Hey Everyone! I want to introduce my latest project Blokfeed, a crypto news aggregation site. Blokfeed provides not only a news feed, but daily briefs, saved searches and email alerts.

Motivation for Blokfeed

Keeping up with crypto news can be a daunting task. I was watching YouTube and sifting through multiple news sources. After a while, I realized there was too much information for me to keep up with. I looked around and found some sites that aggregated news articles, but the sites were convoluted to me and still required me to sift through a lot of information. So I decided to solve my own problem and create a site that would not only aggregate news articles relating to the crypto and blockchain industry, but provide additional tools to lessen the time I was spending sifting through articles I didn't care about.

The Tools

I turned to NextJS to build the site. NextJS is a framework the provides server-side rendering of React. This was perfect because I wanted to use my current React skills, but also make the site SEO friendly.

Following this, I turned to NestJS to build my API. I technically could have done this in NextJS, but I have built out many other APIs using NestJS, which sped up development.

To round out the tools, I used the following to build out various parts of the site.

• AWS for hosting, emails, and small services
• MongoDB for database
• Auth0 for authentication
• TailwindCSS for styling
• Serverless Framework for assisting in infrastructure as code

I don't want to go into too much detail here because while writing this as part of the 4 Articles 4 Weeks challenge, I finished my series on How I built Blokfeed, which details my process and decisions around building Blokfeed. It would mean a lot if you checked it out!

Final Thoughts

Biggest lesson learned from this project is one I do want to share. Use projects to learn, but, also don't forget the tools you know how to use well. I sometimes find myself trying to learn too many things at once while building projects.

I put a deadline on myself to release an MVP, which forced me to use tools to help me increase my productivity in regards to feature development. In the process, I released my first production NextJS app which was new for me.

Again checkout my series on How I built Blokfeed!

Til next time - Happy Coding