Built a serverless application as a weekend project to help me save money on my heating bill. In doing so, I experienced something great about building websites in 2022. By Cameron McHenry.
While there’s absolutely a learning curve to getting started, once you’ve got momentum, modern web development feels like having rocket boosters. The distance between idea and execution is as short as it’s ever been.
Simeon Griggs, There has never been a better time to build a website
When faced with a problem, one did what any software engineer would do: build a full-stack web application deployed to the edge using the hottest JavaScript framework.
That meant author needed to pick:
- a scraping tool (for fetching the current gas level)
- a database (for storing the data)
- a framework (for interacting with the database and rendering pages)
- a host (for hosting the whole application)
So, author decided to use:
- Scraping: Browserless
- Database: Supabase
- Web framework: Remix
- Hosting: Fly.io
Something author did not expect is that this project cost hom nothing at all, except for the time it took to develop it. The framework is free. All of the libraries used are open source and free. The application hosting on Fly.io is free, and we got a free randomly generated fly.dev domain name with HTTPS. Even the database and scraping tool are free for the amount that it was used. Excellent read!
[Read More]