Dropserver Progress - Recap of 2024
Instead of going over the month of December (not much happened), here is a quick recap for the year in countdown form:
Four Releases
I released four versions of Dropserver:
- 0.13.0: Install/update apps from URL. See January.
- 0.13.1 brought a few bug fixes and improvements. See March progress report.
- 0.13.2 Adds a proxy for outbound requests, and many small tweaks. See May update.
- 0.13.3 See September progress report.
Three Main Areas of Work
I worked primarily on three new things in 2024:
- Outbound requests from appspaces. Failed to ship (see this post)
- Deno 2 support. Shipped but caused some backwards compatibility challenges.
- Tailscale integration (not yet finished). See progress reports for April and onwards.
Two Dropserver Apps
I worked on the two publicly available non-demo apps for Dropserver:
- Leftovers: small tweaks to polish the UX. This app is pretty decent now, a few quibbles aside.
- ShoppingList: I made it a PWA and improved the UX for adding items to your list quickly. This one needs more work before I am happy with it.
One Goal
I am building Dropserver in an attempt to figure out how self-hosting personal web services can be brought within reach for non-technical users, or people who don’t want to become hobbyist sysadmins.
I am not where I want to be, and it seems the decks are stacked against this ever becoming a thing. But when I look at Plex, HomeAssistant, and Cloudron, I see that some formulas can lead to success.
