The after-post
As a secondary kind of “post” inspired by the after-show from one of my favorite Podcasts - ATP - I’ve decided to include a “post-blog-post” section where I am going to include whatever interests me since the last time I posted. Like a little popcorn nugget. More succinctly, treat:
- Everything in the real post as the “professional” section where thought, time, and effort went into making something meaningful.
- This? More of a “raw”, current time and place, “P.S.” after-thought.
Technical Bits
I’m always interested in this part, and if you’re reading this so might you. I figured I would take this first after-post to go over a little of the technical behind-the-scenes running the show right now. Originally, I had set off on doing something more complex and cool engineering-wise because “techz y’all”… but that was 3 years ago and then I put that on a git shelf somewhere on a NAS. The general cycle I go through with these kinds of side projects is pretty consistent now, especially when a new full-stack is involved:
This time around - and taking some inspiration from everyone’s good pal Shia LaBeouf - I tried to find the quickest route to standing up an authoring platform that just worked enough for me to get started on actually writing.
- Hosting: DigitalOcean (Referral Link) - Had this already from setting up a personal Wallabag (think: Pocket)
- Static Site Generator: Gatsby
- Posts: Markdown, converted via gatsby-transformer-remark
- Misc: Gatsby Starter Template: gatsby-starter-lumen (heavily ripped apart), prettier, yarn, eslint, travis, npm, Jest, etc…
I still managed to check some other boxes along the way because multi-tasking:
- I currently work for Facebook which develops React, so Gatsby is a start at learning that plus GraphQL since I don’t use either in my day-to-day work but should probably know them
- Markdown is developer-friendly and pretty universal now (at least some flavor of it), so less time formatting and more time writing
- A ton of out-of-the-box technical voodoo which I do not fully understand yet, like SEO, RSS, Sitemap, and the like… so something free for nothing much additional on my end that I’ll one day learn to master
…And who knows where this will go from here. This is just the beginning of another adventure for me which… often goes nowhere. But, if everything goes to plan…
I’ll see you in 1-2 weeks.
-EP