The Joy of Under-Engineering

When I first started in the industry, I worked in the documentation department of a small company. My boss had me write Windows Help files by hand before using tools like WinHelp / HTMLHelp. Years later I did much of the same thing when I dealt with generating .epub files from an editor.

There's something to be said for under-engineering, even if you're using higher-level frameworks. It gives you an idea of what the tools are doing under the hood, where they could possibly go wrong, and how errors can be fixed.

> Grab your own server. Maybe you’ve got a spare laptop or Raspberry Pi sitting around that you could expose to the internet (for example via dynamic DNS, look at Cloudflare or ngrok). Or you rent a cheap VPS at Hetzner, DigitalOcean or grab a free AWS EC2 instance.

Nah, if you're gonna go minimal, youve gotta go all the way.

Expose that little Pi direct to the wild Internet. Do it.

Enable port forwarding to send traffic directly to it. You can even configure iptables yourself if you want.

Don't forget to configure nginx, because the default config won't save you where you're going.

Nothing but you, the Pi, your Python app, WSGI and hundreds of millions of bots on the Internet ready to destroy it to pieces.

Just like God intended.