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Behind the Scenes: My Blog
Software Engineering Team Lead and Director of Cloudsure
I developed corporate programmer using a Ruby-based static-site generator called Jekyll. It transforms Markdown, Liquid, HTML and CSS to a static website so that no is database required.
While I was planning to leave the corporate world, I started rebranding. I wanted a change. A new look. A new tech. A new name.
My blog
I wanted a new blog. I was introduced to Gatsby, a blazing fast static site generator for React.
This was handy as I wanted to learn React. Off I went to implement it using the Gatsby Advanced Starter, because why start small?
This starter kit has a lot of features including offline support and web sockets which I think is rad. I must admit that it tricky for me, as a beginner, to implement - but I came right and the site came out better than I expected it to. I still have a few features that are outstanding.
My brand
I wanted a new name. I settled on curious programmer after a lot of different ideas that came to mind.
I chose the name because I am curious about how things work and what is in store for me in my Clojure and Cloud infrastructure journey. It is also happens to be similar to my former brand.
I visited GoDaddy to secure the curiousprogrammer.io domain and had to work extra hard to get my blog ready.
Hosting
I wanted new hosting. I used to host at BlueHost but I was stuck with an FTP and cpanel approach which wasn't ideal for me.
Somehow I stumbled across Netlify. It lets me build, deploy and manage my blog automatically.
When I push my changes to my public GitHub repo, the Netlify hook detects the change and builds it automatically for me. With Gatsby's web sockets, the web pages refresh over time as changes are detected.
Code quality
I am interested in knowing what the quality of my code is and found websites that verify it automatically on build.
I registered with both Code Climate and Codacy to get these insights. After each deployment, I get a report telling me what standard my code is in. I seem to have some work to do 😉
I enjoy writing and sharing what I learn. My blogging platform makes this possible and I am proud of its outcome.
I hope that some of these technologies can be useful to you when developing a blog or any other website of your own. If you have any other technologies that you use, please share it with me.