What is this?

This is a random idea generator.

Why did I make this?

I’ve been an active reddit user (almost too active, seriously though, need to tone down a little) for the past 2 years and every now and then I stumble across a new subreddit and I wonder where it had been my whole life. One such subreddit was r/SomebodyMakeThis - a community where people who do not have the time, resources or skills share ideas they think are useful and need to be built. So I decided to scrape 2000 of these ideas and create a random idea generator out of it. I’ve been wanting to try Flask for a really long time and this project seemed like a simple one to start with.

How did I make this? (a basic overview)

1. I scraped the subreddit and stored the data in a Firebase. Here’s the code for it.
2. Designed a basic one pager using html+css.
3. Created a flask app. I followed the Flask by Example tutorial for this step.
4. Now, added the one pager HTML file to a ‘templates’ folder within your working directory and the css file to a ‘static’ folder.
5. In the app.py folder I imported the packages flask, random and firebase-admin. Please please make sure every time you install a package you do it in a virtual environment and keep adding it to your requirements.txt file. It will make your deployment process smoother.
6. Added the Firebase API call to my application. Checkout my html one pager + my app.py to see how I did it.
7. Deployed it on Heroku and WE DONE HERE. Follow this for the deployment process.

What did I learn?

1. Notice how I said ‘Please please use a virtual environment’. Yes, I learnt the importance of a virtual environment the hard way. Because I didn’t use one, I ended up with a bunch of dependencies on my requirements.txt which I had to remove manually :'(
2. I also learnt that you can build almost anything you want to because the internet is full of resources. It wasn’t much of a revelation but just wanted to put it out there incase you’re not starting a project that you always wanted to just because you aren’t very familiar with the tech stack required for the project yet. I think the best way to learn is to just start and take baby steps as you go.