Firefly has to be the coolest project I've worked on so far, and I don't say that lightly
While studying at Ignite Professional Studies I noticed that many of my fellow students had some awesome ideas, but they didn't know how to build them to get actual users.
Having worked with Vercel extensively, I knew a lot about the general concepts of PaaS (Platform as a Service), which is basically selling server-space for people to run their projects 24/7. However, after trying to teach them Vercel, it seemed that Vercel was too advanced and moved too quickly for my colleagues to actually understand what was going on.
Hence, Firefly was born! Firefly was a project that walked students through hosting their websites and other projects using some Raspberry Pi 5's that we had lying around the lab at Ignite to create a cluster. It's built using Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Linux, Typescript, and a few other technologies.
The project was TERRIBLE initially, as it ran into some pretty primitive errors with distributing available compute and partitioning PostgreSQL stores. But now, after a few updates, it works great! The Raspbery Pi 5's perform very nicely for this usecase and the software is super-performant.
Students can create their account, upload their project, and use the cluster to publish their websites to the web with working SQL integrations!