Supporting a charitable organisation as a 1-person developer/sysadmin team - pragmatic lessons from a variety of projects

I have developed several Python-based web services and applications to assist the southern African Lions charitable organisation, many of which are publicly available in this Gitlab group. These include tools to:

• facilitate registration for the annual conference, consisting of
  
  
  • A static Hugo website deployed to Netlify
  
  
  • A FastAPI app to receive froms from the website and upload data to AWS SQS
  
  
  • A scheduled Python script to generate documents from the SQS queue and email them to the submitter
  
  
  
  


• provide online ordering and information for clubs to purchase stock of Lions Christmas Cakes with a simple Django site, relying heavily on built-in admin site features


• compile an annual directory of the 120+ clubs and useful contact info and keep it up to date, consisting of
  
  
  • A locally-run Django site for data capture
  
  
  • Pandoc LaTeX-based PDF generation
  
  
  
  


• book Zoom meetings in a shared Zoom account accessible to every club with a locally-run Python script using the Zoom API and updating the static HTML that ends up on Netlify at this page

These tools have all been developed to be as cheap as possible to run by 1 person (i.e. me). This talk will explore some of the infrastructure, technology choices and trade-offs made in developing and maintaining these tools. It will also discuss lessons learned over several years of this kind of project, where the developer is also the sysadmin and the audience is largely non-technical.

No particular expertise will be needed to follow along. The pragmatic approach to these projects can be applied to a variety of hobby or small-team projects and may be useful to attendees with similar requirements.