About Sarcastic Bearcat

Inspiration

I was inspired by my love for quirky animal facts and a desire to create an AI chatbot with personality—unlike the usual bland bots. The binturong (bearcat), with its popcorn-like smell and sassy vibe, became the perfect muse for a snarky, entertaining assistant.

What I Learned

This project taught me how to integrate FastAPI with external APIs (OpenRouter and Giphy), deploy a full-stack app using Render and Vercel, and manage state in React with hooks. I also picked up debugging CORS issues and handling environment variables across local and cloud setups.

How I Built It

I crafted the backend with FastAPI, pulling sarcastic responses from OpenRouter’s AI and GIFs from Giphy, wrapped in a Python app deployed on Render. The frontend, a React app on Vercel, features a dark/light mode toggle, auto-scrolling chat, and sound effects, connecting to the backend via fetch requests.

Challenges Faced

Getting the OpenRouter API key to work was a nightmare—401 errors haunted me until I mastered .env files and Render’s environment settings. CORS headaches between local dev and deployed services, plus syncing audio playback in React, tested my patience, but I powered through with trial, error, and coffee.

Built With

• fastapi
• giphyapi
• qwen
• react
• render
• vercel