About

Today in Destiny was a website that displays a summary of the available activities and events in Bungie's video game, Destiny. It was accompanied by a Twitter bot that tweeted out a summary of the weekly activities at the beginning of the week. I built Today in Destiny to learn more about modern web development and specifically chose to avoid the .NET stack (e.g. ASP.NET MVC) as I was already familiar with it.

The frontend is built using React and a flux pattern implementation called Alt. The backend is a Node.js application built on top of ExpressJS that exposes a REST API to the frontend. The backend queries the Bungie.net API to retrieve data about the active events in Destiny. Because both the backend and frontend are written in JavaScript, the initial render of the React DOM can be performed on the server to reduce page load times ("server-side rendering"). I used Gulp to implement a custom build process that transpiles ES2015 JavaScript into backwards-compatible JavaScript using Babel, allowing me to use modern language features while still target older browsers. The build process also downloads and extracts the Destiny manifest (static data pertaining to the game), compiles LESS stylesheets into CSS, minifies images and bundles the app using Browserify. To improve local iteration speed, the build process also supports running in a "watch" mode that executes the above steps and reloads the browser using Browsersync whenever a source file changes. The source code is hosted in GitHub and any commits to the master branch automatically trigger a deployment to Heroku.

Links

• Twitter
• GitHub repository

Technologies Used