devspace : get top posts from the best developer platforms

After an awesome experience with Hashnode ChristmasHackathon, Hashnode announced a new hackathon in partnership with Vercel. This time it was a 3 week-long hackathon. I wanted to build a full-stack app this time, but I didn't know a thing about how the backend works, so I started learning it.

More than 2 weeks passed and I didn't even start working on the project. Everything was new and a bit intimidating and I couldn't build it in time.

But I still wanted to participate!
So I decided to pivot at the last moment and come up with something else. I was running out of both ideas and time. What should I build? a recipe app? a movie app? Nope. It had to be something that would be useful for me in my life.

💡 The idea

Did you hear of daily.dev ? It's a new tab extension that curates blogs and news for developers from different platforms. I have used it. But it was too much content for me. I realized I check only 4-5 developer platforms daily. And sometimes I don't stay for long, I just want to peek, see top posts and get back to my work.

Wait, what if I build something so that I won't need to search and switch tabs for these websites? Well, that sounds like a good idea.

🚀 Introducing devspace

Get top posts from the best developer platforms in one place.

The app is deployed on Vercel and the code is open-sourced on Github.

See live : https://devspace.vercel.app/ and code here.

📰 UI/UX

Even though it was a small app, creating a basic design prototype is always a plus. It helps to move in the right direction. I used
excalidraw. it's a great tool to create quick sketches.

Layout

For the layout, I divided the screen into two parts. One for navigation and another for the main content. I thought of it as an open book.

Colors

I tried to be consistent with the colors and used colors that complement each other. Also, made it super clean and intuitive.

Screenshots

👩‍💻 Technologies used

React
TailwindCSS
APIs - Hashnode, dev, HackerNews, Github, and Product Hunt
svg-loaders-react for displaying a loader while the app fetches data
react-reveal for smooth animation on scroll

🌧 Challenges faced

Implementing the APIs was a bit frustrating. Reading the docs thoroughly helped a lot.
APIs of Hashnode, Dev, and Product Hunt was easy to use and implement. But Github doesn't have any endpoint for getting trending repositories in its official API. Luckily, I found an unofficial API. Thanks to the open-source developer community.
HackerNews API provides an endpoint to get only the ids of top posts. So I had to fetch individual posts with these ids.
Few blog posts didn't have a cover image, so I used Lorem Picsum's API to set random images for default.

✨ Conclusion

I built this in a very short period of time and still managed to make it look good and useful, at least for me. That's an achievement! So this is my submission for the VercelHashnode Hackathon. 🙌 Cheers!

I keep writing about the things I learned and applied. So you can connect with me on Twitter, Github or Linkedin. Also, subscribe to my newsletter and stay up-to-date with my latest blog posts.

⚡ Happy learning!