Hacked.It — Read Hacker News & Reddit in one place!
Screenshots



Motivation
I read Reddit and Hacker News everyday.
For Reddit, I use the official app on mobile. It is pretty good. But very often I spend my time on r/soccer rather than on some relatively more educational subreddits.
For Hacker News, although there are dozens of clients in the app store, I just couldn’t find one that I like.
That’s why I decided to build an app for reading HN & tech subreddits, with the only mobile app framework I know — React Native.
Challenges
Reading other people’s code
There are lots of open source HN clients out there. It’s probably not a good idea to build another one from ground up. But I am mostly a solo dev and I don’t read a lot of other people’s code and build on it.
Redux
I decided to base my app on RCiesielczuk’s HackerBuzz. It has a decent UI with some nice animations. The codebase is well structured too.
One problem though — it uses redux for nearly all component states, e.g. story text, comments… I am always “scared” to use redux since it is just very tedious. If I want to add a new state I have to write code in around 5 to 6 places — actions, reducers, configureStore, mapStateToProps, mapDispatchToProps… anything missing?
At the end I just use local state in my new code, although it doesn’t conform to the existing structure of the project.
Different data structure for HN & Reddit
This project is basically about converting Reddit data to HN format, and then plug it into existing UI components. The data of Reddit is more intricate and their API structures are quite different too.
I had to spend a bit of time to write functions like this:

Final Thought
Since I started to code, I have made a dozen of apps and none of them ever takes off. And I don’t really use any of them.
At least this time I have made an app that I now use everyday :)