Hi everyone👋, I'm Nabil and this is my aws amplify hackathon submission: Ideabox Hope you enjoy it ✨

Inspiration

Some time about a week ago, I was looking for hackathons as part of my new year goals for at least a hackathon every month(kind of late since February is almost done), luckily I just joined hashnode and I saw the town hall post, so I decided to participate, the question now was what to create.

After days with an empty head, I decided to tackle the problem I was having which was coming up with ideas. Funny thing was I had gone through this process before and my solution then was a book of ideas(which I have misplaced😅). So I decided to make it online, hence; Ideabox was birthed.

Initially ideabox was to be a cloud safe of sorts where people could write down their ideas but where's the fun in that, also google keep or some other cloud note service could easily accomplish that. So, I decided to make a feed where anyone could easily view ideas sourced from communities on reddit, dev.to and more to come, they could also post their ideas to these communities.

Project Details

I'm going to talk about the design, implementation and deployment for the build, but first here are the technologies used :

• React
• CSS
• Material UI
• Axios
• Amplify

Design

Alright first we talk about the design, which was inspired by hashnodedeck. This is how it came out:

The app is divided into two; sidebar and feed. The Sidebar allows anyone to post to communities part of the feed and also filter the feeds, by recent, featured and top.This design was implemented using React, CSS, flexbox for positioning and material UI for icons and buttons.

Implementation

The APIs used for this are:

• Reddit; which provided the communities(subreddits😉); r/AppIdeas and r/Startup_Ideas
• Dev.to; in which articles where filtered by #idea

Both APIs were called using the Axios package and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there

For the Reddit API when querying the subreddits by categories(hot, recent, top), the endpoints didn't support the usual pagination but used listings due to how frequent they are updated so I had to figure that out which was tedious but thanks to YouTube it was solved it 👇

Using Dev.to's API was pretty straightforward, call the api with the query being a Idea hashtag.

I actually intended to use the Hashnode API but there seems to be no functionality to query posts by tags.

Deployment

I had never used amplify before so I looked to the all knowing YouTube for guidance, the video showcased how seamless it was to setup hosting with amplify 👇

Take a look at ideabox and maybe you'd see your next side project or share your ideas with the community

master.dcvd6xn5547uz.amplifyapp.com

The repo is also provided for all the tinkerers around. Github.

Future Plans

In terms of functionality I would like to add these features:

• users
• daily ideas through chrome extension
• more communities
• feed for ongoing hacakathons

The ultimate goal would be for this to keep growing as more people contribute and also take inspiration from it. Anyway, thanks for reading.

Have a nice day👋 Stay Creative