DEV Community

Cover image for Building an Open-Source AI Newsletter Engine
Anuj Gupta
Anuj Gupta

Posted on

Building an Open-Source AI Newsletter Engine

The Problem

Ever tried monitoring AI developments across arXiv, GitHub, and news sites simultaneously? Yeah, my laptop's fan wasn't happy about those 40+ browser tabs either.

The Solution: AiLert

I built an open-source content aggregator using Python & AWS. Here's the technical breakdown:

Core Architecture

# Initial naive approach
for source in sources:
    content = fetch_content(source)  # πŸ˜… Bad idea!

# Current async implementation
async def fetch_content(session, source):
    async with session.get(source.url) as response:
        return await response.text()
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Key Technical Features

  1. Async Content Fetching

    • aiohttp for concurrent requests
    • Custom rate limiting
    • Error handling & retries
  2. Smart Deduplication

def similarity_check(text1, text2):
    # Embedding-based similarity
    emb1, emb2 = get_embeddings(text1, text2)
    score = cosine_similarity(emb1, emb2)

    # Fallback to fuzzy matching
    return fuzz.ratio(text1, text2) if score < 0.8 else score
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  1. AWS Integration
    • DynamoDB for flexible storage
    • Auto-scaling capabilities
    • Cost-effective data management

Technical Challenges & Solutions

1. Memory Management

Initial SQLite implementation:

data.db: 8.2GB and growing πŸ“ˆ
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Solution: Switched to DynamoDB with selective data retention

2. Content Processing

Challenge: JavaScript-heavy sites and rate limits
Solution: Custom scraping strategies and intelligent retry mechanisms

3. Deduplication

Challenge: Same content, different formats
Solution: Multi-stage matching algorithm

Open for Contributions!

Areas we need help:

  • Performance optimization
  • Better content categorization
  • Template system improvements
  • API development

Code: https://github.com/anuj0456/ailert
Docs: https://github.com/anuj0456/ailert/blob/main/README.md

Image of Bright Data

Scale Your Data Needs Effortlessly – Expand your data handling capacities seamlessly.

Leverage our scalable solutions to meet your growing data demands without compromising performance.

Scale Effortlessly

Top comments (0)

Sentry image

See why 4M developers consider Sentry, β€œnot bad.”

Fixing code doesn’t have to be the worst part of your day. Learn how Sentry can help.

Learn more