Day 23: Building Something That Actually Saves Me Money!
Yesterday, while reading in depth about how a URL shortener is created and scaled, I thought:
Wait. Why not build something real?
Something with actual users.
Something that could even save me a little money.
Once I understood the concepts, I wanted to deploy it somewhere.
But we all know about the cold starts with platforms like Render and Vercel.
Cloudflare doesn’t have that same problem.
So I thought:
What if I moved python-hub.com to a fully coded website running on Cloudflare?
That could save me around ₹5,000–₹6,000 every year.
Which basically means I get a little more budget to build and run new experiments.
So I started.
First, I won’t be using Python for this.
Yes, Python is supported on Cloudflare, but it isn’t the most native or smooth experience there.
So I decided to go with JavaScript.
My first natural choice was Next.js.
It’s basically the only framework in the JS ecosystem I had a rough idea about.
But after reading 4–5 articles, I found Astro.
For a content-heavy website, it looks exceptionally fast, simple, and SEO-friendly.
And it’s pretty compatible with Cloudflare too.
What more did I need?
A good design template.
Looking at the current design of Python-Hub, you already know I’m not great at that. 😂
So I found another amazing template.
Only one problem.
It stored posts in static .md files.
Which means every time I write a new post, I’d have to redeploy the blog.
Imagine you’re reading an article and suddenly the website goes into maintenance.
Even if it’s only for a few seconds, that’s annoying.
So I thought:
Why not create a simple, reusable Astro template instead?
The main difference?
I’ll let you connect a database to it.
And the new Python-Hub will be built using that template.
Obviously, with modifications — just like anyone else would make for their own blog.
And that becomes the proof that it actually works.
I plan to get the new Python-Hub up in 7–12 days.
And you’ll be seeing the progress here every day.
Brutally honest.
I’m already thinking about what else I can build with the money this saves me.
See you tomorrow.
I’ll explain everything I did today.