The System

What started as a simple TypeScript experiment has turned into something more. I now have the makings of an entire serverless system.

Even better, this whole setup runs on free-tier infrastructure and hasn’t cost a cent to deploy.

Featuring:

• Container Orchestration
• Modern Tooling
• DataDog Metrics (Without a DataDog Agent)
• Scheduled Cron Tasks
• Postgres for the data
• Serverless functions

Although it’s a work-in-progress, it displays how a complex distributed system can be made with modern tooling in a very short amount of time.

My Love: The Grind

It’s five past midnight, I’m a bottle of cabernet away from sober, and my girlfriend is crying that I spend more time with my laptop than I do with her.

Conditions are perfect. Let’s write some code.

The State of Things

Let’s assess our situation:

It’s not terrible, but it’s certainly not great. It’s generic and lacks passion.

There are quite a few things we could do better.

Python is often described as “easy to learn, hard to master”—but the truth is, it’s easy to write and even easier to improve once you learn a few advanced idioms. These small tools make your code more expressive, efficient, and closer to how Python was meant to be used.

And under the hood? Much of this runs at C speed, thanks to Python’s standard library doing the heavy lifting for you.

At Stonehenge, a sacred site that predates written history, a tourist with a designer bag looked upon the shrine and said:

For a split second, I thought I was having a stroke.

Honestly? I kind of love these people. Their expectations may be wildly misaligned, but they voiced the things the rest of us are too polite (or too afraid of ancient curses) to say out loud.

Analytics, At What Cost?

It’s 2025. You’ve built a humble little site. Like a portfolio, or maybe a documentation hub for your custom waifu GPT.

And the question hits you:

Is anyone actually visiting this thing?

That’s it. You’re not trying to build a targeted ad campaign or fingerprint every visitor. You just want a simple counter.

So naturally, you get recommended Google Analytics. Or Plausible. Or Mixpanel. Or Heap. Or PostHog. Or one of the dozens of other options that all promise “simple, privacy-first analytics” but still somehow give off the same vibes as the Church of Scientology.

This website cost me nothing. And I’m going to keep it that way.

You may think you need serious infrastructure to build a website: a server and a database at the very minimum.

But you’d be wrong. Chances are, the site you envision can most likely be simplified down to a set of static assets. Which means you can throw it on a CDN for free, without AWS burning a hole in your bank account.