Notes on software, tools & projects

Things I build, and what I learned.

Programming notes, project writeups and small technical guides, written while building real things.

How to Cheaply Host Your Full-Stack Side-Project: Serving it From Home

Hosting a full-stack side project from a home server with Docker, dynamic DNS, port forwarding, and practical tradeoffs.

Exploring the Spring Boot backend for an IMDb clone with MySQL, Elasticsearch, accounts, ratings, and watchlists.

Managing Python environments with conda and pip, including channels, package exports, and reproducible setup files.

Building a FastAPI service that scrapes GitHub Trending data and exposes it as a developer-friendly API.

Publishing a Python package to Anaconda and automating conda package builds and uploads.

Releasing a Python app on GitHub and PyPI, then automating the release process with GitHub Actions.

Documenting Python projects with readable code, docstrings, useful comments, commit history, READMEs, and Sphinx.

Testing a Python app with pytest and tox, then automating checks with GitHub Actions.

Packaging a Python app with setup.py so it can be installed and distributed more reliably.

Distributing a Python command-line app with a Bash installation script and learning its tradeoffs.

Using Python's argparse module to build a cleaner command-line interface with generated help output.

Using Python's sys module to read command-line arguments and turn a script into a tiny CLI app.

Building a tiny Python HTTP client from a simple script and learning how scripts evolve into tools.