REST Countries API with Color Theme Switcher

What are you most proud of, and what would you do differently next time?

I'm most proud of getting the app to work as expected with tools I've never used before. I also tried to do a bit of extra work in creating and validating schemas for the API responses. That worked quite well.

I neglected the styling aspect a little bit and took some shortcuts. Next time I probably would come up with some ideas for better loading / error indicators or a custom Not-Found page. I focused mainly on the functionality of the page.

What challenges did you encounter, and how did you overcome them?

The main challenges were working with TanStack Router and TanStack Query in this project. I haven't worked with those tools before, so it took a bit of time to get familiar with them. Reading the docs and look at some exemplary implementations definitely helped.

What specific areas of your project would you like help with?

I had trouble with displaying the names of the border countries. The API only provided the country-codes for the border-countries. I thought about fetching the data for all countries to get the country name with the help of the respective country-code but that seemed rather exhaustive. An alternative would be to make multiple API requests for the specific border countries (one for each country) to get the country name that way, but that also didn't feel right. In the end I used the data file which was provided to get the country name that way. That's problematic because of possible (future) inconsistencies between the API data and the static data in that file. So I don't know what the best approach would've been here.

I also tried to implement infinite scrolling for displaying all country cards but that got way over my head. So I decided not to pursue this for a project of this scope. But I may revisit this challenge again.