News Summary Challenge

Makers Academy weekend challenge to create a new summary website in vanilla-js

Challenge Specification

Tech:

just javascript!

Setup:

$ git clone https://github.com/jbropho/news-summary-challenge
$ cd news-summary-challenge

run ./public/index.html in your browser

Tests

Open spec/SpecRunner.html in your browser and open the console

Approach

The challenge was to build a single page web application that would make up to three seperate api calls, without the use of any framework's or libraries. I decided to write the simplest working version I could and incrementally refactor my design to improve the maintainability of the code. Making asynchrous api calls in vanilla js could easily become messy and I made it my focus to handle this complexity.

Positives

• Improved my understanding of asynchronous design patterns
• Used es6 promises for the first time
• Completed first draft of testing framework developed during the week, extending my knowledge of closures in javascript

If I had more time

• Finish refactoring to use promises when making the api call to the text summary api
• Add an image to each news story by querying a third api with the 'category' returned from the guardian api

Focus for the next week

• Learn how to use an array of promises
• Continue reading into/practicing functional javascript