Show HN: My first full stack project

jamisonbryant · 2 years ago

Many on HN (and elsewhere) will lament the fact that there is no way to read about or test-drive your project without signing up (aside from going to GitHub). Many of us guard our emails/logins quite jealously, myself included. Please consider adding some of what you included in the description of this post on your site. Right now, it looks no different to me than a random login form I encountered on the Internet.

That being said, I caved and set up an account with a temp email and the password 'password' (might wanna check on those password security rules) just to play with it so I could give some constructive feedback. Unfortunately, generating a story isn't working (the spinner is spinning infinitely) and I see a few errors and warnings in the Developer Console. I'm not sure what the Short Stories page is supposed to show, either, but it also appears to be malfunctioning.

I don't mean to eviscerate your project - it is always exciting and scary to share something with the world. This needs a little more work before it's ready for show-and-tell, though, IMO. I'm not even sure what I would use this for. Best of luck.

NoahECampbell · 2 years ago

Eviscerate it all you like, thats the point of me doing this so no hard feelings. As for the email bit, all it is used for is to store the email and make it feel safe since google auth seemed like a rather secure option in my limited experience. The short stories and chapter pages are meant to show short stories and chapters generated on the prompt endpoint. I was thinking about adding some help page to describe it in more detail since I know its much easier for me to know what does what as I have all the context for the project in my head

graypegg · 2 years ago

I think even just some screenshots and a blurb about what it is would be helpful on the home page. Your logged out UI should operate as the pitch for the product normally.

Like jamisonbryant said, people want some assurance about what they’re getting in exchange for their personal info and a direct line to their email.

pacerier · 2 years ago

re "" make it "feel safe" ""; Accwalling is one of those things in an app that need full rationales, seldom done in 2 words.

0xbeefcab · 2 years ago

Hi there,

Visually it looks pretty good. However like what jamisonbryant said, people on this website aren't fans of when they have to sign in to test something. I made a test account to try it out, and unfortunately submitting my prompt resulted in a Error status 504 on the request with message

"An error occurred with your deployment

FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT"

This is probably because you are waiting for the external openAI API's response before responding to the user's request. You might want to return a response immediately and asynchronously process the openAI part of things and notify the user when its ready somehow.

NoahECampbell · 2 years ago

That was something I had wanted to do but couldnt figure out how to do right away so went with this slightly worse approach as a temporary thing to just get something out there, but that totally makes sense and would definitely improve the UX

neverartful · 2 years ago

One possibility would be for you to create a demo account with credentials demo/demo and pre-populate some interesting content that would demonstrate some of the interesting features. Then add some text on landing page to indicate that demo account can be used to kick the tires.

replwoacause · 2 years ago

My advice is ask ChatGPT if you aren’t sure. Can’t tell you how many things it’s helped me to flesh out.

0xbeefcab · 2 years ago

I have very little webdev experience so my advice might be completely useless, but some google searches show either long polling or websockets as a solution to this problem. Either way, good job

graypegg · 2 years ago

Messed around with it a little. It’s a cool idea! Something to generate the general beats or outline of a story.

For UI, I might suggest something more “inlined” for the prompt screen. You might find some inspiration from outline writing apps like OmniOutliner [0] or emacs’ org-mode. Those will let you move around heading and groups of rows easily. If you could expand a row into multiple heading rows generated by AI, I could see that being really “in flow” for a writer!

You could imagine someone writing a couple details, hitting some key combo that expands it into a few headings, and then they can move around to the heading they want to expand on and start writing in it. They can recursively expand sentences/rows when ever they need to flesh something out.

It’s hard to get keycombos and the feel right, but I think it would be worth it.

[0] https://www.omnigroup.com/omnioutliner/

NoahECampbell · 2 years ago

I'll definitely take a look into that! Always excited to try out a new tool that makes things a bit easier, since trying to style with React can be a bit painful at times hah

xwowsersx · 2 years ago

I couldn't find any explanation on the site of what this is and was immediately greeted by a sign up/login. You need an about page and some screenshots. Congrats on your project though!

NoahECampbell · 2 years ago

I'm currently working on changing that funnily enough, where I will describe it in more detail on the homepage, as well as allow users to try the site out without logging in, of course with the clear sign that any stories they generate won't be saved until they log in

xwowsersx · 2 years ago

Nice. Should help!

tmitchel2 · 2 years ago

Congrats on releasing something to the world while in your second year . That's a pretty good trajectory you are on

NoahECampbell · 2 years ago

Thanks! I figured that the best thing I could do would be to try and make a full project on my own and have it be a continuous project throughout my summer break, as a way to resemble working continuously on a product for a company in the future.

rglover · 2 years ago

Congrats on the launch :)

NoahECampbell · 2 years ago

Thanks!