Golden Hours

A two-person team built Golden Hour, a mobile-first web app that uses SunCalc to schedule sunrise and sunset push notifications, prompting users to step outside, snap a sky photo, and log a check-in that builds a streak. The app runs on Render with a Node.js and MongoDB backend, uses a cron-style /api/tick endpoint to fire due reminders, and pre-generates its notification copy with Gemma so no model runs in production.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week1-2026-10-05 A team project by @shikha singh 20 https://dev.to/shikha singh 20 and @SHREYASH DEV USERNAME https://dev.to/SHREYASH DEV USERNAME . Golden Hour is a calm, mobile-first web app that nudges you to step outside around sunrise and sunset. You pick sunrise, sunset or both, and how many minutes ahead you want a reminder. When it's time, your phone gets a notification such as "Golden hour in 20 minutes. Take your chai out to the terrace." You go to your balcony or terrace, take one photo of the sky, and enjoy a chai, coffee or snack. Then you tap Done . The check-in is recorded, your streak goes up, and you put the phone away. It's for people who spend long hours on screens and for people in apartments, where "going outside" can simply mean going to the balcony. The screen is the shortest part of the experience: a short setup, and a tap on Done. https://github.com/shikha-code404/golden-hour https://github.com/shikha-code404/golden-hour Open-source pieces scripts/make nudges.js , review them by hand, and save them to data/nudges.json . The server picks lines from that file, so the live app doesn't need a model running. How it works /api/tick endpoint every minute with a secret header. The endpoint plans upcoming reminders from SunCalc and sends the ones that are due. Data model: subscribers push endpoint and keys, location, timezone, preferences, lead time , reminders kind, event time, fire time, sent time and checkins kind, local date, optional treat . Hosting: Render runs the web service, defined in a render.yaml Blueprint with a /health check and secrets entered in the dashboard. Render is only hosting. Any server with Node.js and MongoDB can run the app. How we built it: We used Antigravity as a coding assistant and built the app in phases database, sun-time module, API, frontend, messages, deployment , checking each step ourselves. We have used Gemma , Render for building this project