Two Dev Users, Two Countries, One Weird Avatar Project. V2 Escalated Quickly

You sit down one evening to hack on a side project, and a month later it's living its own life, collecting GitHub stars, and demanding CI/CD. Sound familiar? That's exactly what happened to two developers from different countries who built a quirky avatar project for DEV.to. And, as it often goes, V2 escalated quickly.

The idea is simple: you enter your DEV username, and it generates a unique avatar based on your activity. Initially, it was just an experiment with Canvas API and Next.js. But then the authors added country-based generation, statistics, and even the ability to "crossbreed" two users. It turned into a sort of Tinder for avatars, minus the swiping.

What's new in V2?

• User comparison: now you can see who comments more — you or your friend (spoiler: the friend always has more).
• Location-based generation: the avatar takes into account the country — for example, users from Moldova get a special pattern (probably hinting at wine).
• "Chaos" mode: a button that shuffles all parameters. The result looks like the UI of old Windows widgets — but in a good way.

Of course, bugs were inevitable. The authors honestly admit that the project was thrown together in an evening, but V2 required a refactor. "The code looks like it was written by a drunk cockroach," comments one of the developers. But hey, it's a side project — fun over perfection.

METABYTE studio comment: Side projects are a great way to level up skills and have fun. If your "evening experiment" suddenly grows into production, give us a call — we'll help refactor so your code doesn't look like a "drunk cockroach" wrote it.