Getting started

And here we are! This is not really a fresh start, I’ll be honest.

Right at the beginning, the bot used to run at Python Anywhere, which was fine but very limiting. There was no access to cron jobs and not a huge chunk of CPU time, so whatever I did had to be very small. Then I found Heroku which has a free tier that has a lot more liberty to expand, more CPU time, access to a proper database and scheduling, and things were fine, although I’ll admit I never felt very comfortable having a Debian related bot running on a private platform like that.

Anyway, I didn’t have many options. Although I looked around and found alternatives, nothing came out of those. Every hosting platform I found was either paid, limiting or unreliable, so I was stuck with Heroku.

Perfect Storm

And now, from one I’m down to zero: Heroku has announced, some time ago, that they are removing the free tiers from their platform by the end of this month.

On top of that, there is the issue of the recent change in command at Twitter. I would rather not discuss that kind of thing here, because it would get out of scope really fast.

Needless to say, I used the Twitter issue as a motivator to get moving and start fussing around in the code again. And that’s very fortuitous, since the Release Team has already published a proposed freeze policy for Bookworm.

All of that constituted the “perfect storm”, so here we are.

A change in paradigm

Since Heroku will soon stop being a viable option, and I gave up trying to find an alternative elsewhere, I’m starting a new project. It has no official name, but non-officially I’m going to call it the Debian Rasptracker.

I have a Raspberry Pi at home, running some small services, such as a local DNS and DHCP server, my Quassel core, a transmission daemon and things like that. Since the tracker doesn’t really require that much processing power, I’ll add it to the Pi and run it at home.

That posed a new issue though: it doesn’t have a public IP (and neither do I want it to). So I needed an alternative for the current website that shows the graph (hosted at heroku, so don’t expect the link to work for long).

To work around that, I created a new WordPress instance and created this site. It shows the Home page as a default, with this blog on the side. I’ll be using it to post updated on the bot, complaints about Python and related libraries, solutions, and all stuff related to that. Hopefully this bot will continue to be the amazing learning experience it has already been in the four years (wow!) it has existed.