Devlog #6

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Devlog #6 of Starmap Generator.

Honestly… I didn’t think I’d be writing another devlog after the final release, but here we are.

This one will be pretty short because there’s only one big thing to talk about.

Goodbye, Render

Until now, the project was running on Render.

It was great for getting everything up and running during development, but after using it for a while, I realized the free plan just wasn’t a good long-term solution.

The biggest problem was the cold starts.

If nobody visited the website for a while, the server would go to sleep, which meant the first person opening the site sometimes had to wait 30–50 seconds before anything even loaded.

It worked… but it definitely wasn’t the experience I wanted people to have.

And beside that render is not suported by hackclub so i needed to find better alternative.

Moving to Hack Club Nest

So I decided to migrate the entire project to Hack Club Nest.

The migration went smoothly, and the website is now running at alen.hackclub.app.

The difference is honestly huge.

The server stays online 24/7, so there are no more cold starts, pages open instantly, and generating high-resolution posters is much faster than before.

Since the application does quite a bit of work behind the scenes with Skyfield and Pillow, having a server that doesn’t constantly fall asleep makes a noticeable difference.

What’s Better Now?

The move brought a few nice improvements:

• No more waiting for the server to wake up.
• Faster poster generation.
• Better overall performance.
• More stable hosting.
• A much smoother experience for anyone using the website.

Wrapping Up

I wasn’t planning on making another devlog after finishing the project, but this felt like an important enough update to share.

The project now has a permanent home, performs much better, and is finally hosted somewhere that fits what it has grown into.

Thank you all for following the development of Starmap Generator and reading these devlogs.

Have a nice day.