A regular visitor of Hashnode, a blogging community for developers, Aashish Panthi started thinking about a way to solve a problem countless consumers face.
Aashish was a recent grand prize winner of Hashnode’s “Build with Linode” hackathon. After seeing some hackathon promotions, he went to work developing Lootle, a web app that lets users keep track of the price of products on Amazon and Flipkart and stock prices from CNBC. Users enter a URL of either a product SKU or a stock symbol, see a history of price fluctuations, and sign up for email notifications, allowing them to purchase products or stocks based on the price they want to pay.
Aashish’s says Lootle is different from other apps because of its email feature and ability to track prices from multiple places. Another differentiator is the ability of the app to keep the price history. “Like it’s said in programming: ‘Redundancy is a crime, and the person who writes the same code is a criminal.’ A person who checks the price of something every hour is similar,” said Aashish. As a programmer, I hate redundancy, so I had to eliminate it here.”
A project started while he was on vacation, Aashish challenged himself to complete the Lootle before his free time ended. Throughout the process, he sometimes struggled to find the right solution and tried various tools for the first time.
New to Linode and network protocols like SSH, Aashi used the Lish Console, also called the Linode Shell, which provides direct console access to compute Instances. He used a MERN stack comprised of MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node, as well as Nodemailer to send email and Cheerio to scrape content from websites. After testing his application fully in a development environment, he ran into an issue that prevented him from sending email messages. A Linode Support ticket promptly resolved his problem.
Aashish is a student, so he appreciated the opportunity to build on a developer-friendly cloud platform with $100 in credit offered through Hashnode. Challenged to build an exciting open source app using Linode and its products in just one month, Aashish walked away as one of five grand prize winners earning himself $1,000 in cash and other prizes.
