Show HN: Muler, a search engine for drug info built with Flask

Hi HN,

Muler is a Flask app that allows users to search for pharmacological information by entering generic or proprietary drug names. External libraries used include Flask, SQLAlchemy, and FuzzyWuzzy.

This is a hobby project I made during my final year of medical school. As far as I can tell from the logs there are no more than five humans who use it semi-regularly (lots of bots pinging though). I don't mind because I find it very useful personally, and I've also learned a lot about Python, web dev, and databases.

Right now I'm trying to refactor the code (just wrote my first class) and implement unit tests (just started reading the Pytest docs), so I'd really appreciate specific feedback and tips about those.

Thanks for your time!

URL: http://muler.pythonanywhere.com/

Repo: https://github.com/PizzaMyHeart/muler

Based on the About page, and the information provided by the page, I'm obviously not the target audience for this page, but it was interesting information nonetheless.

Could definitely need some speed improvements or at least some indication of what's going on. Loading spinners are a band-aid, but are better than nothing.

It's not usually this slow. I suspect the sluggishness is due to issues on the hosting end related to the spike in traffic. That said, I'm hoping by refactoring the code I can improve performance. Loading spinners is a good idea.

Thanks so much for trying it out and giving your suggestions!

Sorry about that. I've done my best to make sure my code works before and after pushing changes to production. I think it might be due to limitations on the hosting side as I'm using the free tier on PythonAnywhere.

Nice, looks good! I would suggest increasing leading in the paragraphs when you view a specific drug, they're a bit close together and make reading difficult.