Last night I relaunched Hobby Collection Django on native AWS, completing the deprecation of the Heroku stack. In doing so I accomplished my goal of filling the security gap in my public endpoints. If you navigate to the site now your connection should be encrypted as the endpoint is now TLS-certified.
As I updated the project page to reflect its current state, reading back through its documented history was a reminder of how effective and valuable this project has been as something which began out of useful pedagogy. It has and continues to be instrumental in helping drive my development as an engineer. Thinking back on its origins as a primitive Win32 console app to a relatively modern, scalable and extendable web application I see it as a reflection of my growth in that time. As someone who learns well by application I owe a lot of that to this project and the opportunities/challenges it has created for me to tackle. Setting up native AWS infrastructure and gaining increased knowledge/experience with deployment, server configuration and the ACME protocol for TLS certificate management are some of the latest examples.
It was a satisfying feeling last night putting my own infrastructure into production, doing so with no hard down time with the deprecation of the Heroku stack, and presenting an app with an improved UX. While I have other goals I’ll be focusing on from now, this project will continue to live, and as I’ve previously blogged I do have plans for continued development in the near future.