Wow, time flies. Last time I wrote something I was in Baabe (in northern Germany -- the Baltic Sea, actually) and then I went back to Berlin. Then we had to pack up and move to Munich! Exciting, right!? (Ok probably not so much for you, dear readers). What's happened in the past weeks, from the technical side of things?
Pause on writing tutorials
For starters, I haven't finished my tutorial about publishing the same app to multiple cloud hosting services. Worse, this guy highlights some additional free hosting providers I could check out. By the time I finish his list, I guess there will be even more!
Spring Tutorial
I somehow got interested in Spring and microservices (or perhaps the other way around). I found this great set of tutorials (with the 10th published at the author's website). This was really great for learning how to orchestrate some microservices. I suppose my biggest complaint is that they mostly don't interact with each other, and it seemed like the thought was "how can I put some stuff together and pretend this is a cohesive unit". I would prefer if the services all talked in order to provide some functionality.
I have some vague plans of re-implementing these services using Deno (and Oak?), so perhaps I'll take them a step further and create something that integrates together. But overall this was a great starting point.
Work Blog
I started a blog at work, because some people were talking about me and didn't fully understand what I was doing. Turns out I could do a better job communicating. I figure a good way to improve the situation is by starting to write more: project pages, weekly updates, monthly reviews, random thoughts. Hey, this sounds like a blog!
I decided to use an existing SSG, as opposed to rolling my own by hand. I'm on the company dollar, can't be messing around! This was instructive because it turns out that Lume is a fantastic SSG with a really powerful blog template. This saved me probably hundreds of hours of work, which I'm sure my boss is thankful for. It also conveniently gives me a target to aim for, as I think about how to improve this blog.
For example, a few things that I completely didn't think of:
- previous post / next post links when viewing a post
- paginating the posts page
- showing the first few sentences of a post on the main page
Wow, lots of things to improve with this site!
Storybook Tutorial
I heard about Storybook a few months ago at work, but didn't do anything with it. For some reason I wanted to check it out, so I followed their tutorial. Wow, this was really well done! I think if I just follow one or two great tutorials per week, I would be a significantly better developer. Or at least more knowledgeable about the range of technologies available.
Fly -> Maelstrom
Google knows what I do, so they know I look at fly.io occasionally. This is cool because they suggested I read this article on the fly blog. This then quickly linked to Maelstrom, a system for building and testing toy distributed systems.
This is great because jumping into distributed systems is a bit overwhelming, and this makes it easy to get started. Except for the fact that the tutorials are written in ruby, and I've never used that. So I followed along and then I tried rewriting them in Deno (maybe you're noticing a pattern here...) -- turns out that was pretty hard. I'm not finished yet, but I hope to write that up as well.
Looks like I need to get serious about updating my projects page, since it seems like there are many things to keep track of. Fortunately my work blog already has a working projects page, so perhaps I can copy some techniques from that.
Right, that's all for now. There's another big todo: write about my "baabe hello" project that I spent a bunch of time working on. Hopefully that will be my next post, but who knows when that'll happen, or if I'll write about something else. Sorry readers!