Dabbling in the World of Web Development

I have always been interested in computers ever since I was a little boy when my Santa got me this Vtech computer that had a real keyboard and you could code it to play little brown jug. Those were the days. I have always dabbled in some of the languages and did the courses. The usual shite like while loops , conditionals and functions. Every language had different variations and I got farther in some more than others. I found python the easiest. But at a certain point I used to throw in the towel when things got a little bit too complicated with the likes of args and kwargs, nested functions. I used to be so close to putting the jigsaw pieces together but never got there. Html and CSS were never a problem. But javascript was always a pain in the arse for me. When AI came along it changed my whole world because it could piece together the tough bits.
So I began having an idea and seeing how I got on with some kind of static website. I knew enough code to be able to babysit the AI and realise when it would go rogue and off in a different direction which is all the time by the way. I started out using Chat GPT but I realised soon enough the Elon Musk's Grok 3 was much better at understanding and processing code so I started using this. I had an idea for a sporting website and I began designing this. For some reason I settled on Flask as the framework to achieve this, I asked a friend of mine who is into web development if he would use Flask and he pointed me in the direction of the Django Framework at the time so I used a normal django boilerplate to start me off and I went from there. So I set up a basic website and did all the branding but I just was not happy with it. It had the nav bar across the top and it has the imgs under the nav and it just didn't look right. So I laid my idea to rest for a while and as I would need user authorisations, an engine in the backend to validate sporting bets. I also needed a database which takes the website from being static to a whole new level of dynamic websites. I began to realise how the Mark Zuckerberg's of this world were few and far between. Even if you had an idea in tech , it nearly takes a team to pull it off from the frontend to the backend and to the marketing. I liked the frontend of it all, tweaking areas of CSS. Finding out about more modern CSS techniques such as tailwind after the fact was a lesson learnt and in hindsight I would have used React rather than Django but these Frameworks come into fashion and go out of fashion so I stuck with django and in fairness to it, I thought it did me well.
I was amazed the sheer amount of different systems that I had to learn along the way on my journey. Learning git was a must and I use Github now every day to commit my changes for version control and many more things which I will go into later. I used branches that would fork my website to get me through the tough coding challenges. If I fucked up , I could always go back to my main branch which was working the way I left it. One branch that I worked on for ages was fetching sports results to the website. I used a number of different approaches here and spend ages on styling to get the results to update. What was meant to be a minor part of my website ended up taking me an age and then at the end it was shit looking. I got too complicated for my own good. The common sense approach was to buy a sports API to obtain sports fixtures and results but I didn't want to spend money for a website that may not see the light of day. There are two other methods. Webscraping the data from another website which ends up with too many calls and you get rate limited. Or just take their sports API from their backend which is handy. Lubly jubly. However I had to include many sports and finding an accessible API off a backend is a pain in the arse. I spent around a month doing this every night and I got some kind of website site results going with the use of Cronjobs. But one day I took a step back and thought to myself. What the hell was I doing?? Why don't I just have the website links to the likes of Livescore or the PGA Tour Leaderboard in a button and all my work would be done. And so the easiest way ended up being the best way. I was a fucking idiot for wasting that amount of time on this.
So what else did I need . A chat room and a message forum. And it was here ladies and gentlemen that things started getting all com-ple-ma-cated. No more restarting the django and viewing your changes. Websockets, Redis , Daphne. I had to start so many systems which led me to Docker. Docker Docker Docker. All the devs talk about Docker. Now I was using it. It is handy , I give them that. I started using Docker Compose so all my systems would start at the same time. So once I start up Docker, everything loaded. Happy days. However Docker slowed things down for me . But on the positive side my website was not breaking as much.
Now I spent most of my time in development on the front end so the backend was new to me. But we got through it. Django is pretty good in the backend and Grok was doing a good job tying things together. But I hated copying and pasting code into Grok and then copying and pasting the results. Right at this time some code editors started having AI built into their code. You may of heard of Copilot but this was only at the autocomplete stage. Cursor AI had the full package. So you would type you prompt into the code editor and CursorAI would change the files that needed to be changed. It was an absolute animal and it sped up what I wanted to do so much. Now to all the dev snobs out there, I am not a dev but this Cursor AI will put alot of them out of a job. Now again you have to babysit the results because as per usual the AI may go off on a tangent But generally once you put your ground rules in place such as " Do not create files or folders without approval", Use Docker instead of "Venv" . Run Ruff for Linting instead of Pylint. These kinda rules. CursorAI is so good that it prompts some rules for you the more it learns about your codebase.

So I had the frontend done, the backend pretty much done. So how do I go about taking my code and putting it on a website. Who was going to be the host. How do I go about getting a domain name. The domain name part was easy. Stay away from Godaddy was the advice and use NameCheap or Porkbun which I did. Now for the hosting. There are many but I ended up going with Sevalla after some good videos from a developer who is self learned . His name is Eddie Jaoude and I found a number of his videos helped me when it came to transferring your website from the code to hosting and he recommended Sevalla which I used. You get $50 free starting out with Sevalla and they charge by traffic which was great for me as I do not think I will have much traffic initially. But it was here I reach a learning curve. Most websites have a development environment, staging environment for testing and then the production environment. I only had the dev environment so I had to go about creating the proper infrastructure for all three which was really interesting. Also Github Actions was a section of github that would validate your code before it deployed to your hosting website. A really good check. So I would change my code. Push the changes to Github. Github actions would take over ,validate my code and push the code to my staging environment. I had the staging environment the exact same as my production environment so if the website was broken here I could fix it so my production website was running in the background with an old commit. Anyway I am boring now because of this but this shit excites me. I am not time constrained by my website so I don't mind giving a few weeks to this and taking my time. Again this is my first and will probably be my most complicated project.

So I spent years delving in and out of exercises such as 100 days of code and websites like Treehouse. But the best way to learn was to just go ahead and make a website. Normallies have the tools now to do it. What I found with AI , if you have the read.me files and security files as well as the infrastructure markdown explanations detailed then AI will pick this up and it will have a better change knowing what the hell you want to do.

I have not mentioned the website yet. It all stemmed from going onto a well known tipsters Patreon page. I paid 10 dollars per month for the privilege. Every day around 1pm the Tipster in question would post up his tips for the day. I might not be the same time every day so a large gathering of degens used to be waiting in the chatrooms. These chatrooms became a hotbed for actually good tips. They came from the butcher , the baker and the candlestick maker. Some developed quite the reputation and a considerable amount of money was made from these guys. The actual tipster would then come on and paste in his tips for the day. Now these tips were always favourites and people used to moan alot about them ( even though we were paying for the privilege's. This led the butcher , the baker and the candlestick maker to form their own betting Patreon because they got kicked out of the main tipsters Patreon for posting their own group. Sometimes I used to be searching back on tips by the candlestick maker in case I missed them because nearly every tip he had on American Football used to come in. But these Patreon messgae boards or chatrooms were not fit for purpose and the tipster was an absolute See You Next Tuesday. So I decided I'm gonna make my own platform. And so I did.

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