I Revived A 4-Year-Old Abandoned React Quiz App

This is a submission for the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge

What I Built

I revived a 4-year-old React quiz app I abandoned on GitHub.

It had been sitting untouched for years... broken, incomplete, and barely functional. When I fired it up, it didn't even make it past the loading screen.

Sigh... I expected this anyway.

I opened my browser console and, voila, I found a couple of errors:

• 429 Too Many Requests from the OpenTDB API
• Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'map') — the app was calling .map() on a failed API response

The API kept firing on every render with no error handling anywhere, while the spinner just ran forever. A classic codebase built by a wannabe self-taught junior developer with limited understanding of JavaScript fundamentals.

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Demo

Live demo: https://tryquizzify.vercel.app/

Repo: https://github.com/temisan0x/quiz-app

The Comeback Story

And yeah... that was the starting point.

First thing I did was slow down and actually trace what was breaking.

In api.ts, I refactored the request logic:

• Added a response.ok check so 429 errors don't silently pass through
• Guarded data.results with Array.isArray before mapping over it
• Wrapped startTrivia in a proper try/catch/finally so the loading state always resets, even when the API fails

That alone stopped the infinite loading spinner that made the app unusable.

Next up was the actual gameplay. The original version didn't really feel like a complete quiz app. It just started and ended without feedback. It was boring, to say the least.

So I added:

• A difficulty selector (Easy, Medium, Hard)
• A proper results screen with score feedback
• A "Finish Quiz" state so users know when they're done
• Small sound effects for interactions to make it feel more responsive

The old UI was functional but, to be honest, it didn't match what the idea of the app was supposed to be. So I replaced it with a darker aesthetic, a more eccentric trivia-styled theme, and glassmorphism cards to make the content stand out.

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My Experience with GitHub Copilot

Copilot helped most during cleanup and refactoring.

It was useful for spotting repetitive patterns and suggesting safer ways to handle async API calls. A few times it pointed out edge cases around response handling that I hadn’t fully considered.

I didn’t just follow it blindly, but it definitely sped things up when I was tightening the data flow and fixing the loading logic.

At one point it suggested checking Array.isArray(data.results) before mapping — which ended up preventing a silent crash I had completely overlooked.

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It's not a perfect app... but it's a finished one, and that's the point.