This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Akash
This is a submission for the World’s Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.
What is TravelShare?
- A travel-focused social app which helps travelers connect, plan, build and share their travels.
How did Bolt.new help?
- I have always been bad at frontend web app development. This is the first time I have been able to build and submit an app with a frontend all by myself.
- Bolt’s integration with Supabase and GitHub helped a lot. It could easily make changes to the Supabase setup which took away a lot of manual work.
- Of course the actual coding of the app is awesome considering the size of the app and a major refactoring wherein I wanted to move CSS styles to respective components from 1 huge CSS file 🙂
Sponsor challenges
- Supabase challenge – This project has used Supabase extensively for storing all data, using edge functions for creating MCP Servers, and user authentication.
- Netlify challenge – The app was deployed on Netlify and can be completely accessed by it.
Technical challenges and breakthroughs
- AI has made it so much easier to deal with technical challenges. Bugs, feature additions, refactorings, etc have become fast and Bolt handles all these tasks well.
- Decided to use vanilla HTML, CSS, TS because I wanted to avoid dependency hell and avoid breaking the app break due to some dependency change. It is why the dependencies in package.json are just supabase, leaflet, vite & typescript. If I had used a frontend framework and faced some breaking issue then I don’t know if I would have been able to fix it properly. Sure this increased the size of the codebase but it also shows basic technologies can be used to build stuff in an organized fashion.
- Bolt was writing all the CSS in one huge file. So I asked it modularize the code and keep CSS with the components that need it. It was done properly.
- However due to increasing size of project and the fact that Bolt would write a lot of changes to files (even to those parts which do not need to be edited), the token consumption had to be taken care of. By the end it would take nearly a million tokens to make a change so judicious use was necessary.
- For maps I selected OpenMaps because it would suffice for now at low usage and because it is free for use. Alternatives would need payment.
- Google Gemini has sufficient usage quota in the free tier for this hackathon so I used 2.5-Flash. And it works well for extracting data out of posts, MCP servers, building itineraries from provided requirements, etc.
All in all I have great hopes for the future of AI tools like Bolt 🙂 They are only going to get better ahead allowing everyone to build apps when they normally could not. This project would not have been possible without an AI tool.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Akash