Self-Hosting Rails (and Python) Apps with Cloudflare Tunnels: Why I Swapped $17/Month Cloud Hosting for Self-hosting

Be adventurous and free - start hosting this stuff yourself with no barriers to your exploration! The $17/Month Death by a Thousand Cuts I love building side projects. I tend to use them to explore technologies in a fun way - Fantasy golf leagues, personal dashboards - the kind of apps that scratch a specific itch but don’t need to scale to millions of users. But every time I’d spin up a new Rails app, I’d hit the same wall: hosting costs that kill exploration. ...

August 10, 2025 · 11 min · 2241 words · Mark Holton

AI Integration: Building Conversational Apps with MCP

Why This Matters: The Shift to Agentic AI The software landscape is shifting toward agentic AI systems - applications where Large Language Models (LLMs) don’t just answer questions, but actively use tools to solve complex problems. Instead of building separate AI features, the market and industry are moving toward AI that can directly interact with your existing systems, databases, and workflows. ...

June 22, 2025 · 14 min · 2853 words · Mark Holton