EdgeDB Hackathon entry - Gororobas

A collaborative agroecology wiki, made possible by the expressive power of EdgeDB

See it live

Or learn about how and why we built it

announcement video

intro on Twitter/X

source code

THE APP

A wiki of vegetables

Open and collaborative information on agroecology - join in and help if you're interested!

THE APP

With social note-taking

Where people can share their learnings, discoveries and tips on planting and cooking real food

The team

Made with love!

Feito com amor!

organic bananas!

Angie

Henrique

Content and Photography

Design & Code

Walkthrough of the most interesting technical bits

Feel free to skip, it's unpolished 😬

A bit verbose and boring, I’m sorry!

Too many things to do, so little time 🥵

This isn't an

EdgeDB demo app

We're building Gororobas to learn and share the blessing of agroecology and communal living. It's a dream-coming-true for the long run.

THIS!

EdgeDB is a fundamental piece that will allow us to grow into this vision

There's no going back to raw Postgres & SQL

Open source!

Schema modeling

like the mind thinks

single schema definition file that is easy to track over time

Smart mutations,

e2e type safe

Built-in and robust auth, with no user limits

Powerful, type-safe

and composable queries

Insert rewrites

Amazing docs

Great local dev workflow

Free cloud plan

And much more!

Native Arrays

Powerful constraints

Polymorphic links

Beautiful access policy API

Great Discord community

I've also learned a ton beyond EdgeDB

WHAT I'VE LEARNED

First time using OpenTelemetry & Honeycomb.io

I feel like a pro! And all it

took was a single 50-line file

and some EffectTS magic

WHAT I'VE LEARNED

React Server Components & Next 14 app router

So easy to suspend and stream

costly components and queries! ✨

Demo of the user profile loading after the page first appears

WHAT I'VE LEARNED

Effect Schema

Parsing and decoding form data with it feels magical 🌈

seriously, here are some highlights:

90+ huge commits

100s of hours of work

25,000+ lines of code

Built in public

This is also a hack: using boring streams to have a watch on my screen and force me to stop procrastination 😝

I've streamed a good chunk of the design & development live - it's all on Twitch, over 40 streams and 60h of recordings

(I lost a few hours when saving)

FAQ

Answers to hypothetical questions:

What's agroecology?

Look it up online, it's pretty cool! One of its most well-known techniques is agroforestry (also called “forest gardens”), but it goes beyond that. It's putting the ecological and social aspects back into farming, gaining long-term productivity.

agroforestry, an agroecological technique

What's up with gororobas.com being registered in 2017?

This has been a dream in one shape or another for a while. In 2017, I created the first version of Gororobas as personal recipes website to learn React and Markdown. These are my first components!

Then, in late 2021 I re-created it to allow other to share recipes, of sorts. Built with SvelteKit, Sanity.io and Supabase auth, it never went beyond a broken prototype 😬

Early this year, I pivoted the idea to focus more on agroecology, and began a broken implementation with Sanity.io. Given our requirements, though I stalled that project - until this hackathon.

the first Gororobas, built with Gatsby - can you tell by the blurry placeholders? 😝

What would you do if you won 1st place?

Spend a few months without client work, building Gororobas and sharing my learnings with EdgeDB, Next and Effect. I want to transition from freelancing into tech education, and have more time to work the soil and collaborate with other :)

Finally, a long list of features I didn't get the time to tackle:

Testing React 19

Dynamic OG images for sharing on social media

Automatically relating notes to vegetables and each-other with AI via EdgeDB's built-in RAG

Comments on notes and vegetable tips

tuning performance

(haven't touched anything related to it, it's fast OOTB 😮)

and more I didn't want to find icons for:

Full-screen vegetable photo browsing
Semantic search for notes
An infinite canvas with access to the vegetables database to plan your farming project (w/ tldraw)
Open vegetables in modals via NextJS's intercepting routes
Editing notes - right now it's like Twitter, once it's out, it's out!
Better leverage Effect and get feedback on my usage
Write blog posts about the experience with technical highlights
Better UX on mobile - header is quite lazy, for example
Set-up EdgeDB branches workflow