Show HN: TechLetterApp – markdown to email service turns links into rich embeds

Hi HackerNews

I built TechLetterApp in 17 hours this weekend because I love writing my newsletters but I hate making screenshots, ensuring images are small enough, pasting code into carbon.now.sh, ... it's a huge time sink and super hard to get just right.

Been wanting a service that does it for me and nobody was building one. So I did

The #24hrstartup challenge was just the kick in the butt I needed.

This is gonna save me tons of time and I plan to keep adding more embeds. They're super easy to add.

For the curious, TechLetterApp is built with

    - reactbulma for layout and basic styling
    - showdown for markdown parsing
    - Zeit for hosting
    - a single AWS Lambda function for screenshots
    - an AWS API Gateway to give the Lambda a REST API
    - it uses Chrome Headless to render & screenshot pages
    - Chrome Puppeteer to drive the virtual browser
    - GraphicsMagick to resize and optimize images
    - uploads all images to S3
    - click to copyToClipboard method from a hackernoon article
    - a hack to push code into carbon.now.sh from a random gist
    - Serverless framework to drive AWS deploys and packages
    - uses CheckoutPage to collect optional $2/export payments because I didn't want to faff around with Stripe myself
    - I used https://megatags.co/ to generate social sharing tags
    - and I tried and abandoned a bunch of other libraries on the way

Truly this project is a testament to how far The Web Platform has come that a single person with a little help from the audience can build something like this in just 17 hours.

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