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Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars

boringavatars.com

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Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars

#31

Post by inbx0 »

Tade0 wrote: post #30
enlyth wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it a bit sad that the most upvoted reaction to someone's cool little project they wanted to share is the classic HN misguided and overused response of 'React BAD'

There's a reason for that. The web is roughly 90% static pages with JS sprinkled on top(usually jQuery), and 10% SPAs made in various frameworks. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library React is a small part of the web(in terms of the number of people using it commercially) and thus a library written in React isn't terribly useful for most of the market.

And what percetange of those "static pages with JS sprinkled on top" have a need for automatically generated custom avatars?

Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars

#32

Post by bhl »

jacobmischka wrote: post #15
NohatCoder wrote: post #13

Why make a library dependent on a particular framework? Seems to just limit usefulness for no particular gain.

It creates SVGs using React[1], it would be nontrivial to support another view library with this design and if you're going to support only one at initial release React is probably the most popular bet. [1]: https://github.com/boringdesigners/boring-avatars/blob/maste...

I agree with React being a good bet, but looking at the source code at the link, porting the library over to vanilla javascript or vue seems rather simple given it's mostly using JSX and not using an in-depth React feature like hooks.

Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars

#33

Post by Tade0 »

inbx0 wrote: post #31
Tade0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason for that. The web is roughly 90% static pages with JS sprinkled on top(usually jQuery), and 10% SPAs made in various frameworks. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library React is a small part of the web(in terms of the number of people using it commercially) and thus a library written in React isn't terribly useful for most of the market.

And what percetange of those "static pages with JS sprinkled on top" have a need for automatically generated custom avatars?

Quite a few actually! After all they include static pages with comment sections, forums, image boards etc. - all places where you would want to have user profiles and naturally avatars.

Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars

#34

Post by bhl »

new_here wrote: post #28

Awesome work! I was wanting to build a library like this myself but you've executed it way better! You should try to build and charge for a web API for this to let communities auto-generate avatars for their new users.

That sounds a great side project, since some developers might prefer a static svg dynamically created via url like boringavatar.app/[username here].

There's some prior work on this: e.g. https://github.com/lfades/static-tweet and https://github.com/vercel/og-image.

Re: Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars

#36

Post by InfiniteCode »

nc wrote: post #27

Incredible work! I'd pay for additional packs and also for a list of artists to come up with custom ones. (was just looking for this the other day). Every B2B SaaS and consumer product on the planet either needs to pay an illustrator/designer to create these... or perhaps use your product? :)

I've done this one some time ago - https://www.blankjs.com/ you can create your own styles there.
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