Tech News Gatherer: An AI-Powered Tech News Aggregation System for Software Engineering Students

Tech News Gatherer is a full-stack Python application that helps software engineering students efficiently track the latest developments in the AI field through features like RSS scraping, keyword filtering, and Gemini AI summarization. It addresses the pain points of scattered information sources, time-consuming manual browsing, and easy omission of key content. By integrating technologies such as FastAPI, MySQL, and Google Gemini API, it demonstrates the combination of modern web development and AI capabilities.

Software engineering students face challenges when tracking developments in the AI field: information sources like tech blogs and news websites are scattered and update frequently. Manual browsing is not only time-consuming but also prone to missing key content. This information overload problem is the core background behind the creation of Tech News Gatherer.

The system adopts a layered architecture:

• Backend: Driven by FastAPI, including three main modules: main.py (entry point/scheduling), fetcher.py (scraping/filtering), and db.py (database operations);
• Data Layer: MySQL storage (articles table for deduplication, summaries table for AI summaries) + Redis caching;
• Frontend: Native HTML/CSS/JS + W3.CSS, providing features like article grids, pagination cards, and statistics panels.

Core features include:

1. Automatically scrape articles from sources like TechCrunch AI every 2 hours, filtering content containing keywords such as ai/llm;
2. SHA-256 URL hashing for deduplication;
3. Extract images or use fallback images;
4. Generate student-oriented structured summaries via the Gemini API;
5. Automatically clean up articles older than 7 days every week, with support for manual operations.

Technical highlights:

• Asynchronous scheduling: APScheduler executes scraping/cleanup tasks in the background without blocking the frontend;
• Security design: JWT authentication, HTTPS encryption, CORS configuration, and sensitive information stored in .env files;
• Developer-friendly: Complete documentation, clear code structure, and detailed README.

Recommended deployment methods:

• Render: Free Python service + GitHub auto-deployment;
• Railway: Integrated Python and MySQL;
• Fly.io: More control, suitable for continuous operation; Databases can be paired with PlanetScale or Railway cloud MySQL.

The developer is a software engineering student who used Claude AI to assist with project planning, learning, debugging, and documentation writing. Claude acted as a mentor, accelerating the learning curve without replacing understanding, demonstrating the value of AI-assisted learning.

Tech News Gatherer is a practical tool that solves real problems. It covers multiple dimensions of full-stack development and serves as an excellent reference case for students, proving that personal projects can also have professional engineering practices and good user experiences.