Glasto App
Every year I make a little web app to keep track of my Glastonbury lineup (yes, there are plenty of options out there for this, but there’s always a feature missing or it’s hard to navigate). this year is the 4th complete rebuild, having previously built the app in AngularJs, Angular and Remix, this time we’re using React. React is the framework Remix is built on, and is probably what I should have used last year: Remix focuses on Server Side Rendering (SSR) and React was frontend only (until very recently, but that’s a story for another day). Because I’d used Remix last year, the site had to talk to the server on every request, which can slow things down if you’re in a field with 200,000 other people. Refactoring into React was straight forward enough: mostly a copy/paste job and then I added a couple of extra features (export lineup to a url that’s copied to your clipboard to share, for example). As I use Next.Js every day at work now (which is another React-based SSR framework), the React way of doing things is becoming a bit more natural to me, and this was a great challenge to continue to hone my skills. A fun last minute challenge was that this year I realised I’d be at the festival before the lineup was finalised, so a couple of days ago, I changed how the app accesses the lineup: initially I’d bundled it into the app itself, so updates needed it to be recompiled; now it fetches an external JSON file, and I’m able to update that via FTP from my phone. There’s plenty of features I wish I had time to add, but there’s always next year. Have a play, let me know what you think and I’ll see you by the ice cream van on the left of the Pyramid Stage!
