One email instead of three apps

Level 2: two to three weeks, real architecture. Use with: automate-a-task, use-an-api, ship-on-github. Resume line when done: Built {project_name}, a scheduled digest service aggregating {n} data sources into one daily email — delivered every morning for {n} weeks unattended

Brief

Every morning you open the same three things: the weather, your team's score, the bus alerts, a subreddit, a webcomic. Build a script that fetches all of them and emails you one digest before you wake up. Each source comes from an official API or RSS feed (most of these are free: Open-Meteo for weather, public RSS for news and forums, league APIs for scores). Sending goes through the Resend free tier (100 emails a day, far more than you need) and the schedule runs on GitHub Actions cron. The digest goes to your own inbox only.

Personalize

• Your real morning checks. Track yourself for two mornings and write down what you actually open, in order. Those are the sources. Do not add sources you wish you checked.
• Your wake-up time. The email lands before you pick up the phone, in your timezone, accounting for the fact that Actions cron runs in UTC.
• Your definition of glanceable. Decide what each source boils down to in one or two lines. A digest you have to scroll is just a fourth app.

Milestones

1. Log your real morning checks for two days: which apps, what you looked at in each, total minutes. This is the baseline the digest has to beat.
2. Fetch source one from its API or feed and print the one-line summary you decided on. Repeat for the other sources, one at a time.
3. Compose the full digest as plain text or minimal HTML. Print it to the terminal for a few days and check it against the real apps for accuracy.
4. Send it to yourself once via Resend, triggered by hand. API key in an env var.
5. Schedule it on GitHub Actions cron for your wake-up time. Keys move to repo secrets.
6. Handle a dead source: if one API fails, the digest still sends with a "source unavailable" line instead of not arriving.
7. Live off the digest for a week. Each time it fails to replace an app open, note why and fix the summary.
8. Add a one-line footer with the run timestamp so you can spot a stale digest instantly.
9. README: sources, schedule, how to add a source.

Done means

• The digest has arrived every morning, unattended, for at least a week
• The Actions run history matches the emails in your inbox
• The morning app-round is measurably gone: your baseline minutes versus the digest glance
• One dead source degrades the email instead of killing it
• All API keys live in repo secrets, none in the repo
• The digest sends only to you