This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.
An application that lets you see artwork and headlines of historical events from the same time period.
This application uses React on the frontend and Node/Express on the backend. This application also utilizes two third party APIs:
The application features a timeline slider at the top where the user can change the year (from between 1900 and 2000 at 10 breakpoints). Below the timeline, an image of an artwork in the collection is rendered along with its information (title, artist(s) name, etc). At the bottom, there is a news ticker that scrolls real New York Times headlines from that same time period.
When the user changes the year on the slider, a POST request is made to the getContent route on the backend with that year. In this getContent API, two url strings are built for both of the 3rd party APIs. They are then passed to a function that handles parallel requests. Within this function, there are several helper functions that perform various checks on the received data (i.e. year is a match, image url is present, etc).
There is also a seed data file that is used as a backup in the scenario where the 3rd party API returns a failed response. After these checks, a response object is built with two properties artwork and news to be passed back to the frontend.
I chose to use React (specifically bootsrapped with create-react-app) for building out the UI. I chose React because it's fast, well-documented and I love the component structure. For styling, I decided to use CSS Modules. I like that all styles are scoped locally, helping to keep things more organized. I also utilized a combination of CSS Grid and Flexbox to make the application responsive. For the backend, I chose to use Node/Express because it's lightweight and easily customized.
Given more time, I think I would like to add a third API for fetching a song based on the selected time era. The main idea behind this project is to give the user more context around the artwork. Things like music and historical events give great insight into the context of artwork of a certain time period. Given that this application is supposed to provide a combination of randomly selected images and headlines, I didn't feel that it was necessary to have any sort of database.