New Site

This week I have started working on a new version of this site, one that will be quite different from this one. Inspired heavily by Devon Crawford's site, it will be a completely different approach to building a site - rather than providing the absolute minimum functionality for what I want to do with it (this iteration hosts blogs and nothing else), instead it will serve as a platform on which I could easily deploy any web apps I may develop in the future. It will be completel overkill for a personal site - but that's fine. In the process I'll get to learn about several new, interesting technologies such as Node, React and Docker, as well as how to have multiple servers interacting seemlessly with one another.

The plan at the moment is to produce something very similar to Devon's site - a front end server running React, a thin back end server using Node, and a database server with MySQL. Everything will be containerised with Docker and deployed using Kubernetes, meaning I should be able to add new features relatively painlessly. A security/auth server is a cool idea but not something that will be crucial until I have an app worth providing auth for, so this will be probably be the first 'add-on' once the new site is live, similarly with a CPU bound backend server, although mine definitely won't be written in dotnet.

Inspired by Shawn Wang's "Learn in Public", I will be attempting to do just that, as I embarrassingly stumble through new frameworks and libraries towards the finished product. Hopefully I will be able to show how achievable it is to build the kind of platform I envision even with little to no experience or knowledge of much of the technology involved.

Stay tuned ^^