I wanted to challenge myself with a new project recently. Three interesting skills that I’ve had on my mind for a while have been React.js, Mongo DB, and web scraping. With limited exposure to each, I decided to work all three into a project idea I had to create an auto-updating local music calendar for Charleston. Basically, I pick my favorite local music venues in my city - Charleston, South Carolina - and use web scraping to parse data and aggregate all upcoming events into a single searchable Mongo database. I built a mobile-friendly front end for it all using React.
Some cool features I have added are abilities for users to
I learned a lot along the way, like how to deploy a free app to Heroku, setup https for free using Cloudflare, build a REST API, and kickoff free background cron jobs on my Heroku server.
The site is currently deployed and viewable here: chs-music.com. Whether or not anybody will ever use it is a question I cannot answer, but it certainly has been a successful learning project and with all the free hosting options out there today, I’m amazed I could pull it all off at no cost at all (the only thing I paid for was the domain name).