Don't Judge Me

Have you ever wanted to read pop culture while you were on-the-clock? Disguise your low-level literature under the guise of it being the New York Times and no one will be any the wiser.

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Inspiration

While sitting down, minding my own business, my roommate decided to peer over my shoulder. Unbeknownst to me, they were reading the TMZ article that was apparent on my screen. For the next week, they continued to roast me for the "news" that I had read. I wanted to find a method of obfuscating the articles that I read so I can finally be left alone to my own desires.

How we built it

We built Don't Judge Me using React, Node.js, and Python. We grab the url of the article the user provides and send it to our backend api. The api scrapes the article's body and related images and returns it to the front-end. We constructed the front-end to appear like the New York Times. We populate the template with the scraped information, with the images being inserted into a carousel view.

Challenges we ran into

Building a React app comes with many challenges. We ran into difficulties with managing asynchronous functions. When making API requests, blocks containing multiple functions would run concurrently rendering any form of linear debugging to the console useless. Rendering the carousel view by mapping a list of images was difficult because it was wrapped in external React components, "rendering" it unviewable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud we were able to build a full stack application, featuring a functioning front and back-end. We were also able to web scrape data successfully, grabbing only the relevant information from the articles provided.

What's next for Don't Judge Me

We would like to take this project to the next level by allowing other news sites to be scraped and translated into the New York Times-esque vision.

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