The new website is finally live! I put in a lot of hard work over the past months on it. I'm proud to say that it's out now and it looks pretty cool, at least to me!
The old kycnot.me site was built using Python with Flask about two years ago. Since then, I've gained a lot more experience with Golang and coding in general. Trying to update that old codebase, which had a lot
of design flaws, would have been a bad idea. It would have been like building on an unstable foundation.
That's why I made the decision to rewrite the entire application. Initially, I chose to use SvelteKit with JavaScript. I did manage to create a stable site that looked similar to the new one, but it required Jav
aScript to work. As I kept coding, I started feeling like I was repeating "the Python mistake". I was writing the app in a language I wasn't very familiar with (just like when I was learning Python at that mom
ent), and I wasn't happy with the code. It felt like spaghetti code all the time.
So, I made a complete U-turn and started over, this time using Golang. While I'm not as proficient in Golang as I am in Python now, I find it to be a very enjoyable language to code with. Most aof my recent pr
ojects have been written in Golang, and I'm getting the hang of it. I tried to make the best decisions I could and structure the code as well as possible. Of course, there's still room for improvement, which
I'll address in future updates.
Now I have a more maintainable website that can scale much better. It uses a real database instead of a JSON file like the old site, and I can add many more features. Since I chose to go with Golang, I mad
e the "tradeoff" of not using JavaScript at all, so all the rendering load falls on the server. But I believe it's a tradeoff that's worth it.
This rewrite has been a labor of love, in the end, I've been working on this for more than 3 months now. I don't have a team, so I work by myself on my free time, but I find great joy in helping people on their private journey with cryptocurrencies. Making it easier for individuals to use cryptocurrencies without KYC is a goal I am proud of!
If you appreciate my work, you can support me through the methods listed here. Alternatively, feel free to send me an email with a kind message!
All the code is written in Golang, the website makes use of the chi router for the routing part. I also make use of BigCache for caching database requests. There is 0 JavaScript, so all the rendering load falls on the server, this means it needed to be efficient enough to not drawn with a few users since the old site was reporting about 2M requests per month on average (note that this are not unique users).
The database is running with mariadb, using gorm as the ORM. This is more than enough for this project. I started working with an sqlite database, but I ended up migrating to mariadb since it works better with JSON.
The scraper is using chromedp combined with a series of keywords, regex and other logic. It runs every 24h and scraps all the services. You can find the scraper code here.
The frontend is written using Golang Templates for the HTML, and TailwindCSS plus DaisyUI for the CSS classes framework. I also use some plain CSS, but it's minimal.
The requests forms is the only part of the project that requires JavaScript to be enabled. It is needed for parsing some from fields that are a bit complex and for the "captcha", which is a simple Proof of Work that runs on your browser, destinated to avoid spam. For this, I use mCaptcha.