Skip to content

Every Tuesday at 12pm Mountain Time

weekly-dev- chat logo

A casual weekly virtual chat mostly focused on web and software development.

Weekly Dev Chat is a place to ask questions, hear different viewpoints, and get to know your fellow developers. Every week there is an initial topic posted to get the discussion started. Sometimes we discuss the initial topic the entire chat, and other times the topic changes several times through the natural flow of the conversation.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

Hosting a MySQL DB on hobby‑scale projects: Costs, Quirks, and Work‑arounds

I’ve been experimenting with MySQL on several cloud platforms including Railway, GCP Compute Engine, and other “free‑tier” services. Compared with PostgreSQL, getting a stable, free MySQL deployment has proven trickier (container-related errors, opaque usage‑based billing).

Have you run into the same hurdles? What are your work‑arounds? Any favourite low‑cost hosts? Any billing horror stories? Your tips could help everyone keep projects alive without breaking the bank.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

MySQL Icon

  • 1 min read

Technical Debt

For those new to the term, technical debt is similar to financial debt. A project often starts with clean architecture and the best of intentions. Over time, however, questionable decisions creep in, changes get rushed, processes are undermined, and the codebase gradually becomes harder and harder to work with. Eventually, we reach the point of asking whether a complete rewrite is needed—sort of like declaring bankruptcy.

Have you encountered technical debt in your projects? How do you deal with it? How do you prevent (or at least manage) it?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

messy desk

  • in Security
  • 1 min read

picoCTF Ensemble

picoCTF logo

Let's work on picoCTF challenge in today's (February 3rd, 2026) Weekly Dev Chat. It will be the usual where I share my screen and we work through some challenges together.

This will be good practice for the upcoming picoCTF competition in March:

https://picoctf.org/

If you are in the Edmonton area and interested in joining a team ping yegsec as they usually organize a local team:

https://www.yegsec.ca/

Also, the next Weekly Dev Chat IRL event in February will be picoCTF themed! Exact time and date to be announced soon.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Zoom link will be posted at 12pm MDT.

https://weeklydevchat.com/join/