About This Blog
Copilot Wrote This Post
Not really, but it could be true!
When I was writing a bio for myself GitHub Copilot has some suggestions:
Motivation
Blogging on Dev.to or Medium certainly has its advantages, however I had a couple of goals outside of blogging with this project. As someone who was self-taught and then attended a coding bootcamp, I was advised to call myself a full stack engineer. After joining an Infrastructure team, then a couple of Platform teams I found myself unpracticed in modern front end trends. Save posts and images in a database and blob storage, launch the app in Kubernetes and incorporate authentication? Sure no problem. Set up the cloud infrastructure to support all of that? Just another day in the office. But the last time that I had taken a long look at React, you still had to write your own Webpack configuration file. So I decided to challenge myself to build something and here we are. My goals, once I narrowed them down were as follows:
- Use a modern flavor of React.
- Use a modern CSS framework.
- Build something fun to build.
- Build and deploy quickly.
- Spend little to no money.
Those last two became important when the product I was supporting unexpectedly was announced as hitting End of Life and I was one of the many laid off.
Choices
Everything pointed to hosting a static site on my local Kubernetes cluster and using a Cloudflare Tunnel to expose the application to the world. I decided a static site generator would be best and nearly decided to just use Hugo rather diving into modern React, but then I revisited my goals and decided I was focusing on the wrong parts of the project. I did a bit more reading, decided on using Tailwind CSS and found NextJS.
Seeing the hosting options on Vercel, I'd nearly checked everything off my list. I realized that not only had I to come up with the fun project, but I hadn't considered where I wanted to store the posts. I decided that it wouldn't be prohibitively difficult to write the posts in Markdown and keep them in a GitHub repo. Finally I decided a clone of the Iphone Photos app would be an exciting enough project.
Next time, how I built the Photos clone.