Thursday, January 2, 2020

            Today I thought I'd write a bit about how the tech behind ThirtySixFive, and the horrible atrocities I've
            committed as a seasoned devops and software professional. First off, I want to set the scene a bit, to
            maybe give myself a bit of credit as to why I've made the technical choices I have thus far.

            When I set out to do this challenge a lot of things came to mind on how I could make this the perfect
            website, will all the fancy new technologies and a prim and proper CI/CD process. However, I'm also a
            working professional who's not super pumped about doing these things in my free time. I know, you're
            personally offended. A developer who DOESN'T want to develop on their own time? I should be ashamed of
            myself. But honestly, the cold hard truth of it is, I'm not a 10x programmer. I'm a pretty good one.
            I like writing code, debugging systems, and architecting durable, distributed,
            and highly available systems (like all those sexy buzzwords?). But I also really like doing other things;
            like spending time with my hot ass wife, or playing video games, or, ya know, enjoying the never-ending
            beauty of Montana. So I choose to spend my time outside of work (where I spend all day programming) doing
            those things and not programming.

            Okay, so back to the softening of the blow (that feels like it just made it worse. I came to the idea
            of this challenge while out running (as my all best ideas do).  One of the foundations of this idea was as
            follows: Why not publish a website, that I can both blog on, and evolve technically, in the open.  SO,
            with that in mind, I decided to get something up in super rough form (this page is nigh un-viewable in it's
            current format). Then, in the open, and with a traceable record, I would evolve the site, and any
            underlying tech. I have lots of ideas, but who know's exactly where I'll go from here (likely towards
            react, because that feels like the hottness), but I'll be doing it with commits, to this repository.

            So now you can see what I've done so far (it's literally nothing you couldn't see by clicking "view-source"),
            but you don't know how I'm hosting this site.  That's pretty straight forward, and is the way I choose to
            host all my sites (and have for years) that is with AWS S3.  Using a registered domain, and AWS Hosted Zone,
            it's super easy to create a bucket, drop in some HTML/CSS/JS and having a working, highly avaialable, and fast
            website.  Lots of people have written blogs on this subject, so I'm not going to try and re-create that here.
            What I will do, is eventually post a Cloudformation template that could be used to re-create exactly what
            I've done to host this website.

            So, I'm architecting this out in the open, on github/AWS, and I'm hosting just using AWS S3 and AWS Route53.
            The code, as you can clearly see by checking source, is just HTML5 and CSS.  No JS yet, and certainly no JS
            frameworks.

            A few of the things I want to accomplish in the month of January:
              - Purchase (and document that decision with a post) a fitness band.
              - Integrate fitness band heart rate data into site.
              - Include a static photo of myself each post.
              - Re-write the page to be more dynamic and mobile friendly (probably react but who knows for sure).
              - Convince my sister to help me create a cool logo because she's a dope ass Graphic Designer.
              - Automate the majority of the post generation, and ensuing site changes.

            I think most of these things are possible, we'll see though.  I think the hardest one by far will be the
            integration of fitness data, but I think that will also hae the biggest payoff.  Imagine what I could
            learn (or other people could learn about me) about myself with 365 days of heart rate data.  I'm not
            entirely sure I'd make 100% of that date public, but I'm going to strongly consider it.

            So that's the INCREDIBLY long winded version of why the site is the way it is, and WHAT it is.  And a
            small preview of what's coming, though certainly a lot of it will change.  Hope you enjoy it, and
            I'll see you tomorrow for another rant, maybe about something more juicy, like Notorious.