL·E 2

OpenAI's amazing DALL·E 2 AI model for text prompt-based image generation is available to a limited amount of users in preview mode. Access is gained through signing up on the waiting list. I signed up this month and just recently gained access! When I first learned about DALL·E I thought it would be really fun to use it to generate feature images for these blog posts.

A brief search online has me feeling pretty lucky to have gotten access with such a short wait... See the Reddit thread below to see what I'm talking about.

So now that I've gotten access, I'm taking this first opportunity to do so! Here are the images generated from a prompt of "water color painting of computer hackers camping near the water". This prompt was inspired by my experience at Toorcamp this month and I think it did a lovely job visually recreating my experience there.

Lazztech.Lab

I open-sourced all of the Kubernetes scripts & documentation I've written for my home server.

Lazztech.Hub

I got ample opportunity to test the Lazztech Hub app at a large form outdoor social event.

I shipped a number of changes & updates to the app.

Updates & Changes:

• removed no longer used "bio auth" login button as the app now stays logged in
• The adjusted button layout on the Hub & Event page to layout properly on different screen sizes
• Improved the form for creating and editing a Hub to make the process easier and with less upfront required data entry
• Improvements to the map page now allow for search and selection of a location for a Hub
• Added missing Android permissions for background location
• Geofences now sync state with Hubs from the server vs deleting and "refreshing" (Update hasn't quite made it out on iOS yet...)
• Geofences now check in on "dwell" event vs "enter" event (Update hasn't quite made it out on iOS yet...)
• Newly created Hubs now default to "Active"

Review

My goal for the month was to focus on general quality improvements on the app & to improve the quality consistency between iOS and Android. Toorcamp ended up being an excellent opportunity for field testing the app with a predominantly Android user base and I believe my efforts largely paid off.

I've gained about another 20 user signups this month putting me at ~80 users, which again is still not much though I'm looking forward to breaking the 100 users sign-up mark. I expect I'll most likely see this next month.

Though there's still more work to do on the Android version... For example, the background geofence checking in/out doesn't seem to be working still. I think I'll probably need to get a dedicated Android device for testing & development to iron out some of the last kinks.

However, the interest in the app during field testing at Toorcamp was high and the primary feature requests were all related to easier signup & communication between users. So that will be my focus for the next month. I think this will make the app more valuable for users and help to better facilitate gatherings.

Here's a sneak preview of a new feature

I'm working on to allow users to jump to the devices existing default SMS app or start a phone call with other users from the Lazztech Hub app. This will sort of turn the app into a social phone book for those who want to add & share their contact with other users. I also think it's going to be a high-value add and avoid the pain of producing just another messaging platform for people to juggle since it makes use of regular text messaging and phone calls.

I'm certainly looking forward to getting this feature out to users, & how it may be built off of in the future.