Built on Netlify TweepStalker is a web application that allows you to stalk your favorite tweep i.e see how they are interacting and engaging on twitter and understand the growth they are having with their Twitter accounts.
Simply Tweepstalker shows you the energy in numbers tweeps are putting in place to achieve the results that you observe on twitter. You may want to copy them by replicating the effort they are putting in place.
What Approach Did I take to Achieve the result
TweepStalker is a full stack application meaning there are backend and front end that constitute the whole application. Back end is built with Node Js using express framework and the front end is built using react js and user interfaces are designed using tailwind css. Both back end and front end are deployed on Netlify.
Being a twitter based application, I had to build API endpoints to facilitate login into twitter to give access to users to facilitate calling twitter API endpoints.
To use twitter API you have to apply for a twitter developer account at developer.twitter.com/en/apply-for-access create an app in the developer dashboard and generate consumer keys that you are going to be using in your back end application. The keys facilitate user authentication with twitter API.
Authenticating user with twitter is a three legged process which involves requesting authentications tokens, generating authentication tokens and generating user access tokens that allow twitter app carry out different task on behalf of a user.
Generating access tokens allow calling other twitter API endpoint, for this case we are were interested with the twitter user timeline endpoint. I had to come out with an endpoint to facilitate calling https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json endpoint.
How did I deploy the back end and front end
The process was quite straight forward. Netlify makes is easy to deploy express app as serverless functions. The only requirements were to link your Netlify site with the repository where your application code is hosted and supplying necessary commands to build and run the functions.
The project was a mono repo( both the front end and back end on the same repository). Netlify makes it easy to choose the directory where to run build commands from. It was straight forward to host node js backend and react js code by specifying appropriate sub directories to build applications from.
Links to source code and production application
The application is hosted on github and open sourced source code link
Production ready application tweepstalker.netlify.app
Tech stack used
Node js
Express
React js
Tailwind css
Area of Improvement
While I was trying to make sure the whole architecture of the application is hosted on Netlify I came to realize that, with serverless functions there are limitation to the amount of time a function can execute. You will realize that twitter account with high level of activity the endpoints are timing out and not giving out the actual results. This is an issue I am looking forward to sort out as soon as possible.
Conclusion
Although useful this was quite a fun project. I have seen user grow their account on twitter and to understand how they did it I think this can be a very useful tool that will give a clear picture of the things they did and the effort they put to achieve their growth.
Thank you Hashnode for hosting this hackathon it has come along as an opportunity to learn and improve my skills and to competitively participate in something that I like and love doing more so challenging me to try new platform and tools that will play a big role in improving my productivity.
Thank You.