Storyline of colorize.cc : part 1
Hello, my name is Alex!
Few months ago I started a small project. It's a super simple website which colorize black and white photos. I guess there are a number of solutions for this kind of thing. But my one is based on neural network,which is pretty cool.
Infrastructure : "Data-center" for 200$
I needed a server with GPU, so I checked out cloud solutions. But all of them are super pricy. I mean it doesn't make any sense to pay 300$ per month for a project which is a non-profit in the very beginning, right?
Solution was faily simple. I bought used PC for 200$ with Nvidia gtx 660. It's not much, but still enought just to get something to work with low or medium quality.
By the way here it is.
In the beginning I thought to put it in data-center to have static IP and solid connection. But then realised that this server will be just a processing working. The database, backend and front-end are located on VPS for 5$.
So I thought like paying another 100$ for putting old PC in data-center is not smart at all.
That's how I set up the infrastructure.
Front-end : 5 days of hard thinking
So the concept was simple too. Just a single page with:
- examples,
- file - picker
- email-input to get result
Image processing is taking some time with neural network. Especially when you use old PC. That's why I needed user emails - because queue might be very big. And I can't ask user to stay on web-site, because it's hard to predict wait time.
In the beginning I though to use some landing page constructor to make it look good. But I realised that it will break the idea.
The page should be very minimalistic and clean. I'm not a designer, but I'm able to differ bad design from good design. Dribbble is a great place for inspiration, so the easiest thing was to steal different ideas and put the together.
It's still quite hard to make some solid design even when you steal ideas from other people. That's why I didn't push myself on it. It take 5 days to come up to the final deisgn. And to be clear I didn't work on design 5 days long. In the best case it took 1-2 hours each day.
Back-end : Just couple of simple methods
I used nuxt.js. So I had back-end and front-end set up and working. It really saved some time. Because I could commit into single project and deploy in couple of commands.
Beginning of December
It took about 2 weeks to build something pretty and cool. There are some many funny things I want to tell about, but it will be in furhter posts.
Let me know if you need guidance with organising your small projects.
