Show HN: How I built an image proxy in Go to anonymise images in 20 mins
In this technical retrospective (2018), @matryer shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
Cool, but if you are truly concerned about privacy, I don't think that sending the pictures for facial recognition to a third party service is a great idea.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 8 comments
The code is at https://github.com/machinebox/toys/blob/master/anonproxy/main.go