Do you hate cooking blogs? Sure, we all do..

Inane story, some ads, ingredient somewhere, more adds, quatities somewhere else, another ad. Like and subscribe..

It is embarrassing to say that I bought the domain name with that sort of thing in mind. I have some of our go-tos in texts from Katie and others that I have emailed to myself (from texts from Katie). I parked some stuff on WordPress and promptly remembered that I hate WordPress about as much as I hate cooking blogs. We know what we have and what we like—it wasn’t a very practical idea. No reason to host that sort of thing.

So instead, I sort of built an anti-food-blog: Chomptron. It’s an AI-powered engine that turns whatever’s in your fridge into actual recipes. No fluff, no life stories, just dinner.

The Problem

You’ve got chicken, some tomatoes, garlic, and half an onion. Or maybe just sriracha and some leftovers. You don’t want to read an article; you just want to know how to combine those things into something edible without making a grocery run.

The Solution

Type the ingredients, hit generate, and get a recipe with scaled measurements and instructions. It uses Google Gemini under the hood to handle the logic. Bam..

Features that actually matter:

• Scaling that works – Most sites make you do the math. Chomptron scales from 0.25x to 4x automatically
• Privacy by default – It saves up to 100 recipes in your browser’s localStorage. I don’t want your email, I don’t want your data, and I don’t want to manage a user database
• Dietary logic – Filters for everything from Vegan to Shellfish-free
• Dark mode – Wreck your eyes!

The Stack

I wanted this to be fast and ’tidy.’ No framework bloat, no heavy lifting on the client side:

• Backend: Node.js 20 + Express
• AI: Google Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash-lite)
• Frontend: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript
• Platform: Google Cloud Run (Serverless)

Why Serverless?

Chomptron runs on Google Cloud Run, which fits the old ‘cattle, not pets’ thing nicely:

• Scales to zero: If nobody is using the site, I pay $0. It costs me effectively nothing to keep this live.
• Auto-scales: If it suddenly gets traffic, GCP spins up containers to handle it.
• Zero maintenance: No OS to patch, no server to reboot.

I built in some smart caching (24-hour TTL) and rate-limiting to keep the Gemini API costs under control, but otherwise, it’s a hands-off deployment.

CI/CD Workflow

The deployment cycle is refreshing. Push to main triggers a Cloud Build which handles the Dockerization and pushes to Cloud Run. It’s a gang of tests and a few seconds of waiting before it’s live.

It’s got the regular dev junk:

• Health checks (/health, /ready)
• Proper SEO/Open Graph tags
• PWA support so you can pin it to your home screen

Check it out

Live: https://chomptron.com

Source: https://github.com/swantron/chomptron

It’s free to use and nearly free to run (plz don’t spam it). It was a fun excuse to get back into GCP and keep a JS project clean. No bloat, no stories—just the recipes. Chef kiss..

Do you hate insecure base images? Sure, we all do..

I built a thing: secure-base-images. It’s a minimal, security-hardened Docker base image for static Go binaries.

Issue

Most Docker images are bloated. They include shells, package managers, and a ton of dependencies you don’t need. This creates a huge attack surface that your security team loves to talk about, and drives fast pipeline guys like me insane. For static Go tools, you literally just need the binary and some certs.

Solution

A distroless base image that gives you:

• Zero vulnerabilities - Automated Trivy security scanning catches CRITICAL/HIGH issues
• Minimal attack surface - No shell, no package manager, just your binary
• Non-root execution - Runs as uid 65532 by default
• Fast builds - Multi-platform support (amd64/arm64) via GitHub Actions
• Dead simple - 3 lines in ya Dockerfile

Usage

FROM swantron/secure-base:latest
COPY myapp /app
ENTRYPOINT ["/app"]

That’s it. Push a tag, GitHub Actions builds it, scans it with Trivy, and publishes to Docker Hub if it’s clean (it is.)

Under the Hood

The GitHub Actions workflow is doing the heavy lifting:

1. Runs integration tests (non-root user, no shell, CA certs present, etc.)
2. Builds the image
3. Scans with Trivy - build fails if vulnerabilities found
4. Multi-platform build (amd64/arm64)
5. Pushes to Docker Hub on release tags

It’s opinionated but in a good way. Security by default.

Get It

Source: https://github.com/swantron/secure-base-images

Docker Hub: swantron/secure-base:latest

The QUICKSTART.md gets you from zero to published in about 10 minutes.

I’ve been busy with tron swan dot com.

It’s still just hammering on stuff and learning, with a robot motif. The robot spins.

Reminder: the site is a playground, and is sort of stupid. It is also a nicely done React site with modern patterns and a legit pipeline. I run a bunch of health checks for other services.. there is a nice weather feature.. I use it to stream Spotify while I work. It is all over the place.

Here’s the source: https://github.com/swantron/tronswan

strain noodles: ❌
strain sun: ✅

40%-ish solar eclipse in Bozeman. Time to make crescents.

10 year-old provided jellybean feedback to 12 year-old..

Alex from Peloton likes to say something along the lines of “you don’t have to get ready if you stay ready.” Its pretty good advice.

Along those lines I decided to put together a react app to stay fresh. I’ve been hammering on (gitlab) pipelines and api frameworks at work for most of the year.. time for a project.

It is live on tronswan.com

The goals were to:
- hit some APIs from react
- mess around and build some components
- implement playwright on a project
- write GH Actions to handle build / test / deploy
- POC CI/CD to DigialOcean

Pretty fun project.. I’m displaying weather stuff and doing fizzbuzz via a weird component. Full CI/CD. Take a look if you’re bored.

https://github.com/swantron/tronswan

➜  ~ curl -s https://api.openweathermap.org/geo/1.0/direct\?q\=Bozeman\&limit\=5\&appid\=$WEATHER_API_KEY | jq .
[
  {
    "name": "Bozeman",
    "local_names": {
      "en": "Bozeman",
      "ru": "Бозмен"
    },
    "lat": 45.6794293,
    "lon": -111.044047,
    "country": "US",
    "state": "Montana"
  }
]
➜  ~ curl -s https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather\?lat\=45.67\&lon\=-111.04\&appid\=$WEATHER_API_KEY\&units\=imperial | jq .main
{
  "temp": -18.99,
  "feels_like": -31.59,
  "temp_min": -21.44,
  "temp_max": -15.3,
  "pressure": 1022,
  "humidity": 71
}

1/19/2023 - Bozeman gets Verizon 5G

It is both fast and several years late.

I mentioned in the previous post that the lightening picture would possibly look nice on a canvas, or
“It would, without any doubt, look fucking awesome on a sleeveless shirt if I crop out the neighbors’ houses.”

Here’s the crop..

.. go nuts.

I don’t think there’s a contest, but here’s my entry.

Cellphones are pretty amazing.. that pic was taken through glass via Google Night Sight. The camera operator basically just has to aim at an area and keep the device still for a minute or so. Crazy storm, crazy technology. I would say something like ’the future is here, but the skies are angry’, but that that would sound very stupid.

I don’t know.. the picture might look pretty awesome on a canvas. It would, without any doubt, look fucking awesome on a sleeveless shirt if I crop out the neighbors’ houses.