You might have seen a Google Street View car like in the picture above. These cars drive around all over the place, capturing their surroundings in 360 degrees with that big camera on top of the vehicle.

Those images then get added to Google Maps, and these are part of the official Google Street View imagery.

Besides those cars, Google also has cyclists and people walking around with a 360 camera on top of their head to capture places where cars are not allowed. However during my last road trip through East Europe, Turkiye, Iran & Iraq, I found four places Google didn't capture yet. Four places with a ton of history, that make me super proud to add them to Google Street View.

Which places, you ask? Let's find out!

Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria

The Buzludzha monument is a officially the Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party. It's built on the Buzludzha Peak in central Bulgarian. Building started in 1974 and finished in 1981.

Inside, there are some wonderful Soviet Mosaics, but unfortunately they closed off the inside for the public, because the building is in very bad state.

When I added it on Google Street View, there was only one other blue line, but these days on GSV there are a few other people that added it.

So, while I might not be the first or the only person to have added this amazing monument to GSV, I'm still one of the few that have preserved it for future generations to visit digitally

Troy

Yes, that Troy. The city famous from the ancient story about the Troian horse, and the 2004 epic movie with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and many other famous movie stars.

It's located on the West coast of Turkiye, and while it's not the most impressive ancient site to visit in Turkiye, it's definitely worth a visit! Just for the myths alone!

The site is divided in Layers, randiging from Troy 0, which is dated to the Early Bronze Age, up to Troy IX, dated to the Roman Period.

I'm currently still the only person to have added Troy to Google Street View!

Ur

Located in modern day Iraq, it was one of the most important Sumerian city-states in ancient Mesopotamia. It's famous for the Ziggurat of Ur, which you can see in the Google Maps snippet above.

It was founded in 3800 BC, that makes it almost 6000 years old!

If you've read the Bible, you might remember there was a place mentioned called Ur Kasdim. Scholars think that Ur is possibly Ur Kasdim, the birthplace of Abraham.

There is a ruin called "Abraham's house", but unfortunately, when I was there, a big part of the site was closed off for the public, so I couldn't add it to Google Street View. Maybe one day I'll have to go back then...

Uruk

This one is by far my favorite. Let me explain you why.

You know that meme about how every man thinks on a daily basis about the Roman Empire? I have the same but with Mesopotamia.

When I was 12, and I was in grade 1 of secondary school, I learned about Mesopotamia for the first time, and it intrigued me. What also didn't help that compared to Greek and Roman history, the time spent on the history of Mesopotamia was really short.

City-States.

Cuneiform.

Invention of the wheel.

Cradle of civilization.

Done.

That was basically it.

As it intrigued me so much, I went to the library a lot to find books about it, but I remember that was also very limited.

One of the books I got was about the epic of Gilgamesh. I can't remember which book it was, and I can't find it, but I got so obsessed with the epic poem. I must've read that book at least a dozen times in the four weeks I loaned it from my local library.

So twenty years after I first encountered Gilgamesh and Uruk, I was standing there in the Iraqi desert, with a 360 camera strapped on my back. Capturing the ancient city of Uruk, the birthplace of King Gilgamesh. A city that was once thriving, with very fertile soil, and that was now in the barren desert, under the excruciating heat of the sun.

In the epic poem of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is on a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life.

Spoiler alert:

While he doesn't discover the way to not die, he realizes that eternal life is not about living forever. It's about being a good man, and in his case, a good King.

After his heroic journey across the world on the lookout for ways to live forever, he returns to Uruk, taking his responsibilities, and realizes what it takes to be a good King.

In the end he got what he wanted: he didn't die. Millions of people still know his story today.

We don't know exactly when Gilgamesh lived, but scholars think it's around 2900-2700 BC.

So 4700 years after he died, a Belgian drove his motorcycle to Iraq, to visit Gilgamesh' birthplace and walk around it with a 360 camera so it could be added to Google Street View.

Keeping the story of Gilgamesh alive for a little longer.

A collection of the Polaroids I took on my road trip with my Bonneville T120 in 2024.

🚩My red flag is that 90% of the time I forget I have my Polaroid with me, and when I do remember it I take three similar photos of the same subject.

This was my second bigger road trip, which started in Serbia, then went to Asia (Turkiye ,Iran, Iraq), and then back to Eastern Europe.

Flags collected:

🇩🇪* 🇦🇹* 🇸🇰* 🇭🇺* 🇷🇸 🇧🇬 🇹🇷 🇮🇷 🇮🇶 🇷🇴 🇲🇩 🇺🇦 🇵🇱*

\* I already visited these countries on my previous road trip

Intro

One of my favorite movies of all time is "Lawrence of Arabia". I rewatched the movie somewhere in 2023 and I decided that my next road trip was going to go to Saudi-Arabia.

But getting with a motorcycle from Belgium to Saudi Arabia is not easy and it takes a long time to get there. As I work as a freelancer and have some projects on the side, I just couldn't take six months off to travel.

On top of that, getting to Saudi Arabia by road is not easy.

Getting from Europe to Turkiye is the easy part. From there it gets difficult:

One option is to take a ferry to Israel, and then from Israel to Jordan, and then to Saudi Arabia. But the events that happened on October 7 and everything after that, made me decide that going to Israel was not a good idea right now.

I then checked if I could take a ferry from somewhere to Egypt, and then drive across the Sinai desert to Saudi Arabia. This is not possible anymore (it used to be). On top of that the Sinai desert is really dangerous and you get a military escort when you drive through it. I decided against that option, even though it would've been an epic Biblical themed road trip.

Okay, driving to Turkiye it is. But what then?

The border between Turkiye and Syria is closed, so even if I was crazy enough to go Turkiye > Syria > Jordan > Saudi Arabia, that is not possible.

Then the last option: Turkiye > Iraq > Kuwait > Saudi Arabia.

It turns out Iraq is pretty safe these days. And on top of that there are some amazing historical sites like Ur and Uruk I really wanted to visit in Iraq.

But after researching this a bit more, it turned out it wasn't possible, because of this reason: It's possible to cross Iraq from the south to north, but not north to south.

I'm not joking. I thought Belgium was weird, but that didn't make any sense.

The north of Iraq is Iraqi Kurdistan, a separatist region, that has their own language, culture and... borders and visa system. So when you enter Iraq from the north via Turkiye, you get an Iraqi Kurdistan stamp in your passport. When you then drive south, at one point you get to a border between Iraqi Kurdistan and Federal Iraq. Federal Iraq does not acknowledge this Iraqi Kurdistan stamp, and according to them you're basically illegally in Iraq. But instead of arresting you for illegally entering the country, they just don't let you through, so you're stranded in Iraqi Kurdistan.

There are - again - two options around this: You can enter Iraqi Kurdistan, take a plane from Erbil (IK) to Baghdad (FI), get a stamp from FI, then go back to IK, and you'll be free to enter Federal Iraq. This doesn't even work all the time. Don't ask me about the specifics, because I quickly decided that this was going to be the way I wanted to continue.

Another way is to enter Iraqi Kurdistan, hop the border to Iran, drive south, and then re-enter Iraq in the south, so you'll get a Federal Iraqi stamp.

This seemed to be the way to go for me. But then, the more I was researching Iran the more I started to like it, and I wanted to visit more and more cities in Iran.

What started as me going to "hop the Iraq-Iran border" for a few days, turned into me going to Iran for a few weeks, and skipping Saudi Arabia all together.

Now, it's picture time!

Serbia

I drove from Antwerp, Belgium to Belgrade, Serbia in three days. I had the worst side winds on the motorcycle I've ever experienced. It took 6 hours to drive 150 kms, because the winds were so bad and it was really dangerous.

I stayed in Belgrade for a week to work remotely and prepare a bit for the trip to Turkiye

Bulgaria

From Serbia I drove through Bulgaria, which was a great experience. I stayed in Sofia one night, and while I really was amazed by the beauty of the city, there's something I just really love about the very rural provinces of Eastern Europe.

In central Bulgaria there is an enormous communist monument called the Buzludzha monument. It's closed off for the public unfortunately, as it's on the verge of collapse. Inside there are the most beautiful Soviet style mosaics

I added the Buzludzha monument to Google Street View, and made a reel about the whole process

On the way to Turkiye I saw a sign pointing to Istanbul, and then it hit me that this adventure was really happening

Turkiye

Right at the border of Bulgaria and Turkiye, there's a beautiful city called Edirne where I stayed for a night.

From Edirne, I drove south to the Dardanelles to visit the ruins of Troy.

Yes that Troy! In Çanakkale they even have the original horse of the 2004 movie with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Diane Kruger.

Guess who in the world added the mythical city of Troy to Google Street View.. 😎

From Çanakkale I drove more south along the west coast of Turkiye. What an amazing trip that was.

You can't see it really well, but that book is a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Foreshadowing!?

I met these Belgians who transformed an old Polish fire truck to a beast of an overlander camper. You can see my Bonnie left from the truck.

From the west coast of Turkiye, I crossed the whole country from east to west, from Izmir to Van.

Central Turkiye was so nice to drive, the people were so friendly.

In central Turkiye I visited Konya, Cappadocia, Gobekli Tepe and the amazing city of Batman 🦇 (truth be told, this was a detour, but hey, I'm not gonna miss out on Batman)

Cappadocia was as magical as you think it is. It feels like you're driving through the Grand Canyon in the US.

And then in the morning at sunset you have this alien experience of the whole sky filled with hot air balloons while the sun is rising in the background. A truly breathtaking experience.

On the way to Van I quickly realised how bad I actually planned this road trip, because Lake Van is apparently located 1600 metres above sea level. I had no clue.

At one point I was driving among the mountain tops covered with snow. I got lucky the weather was really nice, and the roads were not covered with ice.

As I stopped at a gas station, I saw a couple of people slaughter a sheep in the garden of the gas station. They invited me for dinner, and the meat they served was soooo delicious.

Iran

From Turkiye I crossed the border with Iran, which went actually much smoother than expected. People were really helpful and the border guards were even trolling me by saying that my motorcycle is a Harley Davidson (Iran does not allow American made vehicles in).

When I successfully crossed the border I got in a bit of trouble. I had no mobile internet, my Google Maps offline maps were not working and I didn't have any Iranian money. All I knew was that I had to drive to Tabriz, a big city in the east of Iran, and that my hotel was 20 kms south of the city. But I had enough gas left for 150 kms, while the total trip to the hotel was at least 180 kms...

So I started driving, and luckily road signs in Iran are both in Persian and English, which .

I stopped in Khoy, which I remembered from when I was planning this trip.

I saw a motorcycle shop, and thought that the owner must be a young guy that could speak English and he would know where to exchange money and get gas for Bonnie.

But nope, it was an old 70 year old guy who did not speak a word of English. I managed to explain to him that I wanted to exchange money and get gas, and he told me to follow him to see his neighbor. His neighbor was an even older guy who signed me to follow him on his motorcycle.

As he drove in front of me, evading all the cars, and I tried to keep up with him, we stopped at a gas station. They filled Bonnie's tank. The old guy then handsigned me that I had to pay. I told him I had no money. He said "Card". I said "European cards don't work in Iran".

He then spoke to the gas station clerks and they told me it was fine. I later found out that gas is super cheap in Iran, and 14 liters is around 55 euro cents. CENTS. Literally CENTS. Compare that to 1.7 euro per liter in Belgium.

The old guy then guided me to a money exchange place. We said goodbye and I drove on to Tabriz.

It was getting late, and as it was so early in the year, the sun set at around 6-7pm. And I really did not want to drive in the dark, in a strange country. But I also had no choice, as I already booked a hotel.

I arrived in Tabriz in the dark at around 6:30pm. I got gas and asked some people in shops around the gas station if they had WiFi. One said he didn't, but another one had internet, so I managed to download my offline Google Maps. My hotel was another an hour drive, in the dark. I didn't really know what to do.

As I was standing by my motorcycle thinking what I was going to do, the guy who didn't had WiFi told me I could come inside his restaurant and use his hotspot. I gladly accepted his invitation. He gave me something to drink and told me that it was not a good idea to go to the hotel, as it was in the middle of nowhere and the roads were bad and dangerous.

He suggested to call some hotels in the center of Tabriz (only 1km away from his restaurant), and negotiate a good deal for me.

The friendliness of Iranian people is out of this world. That really motivated me to be way more proactively helpful to travelers I see in Belgium.

From Tabriz I drove to Tehran. I arrived at 6pm, right in the middle of evening rush hour. But I think in Tehran it's always rush hour. The traffic was insane, cars and scooters everywhere.

The first day I was in Tehran, I was so overwhelmed. It was my first day in more than a week where I was not riding my motorcycle. I explored Tehran, and everyone I met invited me in for tea. The first few times I kindly refused their invitations. Hey, I'm European. Nothing is free here. If a random person in Europe invites you in for tea, they're going to guilt you in buying something or they have some other ulterior motive. At least that's how I was brought up.

But at one point I was like "okay let's just say yes, we'll see that happens". And it was just that: a Belgian and some Iranians drinking some tea, talking about traveling, things to visit in Iran, what it's like to live in Iran, and stuff like that.

The most dangerous part of that was because I offered to pay for my tea, which is a big no no.

I was slowly getting relaxed all alone in this strange new country.

We all have read some horror stories about tourists taking photographs of (government) buildings and getting jailed. As I was walking around with my Polaroid in my bag, I was really paranoia. I really thought if I just take one picture of the wrong building, twenty police officers are going to surround me and I'm gonna be put in an Iranian jail for forty years.

I also didn't see any western tourists to talk with and ask their experience. When you read online on websites like Reddit, they say that it's all fine, and the buildings you can't photograph are clearly marked with signs, but I know better than to trust some random stranger on the internet!

This was my first image I took somewhere in an alley in Tehran. The more I walked around with my Polaroid out in the open, the more I realized I was going to be fine.

I also saw a bunch of girls taking pictures of each other in the gardens of historical houses and in museums. That's when I realized that taking pictures in the streets of Tehran is fine.

After a couple of days in Tehran, I drove south to Isfahan. I stayed in this amazing historical house called Ghasr Monshi hotel. If you decide to travel to Iran/Isfahan, I can highly recommended it. It's right in the center of the city, really calm and just a really beautiful hotel.

I really prefered Isfahan over Tehran. Tehran is really busy and noisy and there are cars everywhere.

Isfahan was really walkable and calm. It seemed more like a family city

One morning I woke up and I had a ton of missed calls and messages from friends and family. Turns out that Iran was "attacked" by Israel, aka Israel crashed a couple of drones on an air base near Isfahan. The newspapers were talking about World War 3, and there I was, in the city that was "just" attacked.

I had breakfast and started exploring the city, and I noticed nothing of what happened. No news, the people were not stressed or anything. I don't know if they knew it and didn't care or the attack was not discussed on the news.

Anyway, I went looking for a sign of the city as a nice souvenir that I was once attacked by Israel. And this bad picture I took of the entrance of a mosque will be forever my souvenir of the Israeli drone strike.

The day after I drove from Isfahan to Yazd. On the way I got in a really bad storm, with hail as big as marbles.

A pickup truck came driving in front of me and signaled me to stop at the side of the road. He invited me to his guest house to cover for the hail, and after the storm I could continue my travel to Yazd.

I accepted his invitation and followed him to his amazing guest house where we had tea and talked about traveling.

When it was time for me to move on, he gave me the advice to take the long route to Yazd, instead of the short one that GPSes recommend.

I thanked him for that advice and went on my way.

Unfortunately, at one point I took a wrong exit, and because I had no mobile internet Google Maps didn't reroute. All I knew is I had to drive east to Yazd. I continued driving on, saw a sign pointing east that said Yazd and took the exit.

I entered a highway that seemed to be brand new. After a few kilometers I got a bit suspicious. I only saw trucks and heavy machinery on this highway. I was clearly in some sort of industrial zone. Ah well, as long as I'd get to Yazd.

At one point there was a military checkpoint, which was not the first one I encountered so I happily gave my passport to the police officer. He walked way with my passport and after ten minutes he came back, and asked him to join him.

He took me to a room where he interrogated me for almost two hours.

"Where are you going?"
- "Yazd"
"Where are you staying in Yazd?"
- "Fazeli hotel"
"Where are you going after Yazd?"
- "Kerman"
"Where will you stay in Kerman?"
- "Don't know, I'm going to camp in the desert"
...
"Where are you going now?"
- "Uhm, to Yazd like I to-"
"Where will you still in Yazd?"
- "Fazeli hotel"

I don't know what the point of that was, but after two hours he decided I must really be going to Yazd and he gave me back my passport, offered some tea and bottles of water for on the way and let me go.

I later asked at my hotel in Yazd what that was al about, and apparently the short route between Yazd and Isfahan has a lot of industry and military complexes, with a few military checkpoints. With the "attack" by Israel happening a day earlier, they were extra curious why a European guy on a motorcycle was driving all alone there.

Glad that ended well!

In a coffee bar in Yazd I met Kamran, a super friendly Iranian whose dream is to one day move to Italy.

He gave me some amazing recommendations about things to visit in Yazd and Shiraz.

Yazd was a really calm desert city. It was really hot (for European standards anyway, I'm sure those Iranians were freezing) - around 33 degrees celsius.

When I was walking around Yazd I realized how big and different Iran is, and that every region in Iran has its own history in culture. The three cities I visited thus far, Tehran, Isfahan and Yazd, are so very different.

After four days in Yazd, I was ready to go to Lut desert, the hottest place on earth.

On the way there I stopped at a gas station, to get gas and buy a few bottles of water for on the way.

When I wanted to continue my journey, I couldn't start my motorcycle anymore. The key was totally bent, and it wouldn't go all the way in the ignition anymore.

Together with the help from some Iranians (their willingness to help a stranger in need is really the common thread in this story), we managed to get it somewhat straight again by hitting it with a stone.

Instead of continuing my journey towards to desert, I decided to turn back to Yazd and to get a locksmith to make a copy of my key.

As I was waiting for the locksmith to make a duplicate, some people from the touristic infodesk came and say hi, as they heard a traveler with a weird plate on his motorcycle was in town.

We talked about my plans to go to the desert, and they advised against it. It was already really hot there, but as it was outside the tourist season, it was even more desolated as before. They told me I could try to find a tourist agency to take me with them, but I really didn't want to do that.

As I just had this big trouble with my key, their discouragements were successful and I unfortunately decided against going to the Lut desert. I regret it now, but back then I was just happy I didn't get stranded with a bent key in the middle of Lut Desert.

Instead of driving east towards the desert, I drove south to Bakhtegan National park.

I was once again stranded in a storm in the dark. As I couldn't find any hotel or camping (they don't really exist anyway in Iran), I just pitched my tent behind someone's garden wall.

From there my trip to Shiraz continued.

In Shiraz I decided to take a few extra days to recover and explore the city, as I quickly find out it had a really amazing atmosphere.

I stayed at the Seven Hostel/ Rashedi House in Shiraz. It was an amazingly beautiful hostel, with the most friendly hosts.

I met some of the guests and together we explored Shiraz

The hostel was also really close to the famous Pink Mosque of Shiraz. Which was filled with teenagers and young girls taking pictures next to the leaded windows.

One of the most famous inhabitants of Shiraz was Hafez, a Persian poet who lived in the 12th century.

His poetry is very famous and important in Iranian/Persian culture. I thought it would be similar to Shakespeare in the UK.

I was wrong.

I went to visit Hafez' tomb where he's buried, fully expecting it to be a really calm experience.

Wrong again.

I entered the site where his tomb is and it was absolutely packed. Lots and lots of children, but also couples, families, and even some tourists.

Okay but apart from the big crowd, it will be calm, right? It's after all his burial place, a bit like a graveyard.

Wrong. Again.

People were reciting his poetry next to his tomb, people were clapping, cheering on the reciters, applauding, dancing. What an amazing experience that was. I got a very cool video of a young boy reciting poetry, and the whole crowd clapping rhythm. At one point he even made some special sound effects, which had the crowd in stitches. Unfortunately as you can see from the polaroid it were a lot of kids, so it would not be okay to share this video.

Together with Dmitry, the Russian guy from the group picture, I did a big tour of Persepolis, Necropolis and the tomb of Cyrus the great.

After six days it was time to leave Iran and go towards Iraq.

This is when I had one of the craziest days of my adventure.

I planned to cross the Iran - Iraq border somewhere near Talaieh (Iran) & Al Qurnah (Iraq). I read online that this border is really... let's call it fickle and unreliable. Some days they let one car through, some days no cars at all, some days there's no issues.

To prepare for this I drove to this border the day before I wanted to cross it, pitched my tent somewhere in the wild desert around three kilometers from the border, just so I could wake up really early and be there when the border opened at 7am.

This part of Iran is really hot, which meant I sweat all night, and barely slept. At night I heard all kinds of animals walk around my tent, and at one point I get woken up by something very sharp hitting me in the back, which I think was a little mouse or a rat biting me through my tent?

At 5:30 am I had enough of it, and as it was already light outside, I decided to get ready and go to the border. I packed all my gear, mounted my motorcycle, and drove off. But I didn't move an inch forward. But I did drive a few inch down, right in the sand.

I took off all the gear, dug my motorcycle out of the sand, parked it 50 meters further on the road, and dragged all my gear over there and got ready again. Mind you, at this point it's already 30 degrees Celsius.

I drove for 10 meters and I notice my wheel is wobbly. Oh no, flat tire.

It's not my first flat, so no big deal. I get some soap and some water and get to finding the hole. But I just can't find it. I take some more water and soap, but again, nothing to be found.

Luckily a guy on a scooter passes and stops to ask what's wrong. I explain him, and he tells me to follow him, as he's working at a building site and they have an air compressor. His colleagues were super friendly, offering me ice cold water which was welcome as I wasted all my water trying to find the hole in my tire.

We blow up the tire, trying to locate the hole, but we can't. After five minutes my tire is flat again.

He tells me the only option is to go to the mechanic in the nearby village, 9 kilometers from there. I have no other option and he tells me to follow him to the mechanic. Again, the friendliness of Iranians to help people in need is unmatched in this world.

We get to the mechanic, and he manages to find the puncture and fixes it.

The guy who helped me and I get back to the place we first met, we say our goodbyes, and I'm finally ready to cross the border to Iraq. Mind you, at this point it's still only 7:30 am.

I get to the border, some border agent takes my passport and documents and tells me to wait. After 45 minutes he returns and tells me I can't cross the border today, as they only allow Iranian and Iraqi vehicles here, no international vehicles.

He suggests I go to the border near Basrah, 180 kilometers south of this border. I have no other option and leave to go that border.

The weather is excruciating at this point, I'm sweating like a pig. I'm driving on some desolate highway that was just 100 kilometers straight on without any gas station or shop. I was getting severely dehydrated. Really not my favorite part of the trip.

Around midday I get at the Basrah border, and I immediately buy some ice cold water.

Borders are always a scary place, because they're very bureaucratic and most of the time border guards don't care to explain you what you have to do.

Of all the borders I crossed, this one was the worst.

First I had to exit Iran, then I entered no man's land (where's I'm officially outside of Iran but still not inside Iraq) and then enter Iraq.

The customs agent who helped me clear my motorcycle told me I had to leave my motorcycle with him and I had to get my visa stamped to exit Iran. I explained to the guy at the booth that the customs agent told me to get my passport stamped here and return, but it wasn't possible as I was officially outside of Iran. But my motorcycle was still inside Iran of course.

I don't know if they never had that situation before or it was a collaborate prank on me, but it was such a weird experience. Nobody knew what to do.

In the end they sent three soldiers of the Iranian guard with me to go back to the customs office, get my motorcycle documents, and then they escorted me out of Iran to no man's land zone.

Now I had to enter Iraq. It was a kafkaesque nightmare. They sent me from one office to the other. Then to another one, and another, and another and then back to the first one.

It was one big mess.

Finally after 4 hours of walking around the border zone, I got the right stamps and I was ready to go to my hotel in Basrah.

I mounted my motorcycle, and drove off. But no..

I drove for 10 meters and I notice my wheel is wobbly. Again. Oh no, flat tire. Again.

Luckily I have tubeless tires. I couldn't find the puncture again, so instead of trying to fix it, I just inflated my tires, drove for a kilometer or two, stopped, inflated them some more. The whole 20 kilometers to Basrah I drove like that.

I was planning to stay in Basrah for one night only, but I got stuck in storm. Proper storms too with lightning and hail. I ended up staying in Basrah for three night instead, which meant unfortunately that I had to skip visiting the Iraqi marshes.

I drove from Basrah to Nasiriyah, to Najaf, Karbala, and Baghdad.

I was down to my last pack of polaroid film too. There were two Iraqi places I really wanted to have a memory of:

The ancient cities of Ur and Uruk.

Ur is famous for its Ziggurat. I also took the time to add both of them to Google Street View. Most of Ur was closed off for the public, but Uruk was an amazing experience. It's a desolate archeological site in the middle of the desert, that's only been uncovered for 5%, because it's so desolate and lack of funding, and of course the instability of the region.

When you arrive at Uruk you get appointed a military guide who shows you around and makes sure you don't take any historical souvenirs with you. Because it's all just laying around there. You see shards of pottery everywhere, broken off parts of Sumerian tablets just laying around you in the sand. It's a really special experience.

Also, can you guess who added these old civilisations to Google Street View?

Here is a reel of me streetviewing Ur and giving the guard of Ur a nice souvenir, and here's a reel of me walking around Uruk.

Uruk is also the city of Gilgamesh, famous from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories we have. There's a great translation by Sophus Helle, which I took with me on my travels. The epic of Gilgamesh has really everything: love, hate, friendship, adventure, life lessons, and more. It's at least six thousand years old and even mentions the ancient floods, which are the same as the floods of Noah in the bible. It felt really special to be there in Uruk, the city state Gilgamesh ruled.

Baghdad was such a nice experience too. It's actually really modern, with great coffee bars and a lot of historical places. It's not really walkable apart from some parts around the Tigris. The Green zone was really special to visit too, it's where all the embassies and government buildings are. It has some amazing museums as well, and is more touristy than you'd expect.

From Baghdad I went to Erbil, then to Mosul and then back to Turkiye.

As soon as I got back to Turkiye I had a decision to make. I had to be home by a certain date, so I could either take my time in Turkiye, and from there speedrun my way back home. Or, I could speedrun Turkiye and go hunting for Soviet mosaics in Eastern Europe.

Easy choice if you ask me.

My last polaroid of part one of my trip is this one, taken while wild camping near the lake of Adana, Turkiye

I speedran towards Istanbul, drove over the Bosphorus with Bonnie, which was a very special feeling.

I stayed in Istanbul for two night, and just took my laptop to a nice tea house and planned the next part of my trip. And lo and behold I even found some Polaroid film in Istanbul.

From Istanbul I drove towards the Black sea to Burgas and Varna in Bulgaria, and Constanta in Romania. I didn't really visit anything here, but was just having so much fun again driving through these rural areas. From Romania I drove to Cahul, Moldavia.

Look at these beautiful mosaics!

I also noticed that Cahul was not at all what I expected from a Moldovian city. It might be prejudice, but I expected Moldovian cities to be gray and boring, but Cahul seemd green, and lively and full of people, and walkable.

Maybe Cahul was the exception to the rule and Chisinau was going to be the gray, boring, Soviet brutalist city I expected?

Honestly, the road from Cahul to Chisinau was not good. But being from Belgium, I feel I'm not supposed to complain about the road quality of another country.

Chisinau was nothing like I expected it to be. It's so walkable and clean. The covered market near the bus station feels really old fashioned, but then two streets from that you have just your average modern shopping street. You have amazing buildings everywhere that look straight from the historical centers of Vienna or Paris.

It's a beautiful mix of old and new, beautiful brutalist buildings like the Cosmos hotels or your typical Soviet apartment building and then modern parks with modern buildings and nice Parisian style coffee bars.

I also noticed that Chisinau and Moldova in general felt really safe.

Because of the war in Ukraine, there are also a lot of Ukrainians in Moldova. I met some of them, and they told me that the east of Ukraine is actually very safe right now, and that the war mostly takes place in the eastern regions.

Combine that with finding a book about Soviet mosaics in Ukraine, I knew I was going to take another little detour.

After a four day stay in Chisinau I left for Ukraine.

In the north of Moldova I came across this: an old Soviet monument for WW2 soldiers, and a stork's nest on top of it. I don't know if it's symbolic or anything, but it was such a nice scene.

From Moldova I drove towards Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk towards Lviv.

This was the last mosaic I saw in Ukraine, in the city of Lutsk. Funny that it shows a motorcycle!

After working a week remotely from Lviv it was time to drive towards Warsaw. In Warsaw I worked for another week remotely before making it back to Belgium.

A collection of the Polaroids I took on my road trip with my Bonneville T120 in 2023.

🚩My red flag is that 90% of the time I forget I have my Polaroid with me, and when I do remember it I take three similar photos of the same subject.

Odyssey 2023

September 2023

This was my first bigger multi-country road trip, in a very limited amount of time.

I first went to Italy, to get the ferry from Venice to Greece.

Then from Greece I drove all the way north to Warsaw, and then drove back home.

Flags collected:

🇩🇪 🇦🇹 🇮🇹 🇬🇷 🇦🇱 🇲🇪 🇧🇦🇭🇷 🇭🇺 🇸🇰 🇵🇱

Greece

Albania

Somewhere in the north of Albania I took a break because Google Maps was sending me through those mountains you see behind me, and those clouds did not look friendly at all.

A German group of motorcyclists stopped, we chatted a bit and then I asked one of them to take this photograph of me.

We drove together for a bit, and passed the border to Montenegro together. A bit later we said goodbye, as I was going to Podgorica and they were continuing on to Kotor.

Montenegro

The weather in Montenegro luckily got much better.

Bosnia & Herzegovina

One of my favorite U2 songs (it's technically not even a U2 song, but anyway), is Miss Sarajevo. I decided to stay a few days in Sarajevo to really absorb the city.

The city were WW1 basically started breathes culture and history. I had a really great time there, wandering about and meeting people.

Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia

From Bosnia & Herzegovina, I drove through the west of Croatia, towards Budapest, Hungary. From there I drove to the west of Slovakia towards Tatra National Park in Hungary & Poland

Driving through those little villages in Eastern Europe is such a nice experience. People are super friendly, curious about why you "chose" their village to ride through, and while Google Translate had to work overtime, it was very nice to connect with these fellow Europeans.

Poland

I decided to stay in Krakow for a few nights, and use one day to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Germany

The last polaroid of the trip, Bonnie in front of the Brandenburger Tor, Berlin.

A week ago I had to sign a PDF into .asice, and it was hell. My Belgian id card didn't seem to be able to sign in CAdES/PAdES/XAdES or whatever *AdES format.

But after a lot of trial and error I got it working with my Belgian ID card.

Here I'm going to explain to you how I did it. Just to be clear, I got it working with a BELGIAN ID card, on a Macbook. If you have an ID card from another country and/or Windows, it will work so too, but you're going to have to figure some things out on your own (mainly in step 3)

First I'm going to explain how to sign a PDF with CAdES with a Belgian ID card on a Mac, and below I'll explain what you need to figure out if you have an ID card from another country. You can skip the next part if you don't have a Belgian ID card but still want to sign a PDF into ASICE.

If you have a Belgian ID card but you're on Windows, step 3 will be different for you.

What you'll need:

• a card reader
• your ID card and your PIN code
• Belgian eID software: https://eid.belgium.be/en
• Belgian eID viewer to verify if everything works. Download it from the same link above
• Disig Web Signer: https://www.disig.sk/en/products/enterprise-solutions/disig-web-signer/
  Benodigdheden:
• Disig QES portal: https://qesportal.eu/Portal/en

Step 1 - Reading your Belgian ID card

Install all the software and restart your Mac

Then when you connect your card reader with your Mac, insert your ID card and open the eID viewer, you should see this:

And then after everything is read, you should see your ID card information in the "identity" tab. If this doesn't work, please try another laptop and/or another card reader. On an old Intel Macbook it works 100% of the time, but on a newer M2 Macbook half of the time it works every time)

The most important part to sign CAdES is the certificates. Go to the certificates tab of the eID viewer. You should see this:

If you don't see any certificates or the Citizen CA certificate is missing, you'll have to make an appointment with your municipality (gemeenteloket) to put some new certificates on your ID card. You DON'T need a new ID card. They can reinstall the certificates on your ID card in five minutes.

Guess how I know)

If you can correctly read your ID card and your certificates, you're ready for step 2.

Step 2: Signing the PDF

With Disig Web Signer installed, go to https://qesportal.eu/Portal/en

If you open Disig Web Signer, it's normal that you don't see any window open. It will automatically later.

On the QES portal, first change the language to English in the top right, that's handier. Then select the document you want to sign. It can basically be any type of document. It will be encapsulated in the .cades document, which works as a container around your original document.

For example, I'm going to sign my memoji, but you'll probably want to sign some super important PDF)

Click "Sign" and it will then process the request. It might take a while (30 seconds) or longer, depending on how large the document is.

If everything goes well, it opens Disig Web Signer and you can see or read your document, like this:

Click "Sign" in the top right.

Step 3: Selecting the right certificate store

If you're on Windows or you use an ID card from a different country, this is where our paths divert. You will see a popup like this to select the store:

In my case, I also installed the Slovakian eID klient, to see if it worked with that. That is why the Slovak national identity card is pre-filled in, but it won't work with your Belgian ID card. So it's totally normal if you only see "Define custom store". Click on it. A finder window will open

For Mac, the store is located here:

/Library/Belgium Identity Card/Pkcs11/beid-pkcs11.bundle/Contents/MacOS/libbeidpkcs11.dylib

For Windows, the store is supposedly located here (according to this documentation here)

C:/Windows/System32/beidpkcs11.dll

For Windows I have not verified if it works like this. If you are on Windows, can you let me know by emailing me on hello@vandevliet.me? I helped you by taking the time to write this blog, please help the people after you by letting me know if it works or doesn't.

If you use an ID card from a different country, this file will obviously not be in the folder 'Belgium Identity Card'. I'd suggest looking through the documentation of your government. Look for something like this on Google:

PKCS11 + your country + id card

Or just ask ChatGPT)

Let's continue!

If you're on Mac, you're going to browse to the root of your hard disk, it should look like this:

I checked on multiple Macs, and they're all called Macintosh HD. Hopefully for you it's the same.

You should see this:

Go to Library > Belgium Identity Card > Pkcs11

On my Mac it looks like this:

Select the libbeidpkcs11.dylib. That's the one I used, and hopefully it works for you too. If it doesn't, try it with another one and please let me know so I can update this guide! My email is down below)

Click the refresh button behind the store, it will then load all the certificates.

If everything went well, you can select the Citizen CA certificate from your ID card:

Then you can continue by entering your PIN code.

You'll get redirected back to QES in your browser

There you can validate the signed document:

And here's the ASICE container if you want to sign or validate it yourself. Don't worry, there's no hidden contract hidden in the image or something.

Congratulations you successfully signed a PDF into asice (CAdES) with your Belgian identity card!

I tried everything, signing it with Acrobat, trying dokobit, creating a Mobile-ID, nothing worked. This was the only way I got it working. If you found another way to sign it, you can always let me know, my email is below!

If it didn't work, you can email me too, but I don't know if I'll be of much assistance. I'd say, try a different browser (I used Chrome, try Firefox or Safari), a different laptop or a different card reader. I'm not joking, I have two card readers, it works with one of them (with the other one the eID viewer stays empty). On a newer M2 Macbook Pro it only sometimes recognizes the card reader, on an older MBP it only works all the time with the other card reader.

Questions, remarks, love letters, feel free to send them to hello@vandevliet.me. Documents you sent me have to be in .asice format signed with CAdES of course)

If you'd like to beta test Grafiki for iOS, sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YD1eI-gh25_pnZX5DkvBGKS9yPPPYsy9EdLpJCKwlP0/edit

Open blog about building Grafiki. Writing helps me clear my head and solve obstacles I come across. These blogposts might not make sense for you to read, but for me they help me to clear the fog in my head.

25 November 2023

13:33 - Writing this blogpost so I have a link to use in my Quora ads. I used Adobe Firefly to create an image of a mandril with a sunset in the background. That's the image you can find at the top of this page.

14:12 - Just created test ads for Pinterest, Quora, Snap, and LinkedIn. It's crazy how fast you can do that these days. Just add a headline, body, image and a link. Select some people to target, add your credit card and done. Quora and LinkedIn review seem to take at least 24 hours, especially in the weekend, but Snap and Pinterest went live fast. These are not the best ads and are actually not meant to bring in users. I just need some test data in my own ad accounts, so when I actually use the APIs I get some proper data back instead of zeroes everywhere.

14:17 - Updated blogpost. I added the Quora API recently already to the backend. Now gonna start with Pinterest.

I basically have two Graphql endpoints: a getSubstructures endpoint and an analytics endpoint. The analytics endpoint is for later, because I'll need to study the different APIs more.

The getSubstructures endpoint allows me to - as the name suggests - get the substructures for an entity. For example you have a LinkedIn campaign group with ID 1234, I can use the endpoint in the app to fetch all the substructures for that campaign group, which are campaigns. Other ad networks don't have campaign groups, but instead use campaigns at that level.

I want as little logic in the app as possible, everything should be very dynamic. It's up to the backend to do the heavy lifting and give the data back as uniform as possible. I don't want to have logic like this in the app:

if (adNetwork == 'Linkedin') {
	header = 'Campaign'
} else if (adNetwork == 'Pinterest') {
    header = 'Ad Group'
} else if (adNetwork == 'Snap') {
    header = 'Ad Squad'
}
// ... etc

15:51 - Back after a little Duolingo intermezzo. If you want to connect on Duolingo, add me: GMJelle. Now back to Pinterest ads API.

Just noticed that LinkedIn already spent 6 euros for 54 website clicks. Pretty good result actually! If you're reading this through LinkedIn (or any other ad), you can sign up here to betatest the app soon: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YD1eI-gh25_pnZX5DkvBGKS9yPPPYsy9EdLpJCKwlP0/edit

Snap ad was not yet approved, the Quora ad was delivering but no clicks yet.

With Quora ads you basically get both analytics and entity details in one API call. Pinterest is gonna make me do two calls, one for the analytics, and another one to get the entity details like the name (of the ad group for example). Don't like it but it is what it is.

Pinterest API does not allow me to get analytics for all Ad Accounts in 1 call, unlike with campaigns and ad groups. So won't bother showing Analytics data for Ad Accounts, as it will result in an n+1 problem.

16:29 - coffee time!

16:33 - back at the desk. I'm having a bit of trouble staying focused because I try to keep it as dynamic as possible. The names across all APIs are different, with the only similarity being that the lowest level is called Ad across all networks. The level above can be called Ad Squad, Ad Set, Ad Group, etc. So instead of calling the lowest level "Ad", and the second level "Ad Squad/Set/Group", I decided to just count my way up:

Level 0: Ads
Level 1: Ad set/group/squad or Campaign (looking at you LinkedIn!)
Level 2: Campaign or Campaign Group
Level 3: (Ad) Account
Level 4: Organization, Business account, or User

It just makes it a bit difficult and abstract to think: If I want the substructure of Level 3 of Pinterest, what am I fetching? Answer: Campaigns

I have a table in Notion mapping all entities, but still, I lose my train of thoughts sometimes.

17:44 - Ordered food, it's here in 6 minutes. Then gonna eat, play chess and afterwards continue. It's going slow, but it's going.

18:42 - Let's get back to the matter at hand: Pinterest Ads API!

20:52 - I don't really like the code I wrote but it works. It's pretty abstract and I don't like the fact that it's possible for the Pinterest Ads API to return no analytics data at all for e.g. a campaign if it has no data. Instead of giving zeroes back, it just doesn't return anything. But I still want to have zeroes in the data I send towards the client, so I need to fill those up.

21:22 - Okay the above example was actually easily solved. But still!!1! Not easy to do all this dynamically and clean. This is not an excuse for my bad coding skills (it is).

26 November 2023

00:32 - Pinterest is now completely done. There was a little issue with the filtering, but that is solved now. Hooray for TDD! Now I'm gonna prepare the LinkedIn API for tomorrow. I'm reading through the docs, see how the structures are built and then add some API requests in Bruno (a Postman alternative)

13:48 - Had breakfast, did my mobility exercises an took a nice shower. Then did some Duolingo and played chess, and I'm ready to continue this little wrestle with the LinkedIn API. But first... coffee!

18:39 - That will be it for this weekend. The LinkedIn API is pretty odd, and I keep getting 400 status errors, even when executing Postman requests they provide or by using cURL requests I copy-paste from the docs. Hopefully I can make some progress this week.

23:59 - I was really tired around 22:30, but got a sudden burst of energy. I put on some candles and am sitting behind my desk, going to get the LinkedIn API to work. Not gonna spend hours on it obviously, but it would be nice knowing what goes wrong with the analytics calls.

27 November 2023

00:31 - Holy shit is the LinkedIn API one big mess. I see API examples online for calls to:

https://api.linkedin.com/v2/...

and

https://api.linkedin.com/rest/...

And then you have the Linkedin-version header you have to add, but also a X-Restli-Protocol-Version.

And if you want to use the v2 endpoint, this example from 1 year ago says that instead of using adAccounts you have to use adAccountsV2. But there's nothing on the official LinkedIn marketing documentation website to be found about the V2 suffix.

And then you have the Postman collections you can use (which use the /rest/ path, so I assume that one is the correct one). However, those requests give back errors about missing parameters.

28 November 2023

19:00 - Finished work and dinner. Going to try to untangle the LinkedIn Analytics API one more time. Let's hope I get it to work today!

22:11 - Literally did nothing. The Sinquefield cup (chess) started so I've been watching that on YouTube.

2 December 2023

00:30 - Gonna map the Snap API in Bruno and then go to bed.

3 December 2023

19:51 - Went out with family to celebrate my birthday. Came home, took some time to wind down and eat something. I'm now in my lounge chair with a crackling candle and a cup of hot tea next to me, while some lo fi beats are playing on the TV. Let's see if I can finish writing tests for the LinkedIn API today and maybe implement the substructures endpoint as well!?

9 December 2023

18:32 - It's been a while. I kinda forgot about updating this blogpost to be honest.
So where are we? How have you been? All good?

I've been working since noon today. A couple of days ago I found an amazingly clean way to transform the API requests from the ad networks into a uniform API request for the Grafiki API: Pandas!

I load it all into one or two dataframes, merge them, clean everything up and then just .iterrows() factory the rows into dataclasses and tada! No more for loops, checking if keys are in the response, etc. I transformed around 150 lines of pretty complex manual code into 24 lines of Pandas magic for the Snap and Quora API. To see what transformations I have to do I have a Jupyter Notebook per platform, the API mock ad network requests and the result the results the Grafiki internal API should return. TDD!!!

So I'm going to continue transferring the other platforms to this Pandas way. And then the API to get the substructures is done. It didn't go as fast as I want, I got some trouble focussing and staying motivated. Especially after work I don't have the energy left to work on this. That's why the weekends are for hustling.

I'm gonna order food now and I'll give you an update in a couple of hours. Talk to you later!

20:36 - Took a little break and updated my blog to Ghost V5. Woohoo inline code!. And emoji search when typing a colon 😁. Just what I needed to keep you all up to date. Be prepared for a ton more emojis from now on! But for now... back to business! 💼👨‍💻🏢

22:40 - Listening Lofi & Chess.com's chill beats. I feel I'm super focused, it's going great. Snap and Quora are using the Pandas way of working and it's so much fun and so easy to work with. Right now I'm gonna map the Pinterest API!

10 December 2023

02:23 - The LinkedIn API is a pain in the... Let me show you what I mean.

So first of all, they have this new way of filtering things throught the API. Imagine you have an API, and you want to fetch the ads from the campaigns with ID urn:li:23 and urn:li:456, and you want no test_data and you want to order everything by ID. Normally it would look something like this:

https://myapi.com?campaign_ids=urn:li:123,urn:li:456&test_data=false&order_by=id

Makes sense, right?

Now the new LinkedIn API wants you to send your query like this:

https://api.linkedin.com/rest/adAccounts/XYZ/adCampaigns?q=search&search=(test:false,campaigns:(values:List(urn:li:123,urn:li:456)))&sort=(field:ID,order:DESCENDING)

Which looks clean, but it works like shit. Because it gets urlencoded into this by for example Postman and Python's requests:

https://api.linkedin.com/rest/adAccounts/XYZ/adCampaigns?q=search&search=%28test%3Afalse%2Ccampaigns%3A%28values%3AList%28li%3A123%2Curn%3Ali%3A456%29%29%29%0&sort=%0A%28field%3AID%2Corder%3ADESCENDING%29

And the API of LinkedIn can't handle the different kinds of colons: the first colon after 'test' acts like an equal sign (=), but then you have colons in the IDs (urn:li:123) and then it thinks the colons also act like equal signs.

Anyway, it's getting late, let's this dev session with a rant, and go to bed. Goodnight! Dobranoc!

14:42 - Alright! Are you ready to delve in the mysterious LinkedIn API with its many traps and odd characteristics? Want to join me and discover all ins and outs of it, every little bit, so we can finally leave this part of Grafiki behind us? If you said yes, then fasten your seatbelt, and get ready. The road is gonna be bumpy but rewarding. Vamos!

21:56 - Just a heads up for all API developers. If your examples on your documentation pages don't work, you messed up. Yes, I'm (still) looking at you LinkedIn!

Ok, this took me a while to figure out. Let's keep it short and to the point:

How  you add a custom domain to App Runner in 5 steps

1. Move the DNS of your domain to Route 53. Yes, I tried it with Cloudflare but I didn't get it to work.
2. Go to your App Runner service and go to the tab custom domains. Enter your domain name in the popup: e.g. grafiki.cc.
3. You will see a table with DNS records you have to create. The certificate validation records are CNAME records, the DNS target i an A-record that you can point to an ALIAS.

4. The CNAME records are easy to set up, to add the DNS target, this is what it should look like:

a) Check that record type is A

b) Check "Alias"

c) We want to alias an AppRunner service, and then in the dropdown below check your region. The choose your app on AppRunner.

5. Now you have to wait till the certificates from ACM are validated. In my case this took 4 hours.

Alright, let's keep it short. I normally use BitBucket, but had to make a few changes to a Github git repo.

So I did the changes, added everything, wrote a poem of a  commit message, wrote git push in the terminal and then pressed enter.

ERROR!

remote: Support for password authentication was removed on August 13, 2021. Please use a personal access token instead.
remote: Please see https://github.blog/2020-12-15-token-authentication-requirements-for-git-operations/ for more information.

And while the blogpost is a helpful guide on helping you generate an access token, it doesn't tell you what to do with it.

How to use your Github Personal Access Token on Mac OSX

1. Open Keychain Access
2. Search for "github"
3. If you have multiple entries, for me the github.com internet password on the login keychain (not iCloud keychain) entry was the one. Double click on it
4. Click on the checkbox next to Show password:
5. Enter your Mac User password.
6. Replace the password of your git account that you see there with your Personal Access Token.
7. You can now push all those magnificent code changes again in the terminal.

Why is this necessary?

Before Github worked with personal access tokens, you entered your password. And so you entered your Github password in every application that worked with Github: the Github CLI, maybe a git plugin for Pycharm/Webstorm/VS Code, the Github GUI, etc. And as every application has basically full control over your Github account, it can delete repos, read pgp keys, etc. That's not very secure.

By using personal access tokens you can create an access token for every application that requires you to be authenticated. So this way you can create a PAT (Personal Access Token) for the Github CLI, another one for Pycharm, etc. You can also set the scopes for every PAT. That way you can give only the applications you fully trust pgp key read access for example.

I hope this little guide helped you!

Jelle

I thought it would be fun to create an overview of my best chess games here.

These are not the highest level games you've ever seen, but they've either made me cheer like I just won the Candidates tournament or tilt like I lost my life savings at roulette. Who says chess is boring?

Two Brilliants in a row

Never surrender

The first game gave me the idea to create an overview like this. It's weird that in some games I have the feeling that I'm not playing that well and end up with a 95% accuracy, and in other games I feel like Magnus and I got a 32% accuracy.

In this game I was clearly the worst player of the two for the biggest part of the game. However one mistake (it's not even a blunder according to the engine) by my opponent under time pressure made me come back.

It's like Eric Rosen says: never resign. Always go for dirty stalemates, and before you know it, your opponent might blunder a queen and you win the game.

Accuracy rules

This game was my 2nd game in the Daily Blitz (5+0) Tournament on Lichess. After resigning the first game against a higher ranked player, I was paired with a player that was rated 1403, around 330 rating points lower than I. So I had no other option than to berserk, which made it a 2.5+0 game for me, but I would get double points.

I was hoping to get a Sicilian Dragon, an opening I've been studying for the last couple of weeks and I'm enjoying more and more, but we get a Bowdler.

The rest of this game was nothing special, but it's not often that Lichess says you have 0 accuracies, 0 mistakes and 0 blunders! I entered the pgn on Chess.com and I played at 93.2 accuracy.

As I explained in my post "On Making Price Trackers", I prefer to only make a price tracker for a shop if it has an API for me. And luckily, Walmart has one, so I decided to build Waltrack.net, the first free Walmart Price Tracker.

However, the road from making my Walmart developer account to actually making my first API call was a bumpy one. The API requires you to create a keypair and use the secret key to sign the request. Something I haven't done before.

Luckily I managed to get it working and hopefully with this blogpost you won't have to spend as much time figuring things out as I did.

Assuming you already have your Walmart.io developer account, the first step is to create an application and create an RSA keypair.

Walmart's guide on this is solid, so you can just follow it.

When you copy-and-pasted the public key to the upload page on Walmart.io you are ready to make your first API call

Making your first API call to Walmart.io

If you want to comment on this code, you can do so on the Github Gist I created.

import NodeRSA from "node-rsa";

const keyData = {
    consumerId: "CONSUMER_ID",
    privateKey: `-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MY PRIVATE KEY
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----`,
  keyVer: 1,
  impactId: "YOUR IMPACT AFFILIATE ID" // not required
},
    
    
const generateWalmartHeaders = () => {
  const { privateKey, consumerId, keyVer } = keyData;
  const hashList = {
    "WM_CONSUMER.ID": consumerId,
    "WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP": Date.now().toString(),
    "WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION": keyVer,
  };

  const sortedHashString = `${hashList["WM_CONSUMER.ID"]}\n${hashList["WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP"]}\n${hashList["WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION"]}\n`;
  const signer = new NodeRSA(privateKey, "pkcs1");
  const signature = signer.sign(sortedHashString);
  const signature_enc = signature.toString("base64");

  return {
    "WM_SEC.AUTH_SIGNATURE": signature_enc,
    "WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP": hashList["WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP"],
    "WM_CONSUMER.ID": hashList["WM_CONSUMER.ID"],
    "WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION": hashList["WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION"],
  };
};



export const getProductById = async (productId) => {
  const options = {
    method: "GET",
    headers: generateWalmartHeaders(),
  };

  const res = await fetch(
    `https://developer.api.walmart.com/api-proxy/service/affil/product/v2/items/${productId}?publisherId=${keyData.impactId}`,
    options
  );
  
  return await res.json()
};

Note: If you get an error saying thate node-rsa Expected 0x2: got 0x30, you can try to convert your key. I am not that proficient with SSL/RSA and keys and all that, but using this tool to transform my PKCS#8 to PKCS#1 did the trick.

Also make sure you don't have any wrong indentation.

This will work:

const keyData = {
    consumerId: "CONSUMER_ID",
    privateKey: `-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
MY PRIVATE KEY
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----`,
  keyVer: 1,
  impactId: "YOUR IMPACT AFFILIATE ID" // not required
},
    

This won't work:

const keyData = {
    consumerId: "CONSUMER_ID",
    privateKey: `-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
                 MY PRIVATE KEY
                 -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----`,
  keyVer: 1,
  impactId: "YOUR IMPACT AFFILIATE ID" // not required
},
    

This won't work either:

const keyData = {
    consumerId: "CONSUMER_ID",
    privateKey: `-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----MY PRIVATE KEY-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----`,
  keyVer: 1,
  impactId: "YOUR IMPACT AFFILIATE ID" // not required
},
    

Explaining how to make Walmart API Headers

const generateWalmartHeaders = () => {
  const { privateKey, consumerId, keyVer } = keyData;
  const hashList = {
    "WM_CONSUMER.ID": consumerId,
    "WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP": Date.now().toString(),
    "WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION": keyVer,
  };

  const sortedHashString = `${hashList["WM_CONSUMER.ID"]}\n${hashList["WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP"]}\n${hashList["WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION"]}\n`;
  const signer = new NodeRSA(privateKey, "pkcs1");
  const signature = signer.sign(sortedHashString);
  const signature_enc = signature.toString("base64");

  return {
    "WM_SEC.AUTH_SIGNATURE": signature_enc,
    "WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP": hashList["WM_CONSUMER.INTIMESTAMP"],
    "WM_CONSUMER.ID": hashList["WM_CONSUMER.ID"],
    "WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION": hashList["WM_SEC.KEY_VERSION"],
  };
};

To create the headers we need 4 things:

1. The private key
2. The Consumer ID from the Walmart IO Dashboard
3. The Key Version, also from the Walmart IO Dashboard (see screenshot below)
4. A NodeJS library to read and sign the private key – I used node-rsa ( yarn add node-rsa )

Basically what you have to do with the headers is concatenate the Consumer ID, the Timestamp and the Key Version with new lines between them.

Then sign that string with your private key and convert it to base64. Then append this base64 string in the headers, so Walmart on their side can check with the public key you uploaded before if it's actually you. It's kinda how SSL certificates work as well.

That's in a nutshell how to create API calls to the WalmartIO API. All in all it's not that hard, but it's kinda unusual to use a secret key to sign an API request.

For any questions or problems you run into, you can comment on the Github gist here.

Happy Walmart API hacking!

Jelle

For my Aliexpress price tracker, AliWatcher, I wanted to implement the AliExpress API to not be solely dependant on datafeeds for the product data. With the API I can search product, fetch product information, get product recommendations, and more. Good stuff!

However, it took me some figuring out to get things working. The docs are mostly in Chinese (but readable/understandable with Google Translate), the signing of the API call was not 100% clear to me and the SDK was download only (no official NPM package).

So let's see how I managed to get it working, for example to get recommendations (as you can see in the bottom of any product on AliWatcher).

If you're having trouble to manage to get it working but you already made an account, you can just copy this code. Below the code I explain how to make a developer account, and go through the code line by line.

Code Sample

With this code sample you can fetch product detail of a product on AliExpress by ID. You can find the ID of a product in the URL, e.g https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000669887458.html

I put the code in this blogpost as a Github gist here: How to make an API request to the AliExpress Affiliate API

If you have any questions about the code, feel free to comment on the gist!

import crypto from "crypto"; 
import dayjs from "dayjs";
import utc from "dayjs/plugin/utc";
import timezone from "dayjs/plugin/timezone";

dayjs.extend(utc);
dayjs.extend(timezone);

const API_URL = "http://gw.api.taobao.com/router/rest";
const API_SECRET = "FIND THIS IN THE AE CONSOLE";
const API_KEY = "FIND THIS IN THE AE CONSOLE";

const hash = (method, s, format) => {
  const sum = crypto.createHash(method);
  const isBuffer = Buffer.isBuffer(s);
  if (!isBuffer && typeof s === "object") {
    s = JSON.stringify(sortObject(s));
  }
  sum.update(s, "utf8");
  return sum.digest(format || "hex");
};

const sortObject = (obj) => {
  return Object.keys(obj)
    .sort()
    .reduce(function (result, key) {
      result[key] = obj[key];
      return result;
    }, {});
};


const signRequest = (parameters) => {
  const sortedParams = sortObject(parameters);
  const sortedString = Object.keys(sortedParams).reduce((acc, objKey) => {
    return `${acc}${objKey}${sortedParams[objKey]}`;
  }, "");

  const bookstandString = `${API_SECRET}${sortedString}${API_SECRET}`;
  const signedString = hash("md5", bookstandString, "hex");
  return signedString.toUpperCase();
};


export const getProductById = async (productId: string) => {
  
  const timestamp = dayjs().tz("Asia/Shanghai").format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss");

  const payload = {
    method: "aliexpress.affiliate.productdetail.get",
    app_key: API_KEY,
    sign_method: "md5",
    timestamp,
    format: "json",
    v: "2.0",
    product_ids: productId,
    target_currency: "USD",
    target_language: "EN",
  };

  const sign = signRequest(payload);

  const allParams = {
    ...payload,
    sign,
  };

  const res = await fetch(API_URL, {
    method: "POST",
    headers: {
      "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=utf-8",
    },
    body: new URLSearchParams(allParams),
  });
  
  return await res.json()
}

Making an AliExpress Affiliate App

When you've created a developer account on AliExpress' developer platform you can go to the console. Remember, Google Translate is your friend if you don't speak any Chinese.

If you are redirected through Taobao.com, that's completely fine. I found that AliExpress and Taobao are really interwoven. Example of this in the code snippet above: to fetch product details from AliExpress we have to send an api request to the Taobao API.

When you're in the console you can create an app. The first thing required is to select the app type. For this we want the "Affiliates API".

When you created the app and click on it, you'll see the App Key and the App Secret. Those two you need to make calls to the AliExpress API.

To get access to the hot products query and the smart match api, you will need to obtain extra API permissions. The Standard API for Publishers is "gained" by default.

Making your first API call

The main docs for the AliExpress affiliate API can be found here.

These are (in my opinion) the most handy API endpoints:

Signing your API

const signRequest = (parameters) => {
  const sortedParams = sortObject(parameters);
  const sortedString = Object.keys(sortedParams).reduce((acc, objKey) => {
    return `${acc}${objKey}${sortedParams[objKey]}`;
  }, "");

  const bookstandString = `${API_SECRET}${sortedString}${API_SECRET}`;
  const signedString = hash("md5", bookstandString, "hex");
  return signedString.toUpperCase();
};

The hardest part of the API was signing the API request. Per the docs here, this is how you sign a request:

1. Check which parameters you need. The ones required are: method, app_key, timestamp (in the right timezone), v, sign_method and sign.
2. Sort all the request parameters, minus the "sign" key.
3. Then make a long string with all those parameters concatenated, just keyvaluekeyvaluekeyvalue
4. As we use the md5 algorithm to encode it, we create a new string where our previously created longstring of parameters is between our secret key, like two bookstands: secret_keylongstringsecret_key
5. Then hash the last string with the md5 algorithm, to hex.
6. This is now the value we send with our params as the sign key in our request
7. Now we send a POST request to the API endpoint (always POST, even if the method looks like a GET, e.g. aliexpress.affiliate.productdetail.get.
8. Make sure the Content-Type in the headers equals to application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=utf-8.
9. With fetch you can set the body as new URLSearchParams(ourParams). If you use something like axios, I assume it's the same but it's better to check the docs to make sure.

Remarks

I use dayjs to create the correct timestamp with the right Timezone. However, you can use any dateformatting library (such as Momentjs) you are comfortable with. Just make sure the timestamp is in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss.

I implemented the md5 hash method by myself, as I didn't get the crypto-js hash method to work. If you're more familiar with crypto-js than I am, feel free to comment how to do that on the github gist I created.

This is how I make API requests with my AliExpress Price Tracker called AliWatcher. With the API you can fetch product info, category information, top selling products, product recommendations and more.

I hope this guide helped you to make API requests.

Keep on hacking!

Jelle

I spent the last 3 days binging The Queen's Gambit on Netflix. It's a drama about an orphan chess prodigy named Beth Harmon and her quest to become the world's greatest chess player.

Spoilers ahead!

In the final episode Beth plays against her arch nemesis, the Soviet chess player Borgov. From the show's Wikipedia, we learn that Garry Kasparov and chess coach Bruce Pandolfini acted as consultants, so that the actual games seem realistic.

Together with Lichess's computer analysis I go over the final game and try to analyze it.  I'm a chess enthusiast, and not very good, so I thought this would be a great way to sharpen my skills and learn a thing or two. I hope you enjoy this analysis from a beginner's perspective.

The Game:

A part of the game was not shown in the show, so I tried to be smart and deduce what happened, and I think I'm not that far off! But more on that later.

Analysis

After researching this game, I found out on Twitter that it was based on a game from 1993. The specific game is Ivanchuk vs Wolff at the 1993 Biel Interzonal. On Chessgames.com you can check it out.

It starts out with Beth playing 1. d4, which makes sense, as it's the start of the Queen's Gambit opener. The complete Queen's Gambit starts with 1. d4 d5 2. c4, which are indeed the next moves. It's remarkable that in all the other games, Beth always played 1. e4.

Borgov then has the option to either accept the gambit by playing 2...dxc4

After 3. e4 Nc6, Beth's center pawn is under a double attack by both the Queen and the Knight. This is why she decided to bring the Bishop into it to defend the center pawn with 4. Be3. Borgov plays 4... Nf6.

Then it's 5. Nc3, again defending the other center pawn on e4, followed by 5...e5, putting the pawn on d4 under more and more stress.

By playing 6. d5, Harmon gains more space in the center, and attacks Borgov's knight which has to move. Borgov plays 6....Ne7. The stockfish engine on Lichess says this is an inaccuracy, as 6...Na5 might've been a better choice it says. Who am I to go against a chess algorithm, but 6...Ne7 seems okay as you still have your knight in the center of the board where it's more dangerous.

Beth replies by capturing the pawn on c4 by playing 6. Bxc4, followed by Borgov repositioning his retreated knight to 7...Ng6

By playing 8. f3, Harmon has a very strong center with the diagonal pawns. Over the next few moves, both players keep developing their pieces: 8...Bd6 9. Qd2 Bd7 10. Nge2.

Borgov plays 10...a6, planning to develop the queen side of the board, planning b5 later on. In anticipation to this, Beth removes her bishop from c4 by playing 11. Bb3, which is indeed followed by 11...b5.

Players continue developing, with a little attack by Elizabeth first: 12. a4 O-O 13. O-O Qe7.

Beth brings her Rook into position by playing 14. Rac1. Borgov brings his Knight to the sides with 14...Nh5. From this point you can see that the tension is building, particularly on the f4 file, with Borgov's 2 knights, the e5 pawn and the bishop.

Harmon strengthens the f4 square by pushing the g2 pawn up with 15. g3 h6. Vasily Borgov continues to build his positioning with this.

This is followed up by 16. Bc2 Rab8 and a simple exchange with 17. axb5 axb5 18 Ra1 Ra8. This quick exchange is fairly normal, followed by Beth's Ra1 move to get control over the A-line, possibly later bringing the rook to a7 where it is defended by the bishop on e3.

According to Stockfish, Vasily's Ra8 move was another small inaccuracy, where Borgov's move was purely intended to block Beth from going Ra7 straight away. Playing 18...Bh3 would most likely result in 19. Rf2 according to Stockfish, but it's not entirely clear to me why. Any suggestions here?

Instead the game continues with 19. Bd3 Bb4, first Harmon putting pressure on the b5 pawn, but Vasily pinning the knight to the queen, thus making it immovable.

Then we get rook captures with 20. Rxa8 Rxa8.

Beth moves her queen to 21. Qc2, thus removing the pin on the knight and now the pawn on b5 is again under attack. Because the queen isn't guarding the bishop on e3 anymore, Borgov plays 21...Bc5. This means that Beth can't go after the b5 pawn anymore because imagine she does: 22. Bb5 Bb5 23. Nb5 Be3, Borgov captures 2 bishops and Beth only gets a bishop and a pawn. So what she needs to do is find a way to defend the bishop on e3. She can't capture the bishop on c5 (22. Bc5, because Borgov will capture it with 22...Qc5, checking Beth and gaining control of the center with the Queen.

Instead, Elizabeth plays 22. Nd1, so she defends the Bishop on e3. The pawn on b5 is not being attacked anymore with the knight gone. Now Borgov either has to move the bishop on c5 to a safe place or go for the trade with 22....Be3. However this is not a good idea, because then Beth brings the Knight on d1 into play with 23. Ne3, and now this knight has a lot of space to move to.

Instead Borgov goes for 22...Bd6, retreating the bishop to a safer place.

Beth's next move, 23. Nf2 is considered another inaccuracy, as Stockfish suggests 23. Nc1. But Nf2 improves the position of the knight so this seems reasonable to me.

Then we get the first really interesting and beautiful move of the game. 23...Nhf4, basically suggesting to Harmon to capture it.

In fact, Lichess' engine suggests that the knight should be captured by 24. gxf4.

The thing is, by doing this you get a whole different game, where white will position itself into a position where it will have to defend, because we have Black's queen and bishops on the right lines to go for the attack then.

Beth not being the defensive kind of player decided to ignore the knight on f4 and plays 24. Rc1, ignoring Borgov's request to go for a trade.

Borgov continues the attack with 24. ...Qg5. Now you can see that Borgov is preparing the attack and also that the bishop on e3 is still a minor problem for Elizabeth. When the black kngith on f4 moves later on, the bishop on e3 is undefended and could be captured by the queen.

The next moves are 25. Kh1 Qh5. Elizabeth doesn't allow Borgov to check her with a Nh3 move. With the Qh5 move Borgov again leaves the knight undefended, but capturing it would be a terrible mistake and an awful play by Elizabeth resulting in a checkmate:

26.gxf4Qxf3+

27.Kg1Nh4

28.Kf1Qg2+

29.Ke1Nf3+

30.Kd1Qf1#

Instead what Elizabeth does is 26. Ng1, and the knight goes for the capture on d3 by 26... Nxd3.

We get a recapture with 27. Nxd3. Borgov then pushed the pawn 27...f5.

Then Harmon puts the pressure on Borgov with 28. Nc5, threatening to capture the bishop on d7. An exchange would not be beneficial to Borgov, so he moves his bishop away to 28...Bc8.

29. Rf1 is for in case the f-file opens up, as it's more valuable there than on the c-file for now. 29...Ne7

The next move, 30. Qd3, moves the pressure back on the pawn. There's not so much Borgov can do, and he goes for the capture with 30...fxe4 31. Nfxe4 Qg6. We get a recapture with the pawn by Beth, and the queen to g6 disallows her to go capture the pawn on b5, as it would ultimately let the pawn on e3 be open for capture by black and letting him gain advantage.

On move 32 both parties improve the position of their kings, with 32. Kg2 Kh7. Especially the white king now has more wiggle room to move around.

33. Nf3 Ng8, is a move by both parties to prepare the attack. On the previous spots the knights were somewhat out of play and you can see that they both want to reposition their knights.

Beth does so by 34. Nh4, attacking the queen. This was an inaccuracy it seems, as statistically h3 was a better move it seems.

Now Borgov wanted to move his knight to f6, but with the attack on the queen he first has to bring her to safety. He does this by playing 34...Qg4.

Beth moves her knight to f5, with 35. Nf5, really positioning it very well in the center with a lot of defenders (pawn, queen, rook). Also by this, the black bishop on c8 is looking rather odd, with no place to go.

We get 35...Nf6 by Borgov, where Stockfish would've added the rook on a8 into play by 35...Ra2

Anyway, so now Beth finally plays the pawn to h3 (36. h3) (which was suggested by Stockfish a little bit earlier). But this time it really adds to the game because it adds more pressure to the queen, thus letting Beth keeping the pressure on Borgov and leaving him in a "responding" state where he constantly has to respond to Beth's moves by moving his queen instead of really playing the moves he wants to play.

This is also the point where Borgov decides to adjourn the game. Fun fact: adjourning is not something that is done anymore in chess, because it can of course be used to analyse the game over the night (with a chess engine like Stockfish). We see in the show that both Borgov and Beth do analyse the game with fellow chess players, which would be a little bit cheating nowadays.

When they resume the play the day after, the move Borgov wrote on the piece of paper was 36...Qg6.

Remember when I told you previously that this game was based on another game that was played in real life? It's actually up to this point the games are the same. But because the real life game ended up in a draw, and that would be a lousy ending for the show, the Beth plays another move.

She goes 37. Ne6,  and Borgov brings his rook into the game with 37...Ra4, going after the e4 pawn, the center of the white position.

Elizabeth plays 38. b3, which is actually such a wonderful move, basically telling Borgov "what you want to do?". The pressure is on Borgov, he can go for the check, capture the e4 pawn with rook or knight, etc.

Borgov decided to capture the central pawn on e4 (38...Rxe4) that's been the foundation of Beth's whole position.

Beth plays 39.Nxd6, essentially going for the future fork, by playing the knight to f8. However Borgov ancticipates this and captures the troublemaker by playing 39...Bxe6.

By doing this, Harmon can advance her pawn, which is exactly what she does with 40.dxe6, but she loses her last knight with 40...cxd6.

She doesn't wait and advances the pawn further, 41. e7, being only one file away from promotion. However as you can see promotion would be useless, because the e8 square is protected by the black knight and queen, so Borgov doesn't have to worry about that - for now. He instead plays 41...d5, so that his rook gets extra protection, as Elizabeth could easily get distract his knight and queen.

It's at this point that Elizabeth starts her ceiling analysis, as at this point she is on her own, and the d5 move is such a powerful move that she needs to consider her next options.

Elizabeth responds by playing the equally beautiful 42. Bc5, preparing the advancement of the white b-pawn and defending the e-pawn on its current spot. Black really doesn't have a lot of possible plays here. Moving the rook is out of the question because white can easily trade queens and capture the knight with the rook in order to promote the pawn.

So black decided to play 42...Qe8.

White plays 43. Qf3, as the pawn on b5 is defended by the queen anyway now.

43...Qc6, to attack the bishop and 44. b4 to defend the bishop.

And then we get the first big mistake of the game. The only correct move would be 44. Kg8, basically waiting for white to see what they're gonna do, but he decides to play 44...Qe8.

It's also around this time Borgov offers a draw which is declined by Beth. And rightfully so.

45. Qf5+ for the check.  

Now Borgov has some options. A possible option would be 45...Kg8, but in a few moves this can lead to this situation which is basically game over for him:

45...Kg8 46.Qe6+ Kh7 47.Rxf6 gxf6 48.Qxf6

Instead he plays 45...Kh8

And here Elizabeth shows how good she is at chess.

This is the current situation:

And she decides to play the wonderful move of 46. Qxf6, sacrificing her queen. We get the expected sequence of 46...gxf6, 47. Rxf6.

Borgov advances his queen to 47...Qh5, assumingly trying to go for the attack with the rook. The expected check with the rook is coming with 48. Rf8+, and black moves the king to 48...Kg7

Elizabeth promotes the pawn to a queen (49, e8=Q).

From this point on it requires some speculation because it's not 100% clear what happened in the meantime.  This is what they showed in the episode.

We can see that the black rook is gone, and the black queen captures the h3 pawn and came down to the second line.

What I assume happened is the following:

49...Re2+

50. Kf1 Qxh3+

51. Kxe2 Kg2+

The only way black can win now is if he can make Elizabeth make a mistake and let her move her king  towards the black pawns. But she decides to block the threat with the rook.

52. Rf2

At this point we have the position where we are in now.

We then get 52...Qe4+, assuming that Borgov was hoping Elizabeth did not see the overwhelming advantage she had and would love to go for some draw instead.

But luckily she kept her cool and slowly played the last move of the game:

53. Kd2

Borgov has no way to attack the white king in any way: either the rook or the bishop blocks it. The only thing left for him to do is to resign and let Beth become the world champion, which he did.

Analysing a game afterwards is fun but also of course a lot easier with a chess engine next to you. There's of course no way I would've lasted than 15 moves against either fictional player 😅.

If you haven't seen the show yet, it's a Netflix original so it will probably be indefinitely on Netflix. However, if you like chess, I must say it's one of the most fun series with chess as the subject I've seen.

Hope you liked this breakdown, and stay safe.

Since the last couple of days, every time I console logged something in my React Native project, the Chrome Developer console would state that it was logged in "instrument.js". As I don't have a file with that name, I decided to look how I could solve this, as getting the correct source file would of course be much handier when debugging.

If you installed Sentry for React Native in your project and got this error, this could be a potential solution for you. If this isn't the case, you can test it maybe with other packages your recently added.

In your Chrome Devtools go to "Settings".

Next, go to "Blackboxing" and add the following pattern:

/@sentry/

Set the behavior to "Blackbox".

Voila, if you now refresh your React Native project you should see the exact JS/TS file where you used console.log().

The reason this happened is because you use Sentry for debugging, and Sentry is picking up the logs. By adding the Sentry package to the blackbox, you tell Chrome to not deep dive into the Sentry package. Blackboxing gives you a first-class way to denote library (or other abstraction) code so that the debugger can route around it. When you blackbox a source file, the debugger will not jump into that file when stepping through code you're debugging.

For Filterlist, my iOS app to discover Instagram filters, I recently implemented Facebook authentication. Apple requires you to also implement Apple Authentication when you use other 3rd party auth providers. I wasted/invested some hours to get it working, and here's what helped.

To be honest, I still haven't managed to get Apple Authentication working inside the Expo client. I always get the following error:

The audience in ID Token [host.exp.Exponent] does not match the expected audience com.vandevliet.XXX.

If anyone has a solution for this error, please let me know, as it would be great to get Apple Authentication working on the simulator or in the Expo client on my physical device.

However, after a ton of building releasing on Testflight, I finally managed to get Apple Auth working with Firebase on React Native.

Just follow the full guide you find in the Expo docs to install everything. It goes smoother than expected. But then when I build my app the first time to distribute it to my testers, they couldn't use Sign in With Apple to authenticate.

The error I always got in Sentry was:

The nonce in ID Token "MY CUSTOM STRING" does not match the SHA256 hash of the raw nonce "MY CUSTOM STRING" in the request.

The trick to solve this error is to sha256 encode the custom string when you pass it as a nonce to the signInAsync method.

This is what the full Apple Authentication Button looks like.

    <AppleAuthentication.AppleAuthenticationButton
      buttonType={AppleAuthentication.AppleAuthenticationButtonType.SIGN_IN}
      buttonStyle={AppleAuthentication.AppleAuthenticationButtonStyle.BLACK}
      onPress={async () => {
        try {
          const credential = await AppleAuthentication.signInAsync({
            requestedScopes: [
              AppleAuthentication.AppleAuthenticationScope.FULL_NAME,
              AppleAuthentication.AppleAuthenticationScope.EMAIL,
            ],
            nonce: sha256("CUSTOM STRING"),
          })

          const authCredential = new firebase.auth.OAuthProvider(
            "apple.com"
          ).credential({
            idToken: credential.identityToken,
            rawNonce: "CUSTOM STRING", // notice this isn't encoded
          })

          try {
            await firebase.auth().signInWithCredential(authCredential)
          } catch (e) {
            Sentry.captureException(e)
          }
          // signed in
        } catch (e) {
          Sentry.captureException(e)
          if (e.code === "ERR_CANCELED") {
            // handle that the user canceled the sign-in flow
          } else {
            // handle other errors
          }
        }
      }}
    />
    ```

The trick is to 256 encode it when you pass it in the signInAsync method, but pass it raw (the keyname "rawNonce" might suggest it) to the OauthProvider credential. To sha-256 the string, I used this package.

And now my Firebase dashboard looks like this 😍

We're in the midst of a lockdown here in Belgium, so I've got plenty of time to work on my side-projects.

One of these side-projects is Filterlist.

Filterlist is an app for iOS that helps you find Instagram filters and filter creators. It's made with React Native and I decided to use a TikTok UI: Simply keep swiping up to discover new filters. It's like a big infinite scrolling interface.

You can download it from the Apple App Store if you have an iPhone.

Instagram makes it very hard, or at least not easy enough IMO, to find cool Instagram filters and their creators. Remember those "Which X are you?" filters from February? The only way you could find one is if you came across one. As a filter creator the only way people can find your filters is if they come across using one or if you follow a creator already.

Then you will see filter suggestions when you're making a story.

So I set out to make the first Instagram filter discovery app.

As a React user developer, and I have some basic experience with React Native (I used it to create my first app - 36Q), I was going to go with React Native.

It took me a while to get the UI just right. Also I learned a lot about VirtualizedLists in React Native, and how to optimize them. The homepage (and the creator page) are just a VirtualizedList that loads the videos with an infinitescroll system.

And I just could hook a listener to it that every 6th screen you see, an ad overlays it. That way I can recover some money from my Google Storage bill where 20 gigs of those videos are stored.

There are three things on my to do lists for this app:

The first one is a better randomizer. Firestore has no way to get random elements from the database. So when you press the randomizer button, it fetches more filters, and then shuffles it, so you don't always see the same. It fetches 50 filters each time, so if you hit refresh right away, it shuffles between the first 100 filters. Not ideal, but better than nothing.

Another thing I want to optimize is the creators page. As I have 500 creators right now, and more and more people are DMing me on Instagram and Reddit the names of other creators, this might potentially be a huge list. Right now this is also paginated with Firestore, which makes it hard to add a search field. It fetches the creators alphabetically, so if it has loaded the creators A to H on the client side, and you search for @jelleattheoffice (😉) it has to go look for it in the firestore database. And ideally it would also fetch the creators H - J, right? Or maybe H - L, so you can scroll down a bit without it having to do a second fetch right away. So that's on the roadmap as well.

The third thing is to do some proper marketing. I created an Instagram ad to promote App Installs, but that was not a success. Posting it on Reddit did not yield a lot of extra installs it seems. So I have to see how I can attract the masses. As people have some time on their hands right now, this shouldn't be too difficult.

One thing I have done tho, is create a website. You can find that one on MyInstaFilters.com. I bought the domain name before I was even thinking about making an app, and I didn't like the idea of calling the app My Insta Filters.

I honestly think it's one of the "slicker" websites I've ever created (apart from the submit creator page). It also takes care of some cool optimizations, like memoization and virtualization - that's a lot of -izations.

It's built with Gatsby, which was a mistake. Because Gatsby is a static site generator, the site needs to be rebuild every time a filter or creator is added. Right now I'm tracking over 500 creators with over 20k filters. Filters and creators are added daily (well, not right now as Instagram reviewers can't work because of the Corona virus), so I'd need to rebuild it every day. I am setting up a Github CI/CD flow to automate that part.

That's my to do list for the coming few days. Enjoy discovering new Instagram filters and don't forget to rate it in the App Store!