– Switching gears and making a different site after running into a road block

– Motivation for using Flask over Django and other frameworks

– Flask makes it easy to get into without needing to open multiple cans of worms

– Would you use Flask again today if you had to re-write the site from scratch?

– Flask manipulates data but the database and storage is hosted on Firebase

– Flask-JWT-Extended helps deal with token based auth for his Flask API back-end

– The app is API based with a VueJS back-end because Ty likes JavaScript and VueJS

– Challenges for trying to sell products with cryptocurrency

– The web3.py library helps interact with the Ethereum blockchain

– Building an email newsletter sender with Flask-Mail

– PythonAnywhere is used to host the Flask app and comes with logging

– Twilio’s API is used to send Ty text messages if errors occur

– What Firebase is and how it helps run a few things in development and production

– Why use Firebase and PythonAnywhere vs using Heroku or hosting your own server?

– About $12 / month to host 3 different apps on PythonAnywhere

– You configure your CNAME DNS records to point to PythonAnywhere

– Firebase directly hosts all of the front-end files such as JavaScript and CSS

– PythonAnywhere gives you free SSL certificates

– Ty hosts 50+ sites through PythonAnywhere and gets 10k+ monthly visitors

– Learning to deploy your own apps is rewarding but there’s a lot to learn

– What it looks like to deploy code from development to production

– Automated end to end testing with Selenium

– Getting banned on Tinder for using Selenium to make too many automated requests

– Mozzarella cheese

– Dealing with secret keys through environment variables using PythonAnywhere

– Database backups are done once a month

– Product images are uploaded directly from the front-end to Firebase

– Placeholders are used to help show graceful errors if something goes down

– Firebase and PythonAnywhere will notify Ty automatically if the site goes down

– Best tips? Learn by doing and don’t worry about making mistakes

– One mistake Ty made was developing the project alone, a 2nd set of eyes is helpful

– Having someone else around really helps with keeping you on track

– Find Ty on Instagram along