Instagram AR Effects & PharoJS Express

As graduation is just around the corner, I find myself filling time with new projects and continuous work on my Thesis project. Here’s what I made today.

My First Instagram Effect

I’ve seen a ton of custom story effects used by those I follow on Instagram. It seems like fun new effects are trendy right now. I started looking into IG effects about a week ago. I noticed that every time somebody uses a custom effect, it links to the creators profile. Ripe opportunity for organic growth? I think so.

I downloaded Spark AR, watched a few tutorials (shout out Catalyst on youtube), and after a suggestion by itsjessicawynne and a few hours of work, I made the effect “What plant are you?” It’s pretty simple–it uses face detection, places a plane over your head, and randomly selects a plant!

It’s currently being reviewed by the Spark AR team. I’ll update this post with a link when it’s live!

PharoJS Express

Last week I made progress with PharoJS. I completed some coding challenges for Advent Of Code 2019 and transpiled it to JS. It worked beautifully. And now, I’ve taken it a step further by extending PjNodeApplication. I made a polyfill for using the popular node.js framework express. I added the basic functionality needed to make a web API using express.

What’s next? I want to make PJS-Express extremely easy to use for any Pharo programmer to make a fully functional web API. Then, I’ll showcase some use cases, starting with a Slack Bot.

Stay tuned for more…