AstroPulse

I built AstroPulse, a dynamic daily start page that fetches and displays NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day using their public APOD API, built entirely with Vanilla JavaScript and Vite. The most challenging part of the project was securely managing my API key using environment variables and configuring a custom GitHub Actions workflow to automate deployment to GitHub Pages without exposing my secrets in the public code. I am particularly proud of how I handled the dynamic rendering of the API data—specifically writing conditional logic to seamlessly switch between rendering an <img> tag or a <video> iframe depending on what media type NASA sends that day—alongside implementing a custom, interactive rotating image animation with functional start/stop controls. To test the project, reviewers don’t need to clone the repository or install any dependencies; they can simply click the live GitHub Pages link to instantly view today’s space discovery, read the fetched description, and test the animation controls directly in their browser.