After looking at the options for sharing photos of our new baby girl, I decided it was worth it to ditch the big tech companies and write my own. I don't trust the social media platform (Facebook, Twitter) and I wasn't interested in giving Google, Microsoft, or Amazon my personal data just yet.
So, I went down the path of trying to build one without using any of the major tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter). Considering I'm a tech person, it was a good opportunity to evaluate some of the new tech hotness.
I've written web apps in more than 7 languages including C++, PHP, C#, Ruby, Python, Java, Kotlin, and NodeJS. While I continue to emulate the Ruby on Rails framework wherever possible, I've decided Python and JavaScript are my primary languages going forward however.
So, after looking through my options, I built our private Instagram using the following stack
Languages
- Python on the server side
- Typescript on the client side wherever possible
Frameworks
Patterns
Cloud Services
- CosmicJS for a headless CMS
- Magic.link for authentication to try the blockchain and because everyone hates passwords
- Digital Ocean because the app platform is awesome
- Mailgun for email
I'll review each one of them in a later post, but suffice it to say, I still miss Ruby on Rails.
