So here’s a problem- you’re building a social media website, but you know that there will be minors (people under 18 years old) actively using the site. And on top of this, you’re too cheap to pay for image hosting for thousands of files. So what do you do?!

You generate the images at runtime, or at least that’s what we did.

To do this, we started with a template. Our template was the body of a rubber duck and we made it a set size- 200x200.

From there, we started adding layers onto the duck: hats, beaks, wings, etc. These layers would be interchangeable by the computer.

And then finally, we set up a simple endpoint that could mix and match these different layers together. If you want to see the API in action, you can check out the website here.

If you want to check out the code for the project, it’s all publicly available here. Make sure to star the repository!