Welcome to nattukaka - my longest running software project with a silly name. It is named after a famous character in an Indian TV show called taarak mehta ka ooltah chashmah, who with his nephew, can get anything done for his employer. It sounds like a cool name for a do-it-all-for-me server!
It started out as a simple bot that sends me the top 10 Hacker News stories everyday at 7.00AM IST. I have written enough complex programs for a living but I think this simple bot is the coolest of all the code I have ever written.
Over the next few months, I thought of taking nattukaka and turning it into a “i will do anything” tool. I made a notes app into this. I made a todo app (we have all been there). I killed most of these projects after few weeks of operation - because I was not using them. The HN bot was still the most used program.
When I set out to build teachyourselfmath, I figured that the web server hosting space is insanely pricey for hackers like me who just want to run web servers for fun. With a database here and there if needed.
And I keep getting these small scale ideas that are fun to build and be consumed by the internet. I am not building the next Facebook here. I am just having fun. I figured I don’t need the reliability offerings these external services provide. I could just run my small scale services on my own VPS.
This brings me to what nattukaka is today. It is a single VPS that runs my entire software stack.
The observability dashboard is visible at bhide.nattukaka.dev. If you get the reference behind this naming, I like you.
When I was just starting out in my journey of programming - I had little money to pay for cloud. It was really hard to figure out free hosting solutions as an early college kid. While I can’t solve everybody’s problems right now - I think I can help my friends and family out. If you are someone who is close to me and wants to run a small scale project on the internet, I’d be happy to host it for you, for free. You bring your code. I run it for you.
It has taken 2 years of fuck-around-and-find-out to arrive at nattukaka’s current form. And I have had a lot of fun putting this all together. If you also have small scale software projects of your own, you should consider hosting them on your own too.
If you'd like to run this by yourself, here's the github link for this project.
Happy hacking!
- Vivek