Still a programmer, Tech bro

The Frugal Developer

Believe it or not, the perk of being programmer is so awesome. If you do your homework enough, you’ll find plenty of freebies that help you kick start many project at virtually no cost at all.

I used to have the thought that participating in tech events always come free. Hackathon after hackathon, free participant fee, and free food with chance with win prize. What is there to lose?

That aside. Let’s get started.

Mindset

This is where things get interesting. Open your eye and mind wide. You’re to be sure to find freebies everywhere. Company are dying to get you in. Free/Free Trial is one way to get you try out without any clause and hopefully you like it and continue to subscribe to their product.

For me, when hunting for such offering. The real win for a frugal developer is…

Always Free, No Expiration.

This don’t come easy. The next best bet is free trial the longer the better. Without the need to put in personal sensitive information such as credit card or identity number.

And the ladder just get higher, we need to put out more of personal info or just buy it.

Brand

It is also important to identify the site whether is trust-worthy. If you are going to give out personal information, at least do your due-diligent to protect as much as possible than to end up in the wrong hand.

Setup

Hostinger. RM9/month. Cheapest can get at RM3/month.

  • This is my web-hosting, I use to host my wordpress.
  • Spawning as many sub-domain as needed to serve my other application.
  • Any static client side application, can be Vanilla HTML, MithrilJS, or ReactJS.
  • Also serve as database server for any application that need persistance storage.

Heroku. Free.

  • Any test demo server that build on Node.JS, can resort to hosting it here.
  • Though there will be a lag in start up when due to dyno is switch off.

Microsoft Graph API. Free.

  • As of my latest fun experiment. I am testing out using Excel Online API as data storage.
  • Seems promising at the same time not as well. Mainly due to the response time and limitation of where query available.

As you can see, my setup allow me to enjoy low cost or near free environment for me to explore and share those work I have done in a always available cloud hosting.