So for those of you who don't know, I need the Dev community to help me get up after the worst knockdown of my life.
About three weeks ago I collapsed in my kitchen and had a seizure. Now, while I've had a lot of messed up health issues in my life this was by far the most terrifying and happened completely out of the blue. I was lucid the entire time and was essentially locked in my body without any control over spams despite almost complete awareness of my surroundings. A trip to the ER by ambulance and several tests later and I am left without a reason for this. Apparently, my organs, blood, and heart are exceptionally strong and healthy. Yet it has taken weeks to get to the point where I can carry even 10 pounds around without getting dizzy and passing out.
Now, I have struggled with the effects of a severe TBI and have gone through major brain surgery. I struggle with chronic pain and very weird health issues due to this. But I've always been able to ignore or push through pain and refused to stop when I was overwhelmed with physical symptoms because I was assured that these were simply my brain sending pain signals to body parts that weren't actually hurt. However, this recent event, while yet unsolved, has caused doctors to hypothesize that my body simply shut down due to my near constant ignoring of pain signals, stress, major anxiety and depression for almost six years. As you can imagine, being finally confronted with an issue that you simply cannot will yourself past is life changing. It has caused me to rethink my entire approach to living with disabilities. Which lead to depression and total loss of motivation.
After much thought, I have decided to leverage the Dev community to help me get my motivation back. I have designed and wireframed a web application that I call Rizzo. This application is designed to dispatch a web crawler to the user's website, download the images, js, and css files, compress and/or optimize them, and email them to the website owner on request, thus automating the process of "minifying" your site media without having to upload said media to a service. Just type in your web address, confirm your email, and you'll receive your media optimized for web performance with minimal quality sacrifice in a zip archive within minutes. Best part? This app will have no database at all. The entire process will retain zero data. It all works on top of auto-composing and auto-pruning docker images that spin up, complete their task, spin down and delete.
I plan on launching my MVP by the end of December, but since I am so limited with energy and physical strength, I need your help to do this! I call on the power of Dev.to to help launch my first real project to the world. Any motivation, encouragement, or feedback that you, my friends and colleagues, can offer will give me what I can, for the time being, no longer conjure myself. Thanks in advance and I look forward to your love, support, and comments!
Top comments (5)
Best of luck with your everything! I'm hopeful that you'll come back stronger and better than ever. :)
What was the inspiration behind your app's name?
Thank you!
The name of the app is an evolution of the acronym I use to refer to the little script that gave me the idea. I have a tiny, personal library that I wrote using Pillow in Python that is used to reduce the size and scaling of all images in a directory. I call this little class RIS for Reduce Image Size. But I didn't like that as a name for a web app. I also didn't like the idea of a URL like ris.com etc. But when I said RIS out loud, I immediately thought Rizzo rolled off the tongue better. Plus, has anybody ever had a bad experience with an entity named Rizzo? The rat from The Muppetts, the leader of The Pink Ladies from Grease. Need I go on? Anyway, it stuck 😁😁
Haha nice, love the thought process!
Good luck!!! What do you hope to accomplish by the end of this week?
Thank you! I'm going to need it. By the end of the week I hope to have two base docker images built. One will contain my Pydra web crawler in all its glory, with all of the custom filter defenses I've developed over the years so that no website owner will need to add special exceptions to allow my bot past their filters. Pydra is capable of fooling any filter I've thrown it at so far. The other will contain what will be needed for processing of media files and a Flask email route. Both images will be based on an Alpine image with Python 3.6+ with relevant packages, minified as much as possible for performance.
Next week will involve the building of a node image for use with a Gatsby front end, and an Nginx image as a web server and reverse proxy. Performance is key for this application. I want speed to be paramount and am considering using Pypy rather than Python 3.6 but have yet to benchmark the performance in this particular application between the two.