Your documentation site should be an MCP server
Introducing Denote, an AI-native documentation framework for Deno. Why I built it, what it does, and why I'm not building a hosted version.
Learning About View Transitions
Three good reads on the View Transitions API, from Smashing Magazine and web.dev.
Refactoring the Blog
Refactoring this blog to use two Fresh plugins I wrote: fresh_blog and fresh_ga4.
Adventures in Open Source
A short note about contributing to denoland/fresh and a recommendation to work on open source on the side.
Adding Comments to the Blog
Adding Disqus comments to a Fresh blog, lifting the island and component from someone else's portfolio repo.
90days: Day 15 -- Bit
Bit's developer onboarding is slow, loses your scroll position, and redefines terms without context. A rough first impression.
90days: Day 14 -- gRPC
The gRPC quickstart is fine, but the tutorial is JavaScript-only, mismatched with its reference code, and buried in maps-domain noise.
90days: Day 13 -- Apollo GraphQL Part 1
Apollo's lift-off-part1 is hand-holdy, and I'm not sure whether challenge-first or follow-the-steps sticks better.
90days: Day 12 -- Typescript
TotalTypescript's beginners TypeScript tutorial follows the same challenge-per-concept format as his Zod course.
90days: Day 11 -- Zod
Zod's docs are reference-only, so I learned from TotalTypescript's exercise-per-concept tutorial instead.
90days: Day 10 -- Loopback
Loopback's Todo and TodoList tutorials are well-structured, and a link to the Diátaxis framework made the whole experience worthwhile.
90days: Day 9 -- Temporal
Temporal's hello-world gets durable execution right, but the course is stuck on an SDK from July 2022 and needs a refresh.
90days: Day 8 -- Supabase
Building Supabase's user-management app with email confirmation, avatar upload, and S3 cleanup via database triggers.
90days: Day 7 -- Remix
The short Remix blog tutorial, an outdated routing convention blocking the path, and why tutorials should build familiar things.
90days: Day 6 -- Prisma
Prisma's getting-started guide, and why separating 'introduce the concepts' from 'apply them in a real app' is good doc design.
90days: Day 5 -- Blitz
Walking through the Blitz tutorial, appreciating the Django-style vote app but wishing auth were part of the hands-on.
90days: Day 4 -- Earthly
Trying Earthly, a tidy mashup of Docker and make, and wishing the tutorial had a more realistic example than hello-world-go.
90days: Day 3 -- Kubernetes
A quick pass through Minikube and the Kubernetes basics tutorials, then stepping back because there's no practical need to apply it.
90days: Day 2 -- Turborepo
Trying Turborepo and Turbopack without any monorepos that actually need incremental builds.
90days: Day 1 -- Astro
Kicking off a 90-days-of-tutorials project with Astro, and using it the same day to build an internal ubiquitous-language docs site at work.
March updates
A catch-up post after moving to Munich, covering a Spring microservices tutorial, a work blog with Lume, Storybook, and Jepsen's Maelstrom.
Deploying a deno app to Deno Deploy, Render, Netlify, Vercel, Railway
Comparing Deno Deploy and Render for deploying the same Deno server, and getting stuck on Render's GitHub-only CLI. (Part 1.)
Deploying a deno app to fly.io
A from-scratch walkthrough for deploying a Deno HTTP server to fly.io with a hand-rolled Dockerfile and docker-compose file.
Obligatory ChatGPT post
What ChatGPT is and isn't good for when building a dockerized Vite + React + Mongo app, and where I had to redo its work by hand.
More experiments with docker
Starting a dockerized frontend / backend / database template, nudged along by ChatGPT, as a starting point for future apps.
How to use Mongoose with Deno
Following the Deno Mongoose guide, killing a stray MongoDB process on port 27017, and getting it running in Docker with auth.
Fixing bugs and adding some info
Fixing an off-by-one in the newpost scaffold task and adding a stub About page.
Generating a post from a template
A Deno task that scaffolds a new post's markdown file and screenshots folder from a template.
Experimenting with deno and docker
Containerizing a small Deno HTTP server with docker-compose, including a two-container variant on separate ports.
Creating an open source project
Starting deno_cap, a small CLI for automating the screenshot workflow, and the open-source project checklist that came with it.
Forking an open source project
Forking Fresh to pick up an unmerged _app.tsx fix, and the trick of pointing an import map at a raw GitHub URL.
Adding a layout
The first real layout on the blog, plus a resolve to stop writing daily status updates and start writing proper posts.
Some days you win, some days you lose
A first-pass navbar and a short plan to make the site less ugly.
Adding analytics to your blog
Adding GA4 to a Fresh site via a middleware lifted from an open PR, and figuring out it was working all along.
Capturing the history of your blog
Borrowing Fresh's screenshot script so each post can come with a snapshot of how the site looked that day.
Creating a blog in 2023
The stack and workflow behind this blog: Fresh on Deno Deploy, plus a few markdown gotchas from getting set up.
How to not start a blog
My 3rd or 4th attempt at blogging, and why posting every day might finally make it stick.