Developer builds Sri Lankan F1 fan site using Facebook as a headless CMS on Next.js

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A Sri Lankan developer built F1 Paddock SL, a Formula 1 fan site for local supporters available at f1paddocksl.com, using Next.js 16, React 19, and TypeScript without any paid data sources. The project uses Facebook's Graph API as its content management system, pulling paddock news and posts directly from a Facebook Page with a 600-second cache revalidation window. Free APIs Jolpica and OpenF1 handle race data and live telemetry respectively, with cache lifetimes tuned to data volatility — standings refresh hourly while live car telemetry updates every 15 seconds. To avoid hammering free community APIs on cold cache hits, the developer implemented a concurrency-limited fetch utility that processes requests in controlled batches rather than firing them all simultaneously. The developer documented six key technical lessons from the build, including dual-environment data routing and cache TTL strategy, intended to help others working under similar resource constraints.

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