I've been a huge fan of open source projects for a tiny while. However, the learning curve is steep; there has been a whole list of stack components that I never wanted to get in because of this curve. Deploying and maintaining a database seems like a nightmare as an outsider, but that is why they call the learning process and curve. So I do as much as I can to offload this fear towards projects that have a lot of that pre-compiled for me. Here's the thing though, it might be time to properly get into it if I ever want to implement something with great effect. All of this has been a bit cryptic so far, so lets get into explaining the brief.
LOVSpecs has wanted an online booking system around about since mid 2024 with a few challenges that kept it from launching. Ultimately, the largest problem is the cost of such an endevour; with most not-for-profit organisations always sufferring with a spout of funding shortages. Now that is not to say that there was not any money, but more that any solution needed to be fairly well tested and integrated before we would spend some serious money on it.
This is where open source projects came in handy.
The ability to dockerise an application and spin it up at will with the footprint on not much more than an old webserver sitting in my Broome apartment was amazing. So I set out to work on that. Now when I say an old webserver, I meant it. Running on an Intel Core i3-4160 from 2014 in a small form-factor PC that I had adopted from an old optometry workplace, resulted in some sideways solutions to try and get a bit of a solid development demo.
I had previously run a lot of things bare-metal in the past
