This is a submission for the Neon Open Source Starter Kit Challenge : Ultimate Starter Kit

My Kit

This starter kit is to help build a community database site to bring people with shared interests together.

Users can:

• View a table of items
• Rate and items in the table
• See a dashboard with analytics

The example used was inspired by BoardGameGeek and uses board games as items.

Link to Kit

repo

My Journey

I have only recently gotten into traditional development (a little less than 2 months ago). My first experience building a web app was using Next.js and Tinybird to build an Olympics tracker, so I decided to use those tools again.

My stack includes:

• Neon for storing board game data
• Confluent for tracking user events (ratings & stars)
• Tinybird for consolidating data from different sources to create user facing analytics
• Next.js for building the web app
• Tailwind CSS for styling

Resources used:

• The Learn Next.js Course and accompanying repo for its Dashboard app as a starting point
• The docs for everything in the stack
• Kaggle for board game datasets to reference
• Mockingbird for generating sample data
• Random users for avatars to use as user profile pictures
• Google Gemini for help along the way

I’ve learned a lot throughout the process, but at the same time feel like I discovered more about how much there is left to learn. While I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with the UI side of things like creating components and Next.js makes routing between different pages easy. But I still don’t feel confident with being able to set up all the data things without referencing a lot of docs and samples (which is why it was a good thing to participate in this challenge!). Neon and Tinybird made working with data easy, my struggles were more around integrating that data into the apps. I am also still working on figuring out the best ways to set up the data architecture such as when to use event streaming.