I’m Promise I’m Done Now

Devlog #12

I know I said I was done with this project in the last devlog, but I lied (I’m sorry).

Why I Wasn’t Actually Finished

The short answer is that I didn’t properly check my website (rookie mistake). The long answer is much more long-winded (obviously).

After I fixed the issue of my static assets not showing up, I forgot to check whether FRCdle and FRC Trivia were working. Spoiler alert, they weren’t. Every time I tried fetching data from my backend, the request would always bounce back with a 404 server not found error because my backend wasn’t actually running. I eventually found that Vercel Services was a thing and tried using that to have both my Next.js frontend and Express backend run on the same project. Another spoiler alert, it didn’t work. I tried basically everything to get Vercel Services to work, but to no avail. Like before, my backend was never started by Vercel which caused requests to bounce back with a 404 error. Sometimes, I’d even have my frontend code not show up at all because Vercel would occasionally show a 404 no code error. After all this trial and error, I eventually decided to ditch Vercel Services in favor of hosting my backend on Render, a dedicated backend hosting service (my frontend is still on Vercel). Getting Render to work was so much easier than getting Vercel Services to work. It took me around half an hour to get up and running compared to probably over five hours to try and get Vercel Services running. The only potential issue with Render is that after 15 minutes of inactivity, the server “spins down” (becomes inactive) and takes around one minute to reactivate.

Last Steps

Get this project finally shipped!
I still need to add more trivia questions (I haven’t added any since I found out that my backend fetches didn’t work).
Feel free to check it out at fluxrobotics.vercel.app!