Athena Delta — News Search Engine

2 min readOct 3, 2022

This project was carried out as part of the TechLabs “Digital Shaper Program” in Düsseldorf (Summer Term 2022).

During the summer term 2022 we participated in the TechLabs Web Development Bootcamp Düsseldorf. The program was quite a ride, helping us not only to learn a ton about Web Development but use this knowledge to built a webpage in the process! Here we want to tell you a bit more about our project journey.

The idea — Burst the content bubble

We are all aware of the problems that fake news and biased reporting can have on society. That is where our project idea was born: what if people searching for a specific topic in the news do not only see the article from their favorite newspaper that echoes their opinion anyway, but also articles from other regions and other publishers that may challenge the assumptions of the reader?

Our idea was to build a website doing exactly that:

The start — Rome wasn’t built in a day

We had the MERN stack on our agenda but at first we thought we might not need React. But Diego, our mentor, urged us to use it and in the end this was the right choice. We also had to reduce our initial idea to filter out the fake news. Instead we provided a website that gathers news articles from different sources

The challenge — learn, code, repeat

Everyone had a different background but we all needed to get up to speed with our chosen stack. I think within the given timeframe everyone was learning more than one would have normally. Also communication and organization improved and the collaboration on Github.

The reward — from caveman to codemaster

In the end we connected the frontend and the backend and got it working together. We had a working MVP online on Heroku. We grew as a team and learned how a website comes to fruition. Thank you Techlabs!