NotifyHub: One Feed for Every Deadline That MattersNotifyHub

I missed a Call-for-Papers deadline by two days because it lived on a site I forgot existed. The information was public the whole time, and I had no system to catch it. NotifyHub is that system: scholarships, CFPs and funding normalised into one shape and ranked by urgency, with every card showing days remaining and turning red inside the 7-day window.

There are two loosely coupled halves that each run on their own: a React SPA that ships with a curated dataset and renders standalone, and a FastAPI backend that scrapes real page titles and descriptions. Each blocking scrape is pushed onto a worker thread and the batch is awaited concurrently, and a 30-minute in-memory cache means the fan-out happens at most twice an hour. Every fetch is wrapped so a failure falls back to seed values instead of failing the response. The frontend only calls the API when it makes sense (never a localhost backend from a deployed host), then enriches live results with deadlines by id.

The Vercel deploy looks complete with no backend, and a local run upgrades itself as soon as the backend is alive. It does what I built it for: I no longer miss a deadline because it lived on a site I forgot existed.

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The in-memory cache doesn't survive across serverless instances, and Redis or Vercel KV would fix that. Regex HTML parsing works for now, but a real parser would let me pull structured deadlines from the sites that expose them, instead of taking them from the bundled data.