Question for the DH Pedagogy folks. I’m helping a student who wants to set up some web based services as a self-guided project. He’s a newbie at non static web stuff. Has some programming experience. He’s looking at AWS, specifically Lambda to handle the back end. My hesitation is this: - ThreadSky

hcayless.bsky.social • 136 days ago

Question for the DH Pedagogy folks. I’m helping a student who wants to set up some web based services as a self-guided project. He’s a newbie at non static web stuff. Has some programming experience. He’s looking at AWS, specifically Lambda to handle the back end. My hesitation is this:

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hcayless.bsky.social•136 days ago

I feel like if you’ve learned how to do something on AWS, you’ve learned how to do it on AWS, but it’s not very generalizable, and you maybe haven’t gained much insight into the mechanics of how these things work. My advice to him was:

hcayless.bsky.social•136 days ago

Get it working locally, with a database and a web framework like Flask or Django, then decide how you want to deploy or port it to a website. I think he’ll learn more about how it works that way. Am I being hopelessly old fashioned?

sjhuskey.bsky.social•136 days ago

I haven't been checking Mastodon recently. Maybe I should? Anyway, my recommendation for working locally is to use DDEV. It can be used to manage a bunch of different CMS products, but it's also good as a generic server space for experimenting. https://ddev.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

hcayless.bsky.social•136 days ago

Kind of like MAMP + Docker? He is kind of locked in to Python, so would this help?

sjhuskey.bsky.social•136 days ago

Yes, kind of like MAMP + Docker, but much less frustrating. But it would have to be hacked to work with Django. The CMS quickstarts for DDEV are for PHP frameworks.

sjhuskey.bsky.social•136 days ago

And if your student has $7–$14 per month to spare, Digital Ocean has easy-to-use droplets for hosting sites.

hcayless.bsky.social•136 days ago

Don’t really know. It’s Duke, so could be billionaire or a 1st gen scholarship student or anywhere in between. I haven’t pried. He may be looking at AWS trying to stay in the free tier.

hcayless.bsky.social•136 days ago

Even if his project ends up there though, I still think he’ll learn more by not starting out that way.

krishardy.bsky.social•136 days ago

I’m not an expert- so this may not be useful- but as part of my PhD I’m using Django to make my site- the uni deployed it: https://kuden.fabrics.anu.edu.au, but for testing I used pythonanywhere. Which is free for small sites.

hcayless.bsky.social•136 days ago

Thanks! You’re the second person to recommend PythonAnywhere to me, so that’s definitely worth a look.

krishardy.bsky.social•136 days ago

I have run into issues with too many images now being an issue with the pythonanywhere site- although that could be fixed I think. Django is relatively easy to deploy on pythonanywhere although it does depend on the database used I think.

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