In college, I built a bash script that would copy photos from an Earth Photography subreddit  and save them to a directory on my computer. I then made my computer background pull from that set of images. Lastly, I set up a cron job to run this script periodically, so my computer background of stunning earth images was continuously being updated.

At the time, a few of my non-technical friends wanted to use my app. But since it was a bash script, it was not easy to share with people. Fast forward a few years, and I was looking for a reason to start a project using Electron. I remembered my old bash script and was excited to rebuild the functionality in a native application that would be easy to share with my friends.

Overall, the app is pretty straightforward. The UI shows a hardcoded list of categories of images you can select. For example, you can choose space photos or mountain photos. The app will periodically fetch new photos from subreddits dedicated to those categories.

This app was built using Electron and React. The hardest part of the implementation was learning how to translate a somewhat complex imperative process into an async process using Promises. Overall I'm really happy with how it came out, and I have over ten friends using it.