After contemplating the idea of creating my own feed reader for a while, I finally took the plunge. I've set up the React frontend and the monorepo plumbing, and gone through three backend frameworks before settling on Hono.

I spent a big part of the time on the feed engine: parsing XML-based and JSON feeds, discovering them from arbitrary URLs (including YouTube). Real-world feeds turn out to be much messier than I expected. They feature non-standard date formats, numerous namespaces, and feeds that technically violate the specifications yet still need to function. Each one needs its own little patch, and the pile of custom treatments is already starting to feel like its own thing.

The core pipeline now runs end to end: discover a feed, subscribe to it, scan for new items on a schedule, and serve them as API responses.