I thought getting Python code into a container would be the hard part. It wasn't. The image-processing dependencies had other plans: initialization timeouts, runtime warnings and changes that looked promising until the next test.

My biggest takeaway was that a deployment isn't complete when it uploads successfully. It's complete when the entire path — from an event arriving to an image leaving — actually works.

At first I hosted the frontend on an EC2 instance with Nginx. It worked — until I stopped the instance and the public IP changed. DNS, HTTPS certificates and the browser's cross-origin rules taught me a lot.

Eventually I moved the static frontend to Cloudflare Workers. The AWS backend stayed, but the always-on virtual machine didn't. Simpler infrastructure was the actual improvement.

I try to keep a record of what I learn instead of treating every completed project as a neat final product. Sometimes the useful part is a command I didn't understand yesterday, or a mistake I won't make quite the same way again.

This website is meant to grow with that process, not pretend it's finished.