TTL Calculator - Convert DNS TTL seconds to human-readable time (built with Datastar)

I just launched TTL Calculator so here announcing to the world.

In this post we'll discuss - what it is, why I built it, and how I built it.

See it live: https://ttlcalculator.com

What is it?

TTL Calculator is a little webapp that can convert from DNS TTLs (in seconds) to human readable time in days, hours, minutes, seconds.

Why did I build it?

Because I wanted to. But really I was debugging one of my site's DNS rules and saw some big ttls and wanted to know how long that was. So I did a quick google and there was an old site that literally just did this conversion.

I thought this site looked fun and was weird there was only one of them (what if it goes down!) so decided to build one myself.

This aligns with one of my goals this year to be more curious - and that will probably end up looking like building more random things I found that I thought were interesting.

So scratches my own itch, I was curious ab it, and I'm trying to build more webapps anyway.

How I built it

As usual I started off with CloudSeed - my F# project boilerplate. This gave me the core webapp scaffolding and I just needed to build out the views, business logic, and customize it a bit.

• Frontend: SSR HTML using Falco.Markup, Bulma for styling, and Datastar for reactivity
• Backend: F# + Falco
  • Related: Build a Fullstack Webapp with F# + Falco
• DB: Don't need one right now but using Postgres
• Hosting: Docker container configured with Coolify and running on Hetzner.
  • Related: Hosting my Docker Container on a VPS with Coolify as a PaaS with GitHub Autodeploys

Notable differences from how I usually build webapps are:

• Choosing Falco over Giraffe for my webapp. I find the apis simpler and I want to support the creator cause he's nice and been doing good work.
• Choosing Bulma over Tailwind for styling - again I find it simpler and honestly I kinda suck at styling so Tailwind is very configurable but I always configure it poorly. Bulma is lightweight, looks decent, and gives me less room to configure it badly.
• Choosing Datastar over HTMX / Alpine. This is a new experiment for me. I don't know if this will stick. But overall I'm impressed with Datastar and it seems to click a bit more for what I want to use it for - server-driven frontend all the way down. More to come here.
• Using Coolify to host my apps. I've done this for the past few apps of mine but this is the first of the year and pretty solidly happy with this choice.

I've been enjoying the continued move to "simpler" technologies so expect some of these to land in CloudSeed as that kind of tracks my state of the art for building Simple Scalable Systems for webapps.

Next

I really just built this site to cover a very niche need so it's basically done IMO. But if people start using it / I get ideas for changes I may hack on it a bit more.

If you liked this post you might also like:

• One Million Checkboxes - Globally Synced Data with HTMX
• The HAM Stack - A Simple Scalable Tech Stack for building modern web apps fast and cheap
• Why F# is a fun programming language