i've been working on an open-source project called blobz, which basically takes care of default profile pictures for your apps.

the idea is pretty simple. instead of assigning random images or the same boring silhouette to every user, blobz generates playful svg avatars from a name, email, or any string you give it.

it's deterministic, meaning the same input always generates the same avatar. no need to store images, and there are over 5 billion possible combinations.

but the part i really wanted to get right was making it easy for other developers to use.

so i ended up building a few ways to integrate it:

shadcn components : ready-to-use avatar components, along with things like avatar groups, profile cards, and user lists. you can drop them straight into your project using the shadcn cli.…