53/This website is now hosted on Cloudfront
Monday, 2024-09-30 to Sunday, 2024-10-06
Created:
I was hosting this website on OVH Cloud since Nov 2020. It costed me $160 for 2 years, and I renewed it once more. After considering that I can get most what I want for this website (static web hosting), I decided to pull the plug on OVH, and host this entire website on cloudfront’s very generous free tier pages hosting. End of an era.

I created this 404 page because by default
Cloudflare just renders the home page when it doesn’t find a URL, and it
is quite confusing. The page was generated by Claude using this prompt create a nice 404 page
with multicolor rotating background using only css and little
javascript
–
I want to take the discussions around Migrating from AWS to Self-Hosting and mention that I rebuilt https://rules.emergingthreatspro.com/ from ground up to serve millions of downloads using EC2 instances. I was first told to use Cloudfront, but the backward compatibility with how Apache2 used to URL rewrites etc made it very hard to use Cloudfront. Ended up using EC2 + Nginx, IIRC.
Programming
Interesting comparison between Java and Rust by Yishai Galatzer - YouTube (2023).
Rust needs a web framework for lazy developers | nicole@web; I agree, on the other hand, if someone is picking Rust to write a web app (or more likely an API), the programmer is doing it for one of the two reasons:
- they want to write in Rust and nothing else or
- they have considered the tradeoffs (vis-a-vis other languages), and feel the tradeoff is worth their time and effort.
I think the second group will be more appreciative of having a framework, but given the language’s culture tends to favour libraries, it might be some time coming.
Added a note on local-first-development#0208
Cloud
¶ This video - How I deploy serverless containers for free - YouTube, did a walk through of deploying services on Google Cloud, especially using a docker image. This felt like a quick way to deploy many smaller projects, especially with the help of “scale to zero” deployment option. The same talk also mentions AWS’s firecracker.
Deep Learning
rembg is a tool to remove images background in the fireship video above. The above library exposes multiple models over the API, like: u2net, silueta, birefnet, isnet etc., The model files are in onnx format. The model weights are downloaded to a local directory.
Generative AI
As generative-ai development picks up, more developers will start looking into the performance penalty paid by ‘friendly’ Python APIs, and for many cases there might be a case to be made for writing solutions in rust – Should you use Rust in LLM based tools for performance? | Bosun.AI.
This is a good survey of using many different LLM tools today, as applicable to a programmer – Go talk to the LLM