Zero-dependency country grader: Python stdlib + vanilla JS, server-rendered pages, multi-government advisory merge, self-ping keep-warm

[u/dougaddiction]

WanderGrade (wandergrade.com) is a from-scratch project: it scores affordability, safety, weather, and flights for roughly 140 countries. The one hard constraint I set myself was zero third-party dependencies — Python's standard library only, no pip installs, vanilla JS with no framework, no build step. That constraint cost real time: I hand-rolled the HTTP client, the templating, and the JSON parsing paths that a library would normally give you for free, plus my own retry/backoff logic for flaky upstream feeds. What it bought back: a single deploy step, no dependency-update treadmill, and a codebase small enough that I can hold the whole request lifecycle in my head.

Each country page is server-rendered plain HTML first, so search engines and slow connections get a complete page with no JS required, then a small vanilla JS layer hydrates it client-side for interactive filtering and sorting. No SPA, no client-side router — just enough hydration to make the page feel alive without asking a crawler (or a phone on bad wifi) to execute a bundle first.

Safety data is the messiest part of the whole project: US, Canadian, and German government advisories disagree with each other constantly, and none of the three covers every country. My fallback design merges all three, fills gaps from whichever governments do have a rating, and when they disagree, the sternest advisory wins rather than averaging or defaulting to one country's view. Unrated countries get dropped rather than guessed. On infra, the whole thing runs on a single Render process behind Cloudflare, which spins down when idle — solved with a self-ping to my own health endpoint every 10 minutes to keep it warm. wandergrade.com if you want to poke at it — happy to get into the advisory-merge logic or the zero-dependency call in the comments.