Creating a simple website using ChatGPT

Software development has too many paradigms, programming languages and tools to know it all. This sometimes makes me a bit frustrated since I known a lot about some languages and tools but creating a simple site can seem too much effort.

Now there’s ChatGPT, without much effort or skill, here it’s a site that shows Electric Grid Power Outages in Portugal https://vpereira01.com/electricalgridptqos/

I have wanted to create such site since I discovered that E-REDES , the electrical power distributor, has an API that provides information about outages. Still, I always stopped when I thought the amount of stuff I would have to learn, debug and troubleshoot.

Gathering Data

Since I also wanted to archive the data and not strain the API, and the license allowed me to, I decided to fetch the data using a GitHub Action that just CURLs the URLs.

I knew I could use BASH script and the JQ tool to handle the API pagination but I always trip up on the bash syntax and didn’t want to learn JQ syntax. I asked ChatGPT and pretty much worked out-of-the box .

Building the Website

Upon prompted ChatGPT created the site using the Google Maps API. However, I discovered that the Google Maps API did not offer a free tier which was outside my project budget, zero euros.

After some research, I found that the Bing Maps API offered a free tier. I requested that ChatGPT make the necessary changes, and that was pretty much it.

It required some tuning and fixing but many times I just asked ChatGPT Got the error "Uncaught TypeError: cluster.getPushpins is not a function", can you fix it? and it was almost perfect.

Summary

ChatGPT, and generally large language models, really leapfrog my capacity of creating simple stuff in languages and tools that I’m not proficient. Furthermore I think it will really help, in future iterations, anyone to create their own sites, applications, webservices as long they are curious and willing enough.

PS: Off-course this post was written with the aid of ChatGPT