Bear Blog

Martinus wanted a personal blog without 2020 web bloat. The weekend project became a multi-tenant platform; he posted it to Hacker News and hit the front page within 20 minutes.

SendGrid tier upgrades, hotfixes, and 130 manual DNS records later, Bear stayed up on ordinary Django — he wrote that well-optimized, battle-tested tech handled the hug on about a $7/month server.

Feature growth meant saying no to infinite scroll and rich-text bloat — simplicity was the product. Spam required a human-in-the-loop approval queue so SEO poison never indexed.

The HN hangover included Heroku hobby Postgres rebooting for maintenance during traffic — the classic shared-database curse. Reliability became a reason to simplify further, not add microservices.

Bear stayed free and open source; custom domains and beta features fund the server bill via Sponsorware. Martinus wrote about moving toward Litestream-replicated SQLite to match the platform’s speed-and-simplicity ethos.

He explicitly chose Django over niche frameworks so someone else could maintain the codebase in ten years — the anti-over-engineering bet is longevity, not novelty.