Since Kloudless’ API has been available, it’s clear that our developers are awesome! Dev Logs are the stories of developers who have created some sweet hacks using Kloudless and other technologies. Know of a hack or smart dev who should be featured in Dev Logs? Email an@kloudless.com for next steps!

Matt Green is featured in today’s Dev Logs —
get to know him!

We met Matt at Hack(bright) for Good Hackathon in San Francisco last month. He built a cool hack using the Kloudless API, won a sweet drone and took some time to catch up with us about what he’s been up to since we last met!

Tell us about you — who are you and what are you currently working on?

I’m a software engineer who moved out to the Bay Area last October from the east coast (Virginia). I really enjoy hacking around with hardware and have been having a lot of fun with the AR.Drone you guys gave me for winning the hackathon (right now, I’m trying to make it automatically track people’s faces). I’ve also been working on some hybrid app stuff with Ionic and Cordova and just recently joined some friends in building out a product using these technologies. I try to do write-ups of interesting problems I’ve solved or things I’ve built on my blog at http://blog.emgeee.com/. As always, I try to post as much stuff to my github account as well: https://github.com/emgeee.

Why did you choose to build the hack you built?

The image uploader hack I built was an idea I stumbled upon after a friend expressed frustration with how hard it is to easily share different pictures with different people. The idea in its current form came to me after thinking about how tedious it must be to amass the large collections of GIFs that Redditors seem to have in order to have an appropriate image representation for every occasion.

What was most challenging for you about the Kloudless API?

Probably the most challenging issue for me when implementing this extension was actually authenticating the user to a cloud storage provider. Because chrome extensions are served from the local computer, there’s no easy way to verify that the authenticating application actually belongs to the owner of the API key. Fortunately, Vinod outlined a solution to circumvent this and after tweaking it a bit, I was able to build a solution that works pretty well. This is a somewhat unique issue that exists for good reason but fortunately the majority of developers won’t run into it.

How would you improve the API (features, documentation, support, etc)?

The Kloudless API was actually really pleasant to use and for the most part the documentation was spot on. I like the honesty in the docs about what features exist, and which features have yet to come. While I didn’t end up using the interactive docs Kloudless provides, they too look pretty well put together.

One thing that was pretty confusing to understand was how the client, Kloudless’ servers, and the cloud storage provider’s APIs all interact together. I think a diagram or two explaining the authentication flow and the file manipulation flow would go along way in helping a developer understand the flow and make decisions accordingly.

A feature I think would be pretty cool to have (and I’m not entirely sure if this is possible) would be to have an embeddable iframe version of the authentication popup box. I think it would give designers and developers more flexibility in how they build their app flows and would overall make for a better experience.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

I really like Kloudless’ logo and website design. I also found the engineering staff both knowledgable and helpful (unfortunately I’ve forgotten the names of the guys who helped me at the hackathon (ed. note: probably Timothy Liu, David Thorman and Leo Zhang) but shoutout to Vinod for taking the time to write my authentication for me). Of the things you guys have planned in the future, I’m probably most excited about EC2 integration, though I’d also like to see you guys integrate with some of the self-hosted file storage platforms like Ownloud and Aerofs.

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Matt! Come back next week for more Dev Logs, or sign up for your own Kloudless developer account. Swap tips and ideas in the comments below or ping us at hello@kloudless.com!