PowerPulse: Building a Crowd-Sourced Outage Tracker for Ghana (and Losing a Fight With My Own Stack)

Short summary

A developer shares the experience of building PowerPulse, a crowd-sourced electricity outage tracker for Ghana, using Next.js, React, Tailwind, and Supabase with heavy AI assistance. The post details debugging struggles with server/client component boundaries in Next.js and silent CSS configuration failures, highlighting the challenges of building with AI tools when framework internals break. The project aims to map outages across all 16 regions of Ghana.

• •PowerPulse is a crowd-sourced outage tracker for Ghana built with Next.js, React, Tailwind, and Supabase
• •Heavy reliance on AI tools for scaffolding created debugging challenges with framework internals
• •Key issues: Next.js server/client boundary with react-leaflet and silent Tailwind CSS config failures

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.