NewsReader

This is a news reader and summarizing app I built to try to match the specifications given in the challenge. I tried to choose the most pragmatic tooling and technology options to create a nice experience for the end user.

The app pulls news articles from an api and sends them to claude for sentiment/summary/topic clustering.

Stack: FE: React Typescript TailwindCSS

BE: node express sqlite

How you would take this prototype to production

I didn't focus on testing so much. I also decided to keep the codebase more simple. we are also using sqlite.

What you would improve or redesign with more time

I still think Id test differnt layouts a bit more to try to find the best one. I think there could be nice ways to interact with the data that I havent landed on yet. In general I'm happy with the brief but I think it could probably be expanded.

What technical/product trade-offs you made during the task

• tanstack/react query vs fetch - fetch is simpler, no need to use tanstack for this scale.
• sqlite vs localstorage vs caching (tanstack/server) - sqlite allows for persistence without overhead of full postgres implementation
• vite + express vs next- vite and express is simple.
• embedding vs prompting - embedding adds too much bloat for the value it adds for this scale.

Considerations for scaling, reliability, performance, or UX

i was experimenting with clustering/embedding but i think for this use case and project size it felt like overkill in the end. its also not a topic i am the most familiar with so i didnt think it made sense to implement it so i stripped it from the final. probably you would eventually need to switch to postgres or something.

Any tooling, architecture, or model choice decisions you would revisit

for the best user experience it probably makes sense to call the AI before a user visits the pages and have the summary preloaded? that would remove some latency.