Show HN: I built a site that tracks short-lived flight deals
2 by airninja | 0 comments on Hacker News.
So, this summer I was hunting for a flight from Calgary to Tokyo with WestJet, and I kept seeing these random cheaper flights popping up. I got tired of refreshing the site non-stop, so I whipped up a script to scrape the flight data. It paid off—I scored a roundtrip for $1000 CAD in July! Naturally, I decided to turn this into a full-fledged project and built flight-price-alert.com! Tech details: Built with Go for the backend and SQLite for the database. Added some TLS spoofing to get around Cloudflare’s JA3 fingerprinting that was blocking my requests. Styled the site with PicoCSS—it was super easy and kept things neat. Generated tons of images with Recraft.ai. Seriously, I must’ve churned out hundreds. It was a blast! Hosted on a single EC2 instance with EBS attached for SQLite storage. It’s pretty simple right now, and I’m debating whether to keep developing it or move on. If you have any questions or ideas for improvements, I’d love to hear them!
2 by airninja | 0 comments on Hacker News.
So, this summer I was hunting for a flight from Calgary to Tokyo with WestJet, and I kept seeing these random cheaper flights popping up. I got tired of refreshing the site non-stop, so I whipped up a script to scrape the flight data. It paid off—I scored a roundtrip for $1000 CAD in July! Naturally, I decided to turn this into a full-fledged project and built flight-price-alert.com! Tech details: Built with Go for the backend and SQLite for the database. Added some TLS spoofing to get around Cloudflare’s JA3 fingerprinting that was blocking my requests. Styled the site with PicoCSS—it was super easy and kept things neat. Generated tons of images with Recraft.ai. Seriously, I must’ve churned out hundreds. It was a blast! Hosted on a single EC2 instance with EBS attached for SQLite storage. It’s pretty simple right now, and I’m debating whether to keep developing it or move on. If you have any questions or ideas for improvements, I’d love to hear them!