Last week, Google introduced its AI copilot Firebase Studio, and I decided to give it a try. It got me thinking about what I want to do next.
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If you may be following me on socials, I just started a newsletter for book reviews & suggestions. Check https://kitaaben.com.
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That got me thinking: What if I built a small book recommendation application that can help users get book recommendations based on their interests?
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I started building it on Firebase studio. Started with a simple prompt to build an AI-based book recommendation application that shows a good variety of genres by default and an interest field for additional context. The Number of books you want to be recommended is either 1/3/6 or 12.
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The initial version came with these fields. But after some iterations, I decided to add the email field and email integration to help users get the recommendation directly to their email.
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The tech stack looks something like this:
- Nextjs + Reactjs ( For the application)
- Gemini API (For AI)
- Firebase (For Hosting)
- Resend (For Email – Free Tier)
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The final version looks like this:
After some testing and a lot of dopamine, I went ahead and made it public. Mapped it to a subdomain and made it public. Here is the URL if you want to give it a try: https://bookwise.kitaaben.com
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I shared it in my friend’s WhatsApp group, Instagram, Twitter( now X), Linkedin almost everywhere I could. But seems like someone didn’t like the spamming and decided to do something about it. By launching a DDOS attack on my website. Targeting my email functionality, trying to exhaust my email limit and increasing my cloud hosting + AI usage cost.
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See the sudden spike in the requests?
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Panic set in; I didn’t know what to do. Should I bring down the site and end this or something else? I decided not to give up and just think and act quickly, which I did. and quickly signed up for Cloudflare, added the Cloudflare protection layer to my app and observed the behaviour for some time.
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By this time, my email limit of 200 emails by resend had already been exhausted, so I waited for the next day and added a caching layer to store the emails and rate limit the emails to 3 emails per hour.
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Things seem to be stable for now. The traffic has dropped as well. However, I would not mind some humans trying the app, benefiting from it and providing some real feedback.
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If you are a human reading this, give the app a try. Tell me what you like/dislike. I am always just an email away at connect@nandan.dev
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That’s all, folks! I hope you found this short note on Call, Apply & Bind helpful. If you enjoyed this, check out more articles on my website, nandan.dev
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