Table of Contents

1. What is Reedr?
2. Built With
3. Getting Started
   • Accessing Reedr
   • Running Reedr Locally
4. What's Next?

What is Reedr?

Reedr is an alternative reader for Hacker News that is designed to be used on mobile, tablets as well as laptops / desktops.

Specifically designed for quick reading, it makes use of a side feed and reader view to allow users to quickly browse through articles. Furthermore, cascading comments allow readers to skip over filler comments and dive deeper into insightful discussion.

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Built With

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Frontend built using Typescript, React and Redux.

Backend built using Typescript, Express and Axios.

CI/CD pipeline built using Github Actions.

Deployed using Docker, AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and AWS App Runner.

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Getting Started

Accessing Reedr

You can directly access Reedr through the following link: reedr.joshfung.dev

Running Reedr Locally (with Docker)

1. Make sure you have Docker installed
2. Open a terminal in the root directory and run the following command to build the images:

docker compose -f ./compose.yaml build --build-arg API_URL="http://host.docker.internal:8000"

3. In the same terminal, after the prior command is done running, run the following command to start the containers:

docker compose up -d

4. To stop the containers when you're done, you can run the following in the terminal:

docker compose down

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What's Next?

The following are extra features I have considered implementing next:

• Lockdown the backend
  • Rather than leaving it publicly accessible, I would like to make it such that only the frontend can access the backend (opted to skip for now as there is no sensitive data nor authentication)
  • Make use of VPCs and Security Groups to restrict access to the backend
  • Reverse proxy so client goes through frontend to access backend
• Improve styling
  • More nitpicking that anything, but I would like to improve the styling of the app
  • Comments that make use of markdown COULD be styled better to show it's markdown
  • Links within a comment should be aggregated somewhere in the comment for easier access and organization
  • Clean up CSS 😔
• Improve fetching / render times
  • Currently, the app fetches each story and comment individually (due to Hacker News' current API design) -- Could investigate more into this

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