DevToo

What I built

A suggestion and search engine for dev.to

Category Submission:

Wacky Wildcards

App Link

https://devtoo.dev/

Screenshots

Description

A search engine and suggestion system for articles published on dev.to. Discover with ease related content of dev.to, by searching for topics of interest or by finding articles that relate to a particular one.

For example if you are reading an article on dev. to with this URL:
https://dev.to/nikkilopez2/understanding-vector-databases-49n3

you can change dev.to to devtoo.dev like this:
https://devtoo.dev/nikkilopez2/understanding-vector-databases-49n3

and discover more related content.

Link to Source Code

https://github.com/tzador/devtoo

Permissive License

It is released under MIT License

Background (What made you decide to build this particular app? What inspired you?)

When reading articles on dev.to, only 4 related articles are suggested at the end. I wanted a suggestion and search engine that would allow to easily discover related content on dev.to.

How I built it (How did you utilise GitHub Actions or GitHub Codespaces? Did you learn something new along the way? Pick up a new skill?)

GitHub actions where utilised to fetch the fresh content from dev.to by scanning the latest sitemaps. They are run using CROM scheduler and update the database with new content.

For database I used for the first time PostgreSQL with pgvector extension, which indexes OpenAI based vector embeddings based on Title, Description and the Tags of articles. This allows to find related articles to a given one in a speedy manner.

Additional Resources/Info

Additionally a chrome extension and a bookmarklet has been build, so that with on click you can jump from dev.to article to a list of related ones. They also work on other websites that provide OpenGraph metadata, which can be vectorised and used as a query in our system.