Back in 2016, before I moved to New Zealand 🇳🇿, I decided to challenge myself with a lil’ side project 💻.
At the time, “Dekh Bhai” memes were EVERYWHERE in India — if you know, you know 😎.
(Dekh Bhai = “Look, brother” for my non-desi friends 👀🧔)
So I thought, why not try building something around it? I was just learning JavaScript and wanted to turn the memes into a fun web app.
Spoiler alert: it took me a whole month to build 😅 (yes, I was a total beginner).
The project was built entirely with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no fancy stacks, just good old basics 🔧🧱
For styling, I used my comfort blanket — Bootstrap 🧶.
At that point, I had already used it in most of my mini projects, and it made responsive design way easier 📱💻
I also threw in Normalize.css by Nicolas Gallagher to make sure the site didn’t look like a mess on different browsers 🧹🖥️
For turning text into image (yup, like meme magic 🧙♂️✨), I used Fabric.js — a super handy HTML5 canvas library with all kinds of cool interactive features.
It even supports SVG-to-canvas conversions, which made things feel extra pro 💼
Changing text colors? That was powered by Prism.js by Lea Verou 🌈
(Technically meant for syntax highlighting, but hey, we adapt 😎)
For the character selection box on the side, I used nanoScroller.js by James F.
Think Mac-style scrollbars, but for us mere mortals 🖱️🍏
Picking colors was made easy with JSColor.js by Jan Odvarko — a cute little color picker that just worked 🎨👌
And lastly, I tried to make things social by using socialShare.js by Ritesh Kumar — sadly, it’s now deprecated (RIP 🪦), but it used to let you control social buttons like a boss.
Of course, holding all this together was good ol’ jQuery v2.1.0. A classic. Can’t forget the OG 💾💙
Moral of the story? I started small, learned a ton, and had a blast building something people could actually use (and laugh at 😄).
Still one of my fav beginner projects to date 💯