Building an Open-Source AI Newsletter Engine

Anuj Gupta — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:23:59 +0000

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)  # 😅 Bad idea!

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

Key Technical Features

Async Content Fetching
- aiohttp for concurrent requests
- Custom rate limiting
- Error handling & retries
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

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 📈

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

DEV Community: Anuj Gupta