Joel Hanson

Most habit apps want an account, a subscription, and a notification every hour. I built a minimalist challenge tracker that stores everything locally, exports to PDF, and ships free on GitHub Pages.

My wife was losing track of feeds, so I built a one-tap nursing timer that grew into a pumping log, and shipped it for free on GitHub Pages with no database and no app store.

Every Kafka record with a Long value you produce sends 8 bytes over the wire, even when the value is 42. Bijou64 encodes integers in 1–3 bytes with drop-in serializers, cutting network transfer and replication traffic on integer-heavy topics by up to 50% or more.

I built Stream Wars as a tiny tap game to demo how Kafka works, by turning every tap in the browser into a real Kafka event you can inspect.

The Celery Question # For years, when someone asked “How do I handle background tasks in Django?”, the answer was almost always “Use Celery”. And for good reason. Celery is mature, battle-tested, and has solved async task processing for countless Django applications. It has extensive documentation, a large ecosystem of plugins, and most Django developers have at least some experience with it.

The Challenge of Reliable Background Operations # Building web applications with Flask is straightforward until you need to handle operations that can fail. Database operations timeout, external APIs become unavailable, and network connections drop. These failures are inevitable in production systems, yet handling them gracefully often requires significant engineering effort.