CodeReal is an app that challenges users to solve a daily coding question.
I had this idea for this app last year (2022) during the height of the initial BeReal craze (at least in my circles)... BeReal but for code.
I set out to create the app with Python and React on AWS Lambda. I quickly found that building a severless application beyond a few functions was quite cumbersome without a deployment framework. I attempted to write IaC for everything (functions, DynamDB tables, IAM roles, etc) with CloudFormation, but quickly got burned out and never finished the applicaiton.
In the beginning of 2023 I was introduced to Vercel and nextjs. At my job, I was tasked with migrating a rather large nextjs application from Vercel to AWS (containerized on ECS) to increase backend performance. The team decided that the performance boost was worth the increased cost of an always-running server. However, I quickly realized how useful Vercel's atomic deployments were (as well as other features like secret managment, DNS, etc) as I worked to automate the deployment of this application without Vercel. I figured this would be a good bet for my next side project.
In summer of 2023 I stumbled upon Theo's T3 stack that utilized nextjs as well as several other services to make building a full webapp quite easy. I love how easy it is to integrate my frontend and backend code in a type-safe way. I wanted to give it a try!
So, I got to work rewriting this app in javascript using the T3 stack, and I was able to pretty much finish the core functionality in about half the time I originally spent to implement ~60% of the original version.
Anyway, I hope you find this project cool!
This is a T3 Stack project, bootstrapped with create-t3-app.
Full stack:
- Next.js for React framework
- Clerk for authentication
- Prisma for database ORM
- PlanetScale for serverless database (MySQL)
- Tailwind CSS for frontend styling
- tRPC for backend API
This app is also inspired by:
- share score button (mobile and web)
- per-question page where you can solve past questions individually
- accessible via a past questions page with list, similar to current past submissions list page
- consolidate loading states using React's new suspense boundaries (it's a bit of a waterfall at the moment)
- add a "current streak" (i.e. questions answered in a row) to user stats
- add more languages!
Copyright 2023 Noah Kurrack. All rights reserved.