Hey HN - I wanted to share my latest side project with you all.

My long term vision for Postcarder is to partner with other liberal political organizations as a tool their supporters can use.

But the self-service part of Postcarder is working today and I plan to always support it.

Feedback and questions are welcome. Thanks!

-Andrew

Hey HN! I'm launching my winter side project today, Postcarder.

Postcarder makes it easy for you to write your elected representatives in support of liberal causes. By combining a few APIs and an address book for Capitol Hill, my hope is that Postcarder will help more people be heard by their representatives.

If you're curious about Postcarder's story, head on over to the About page: https://www.postcarder.us/about

And I'll be hanging here all day, so don't hesitate to drop me some questions.

Thanks!

Oh, and in case you're curious, the tech stack is Django + python-rq running with Kubernetes on Google Container Engine.

Gomix (https://gomix.com) is my current favorite. It might not have as many bells and whistles as the others you listed, but it "just works" more of the time than any other platform I've tried.

HyperDev is definitely a service to watch.

I spent a lot of time with Docker in its early days, and now I work a lot with documentation. I dream of providing my readers with live, on-demand sandboxes they can use to play with our sample code before trying to run it locally.

Lots of services have cropped up in recent years to try and make this dream a reality. Unfortunately, most either require user registration or are defunct, and I suspect it's because preventing abuse and fraud are extremely difficult.

HyperDev is by far the best attempt I've seen yet. It's functional, doesn't require user registration, and provides a full URL I can use with other web APIs.

They're Node-only for now, but they're teasing more languages on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HyperDevIt/status/771766515603533829

I'm certainly rooting for them.

Thanks torkalork! Node.js is definitely just a starting point for us - we plan to support all major backends.

I just offset my emissions. Real simple - nice work!

I agree that most HN readers probably wouldn't use this service, but I will definitely point people to it.

I have set up dozens of sites for friends and relatives over the years. The only reason I'm still paying for shared hosting with WebFaction every month is because some of them are still running blogs / businesses off the crummy site I made for them years ago.

My default response when someone wanted a personal website used to be giving them a WordPress blog. But most people never actually wanted to write content for a blog - they just wanted a domain name and a custom email address, but got overwhelmed when shopping for a domain.

Sending people to a service like this is better for them and better for me.

It would be awesome if someone created an AMI after they finished those driver steps, at least. If I do it I'll be sure to post back here.

I know you can't share AMIs derived from marketplace snapshots, so I suspect the same may be true of Windows instances. The marketplace instance restriction is rather annoying as CentOS and Debian publish their official images through the marketplace.

I also use the $5-tier Digital Ocean droplets to host some side projects.

I've had some processes die semi-regularly, though, because the OS does a scheduled maintenance task that maxes out the 512mb RAM.

Adding a swap file seems to have taken care of it, though. I wish they enabled them by default on their smallest droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-...

Or try running an alternate operating system that doesn't run a task semi-regularly that uses up all of your RAM.

Definitely some neat features here which will help people who need to use Docker but can't use the command line.

For example, when you click the 'Terminal' button on a running container, it automatically starts a docker-exec command in that container for you, which is handy.

For people checking it out today, note that it creates its own boot2docker VM, even if you have one on your system already. So Kitematic won't be able to see any of the images or containers you have running through your other boot2docker VM.

Good point! I'm now calling it "a stream of the latest Hyperlapse videos" instead.