EE Draws Notifier

EE Draws Notifier is a free online tool that notifies people about recent Canada's Express Entry draws. Express Entry is Canada's immigration system based on invitations run by IRCC, which issues news draws approximately every two weeks.

Introduction

The objective of this project is to make it easier for Express Entry candidates to know whenever a new draw was issued so that they don't have to lose hours (or days!) hitting the F5 key trying to get an update.

Tech Used

            

This is a front-end project created using create next app. I used React as the framework and it's 100% written using Typescript. The styles were created using Tailwind CSS. Users and Draws data are stored in a mongoDB database. As the whole project uses NextJS, it's also hosted on Vercel using their free hosting option.

Features

• Responsive Design: The project was designed using Tailwind's mobile-first approach and is responsive to all screen sizes from 320px up.
• Serverless Functions: The app makes good use of NextJS serverless functions stored on the api routes folder and calls them using axios. There are 3 serverless functions:
  • Subscribe function: Checks whether a user already exists in our database and if not, adds him/her to it and sends a welcome email.
  • CheckUpdates function: This function fetches the information from Canada's website, confronts it with the last draw stored on the database, and if it's different, determines that a new draw has been issued, which triggers the update of the last draw information on the database and the email sending to all the users informing about the new draw.
  • Unsubscribe function: Every email sent to the user has an unsubscribe link (created using mongoDB's unique _id property) at the bottom allowing thm to unsubscribe whenever they want to. When the function is called, the app finds the user by the _id property passed and deletes them from the database.

• Email Sending: The app uses the Sendgrid API to send emails to the users.
• Smart email templates: The app uses simple but efficient HTML email templates to welcome and to inform users about new draws.
• Modals: The app includes two modals created using the react-modal library.
• Every-Minute Updates: The checkUpdates function runs every minute ensuring that users will be informed of a new draw within 60 seconds of its release. Because Vercel has a very limited use of chron jobs, I've decided to write the following script on Google Apps Script which allows cron jobs once every minute:

function checkUpdates() {
  const response = UrlFetchApp.fetch('https://www.eedraws.online/api/checkUpdates').getContentText();
  Logger.log(response);
}

Production Environment

• Vercel deploy: https://www.eedraws.online/

Screenshots

Mobile

Desktop

Email Templates