The main goal of this blog is simply to document the development of my technical skills and help me to organise my thinking around the work I’m doing.
I’ll probably spend the majority of posts discussing problems I run into, how I fixed them and how I can architect around them in future.
I also just enjoy writing!
In this post I’ll give a brief overview of the makeup of this site - some of this will be trivial but the idea is to present the engineering decisions I’ve made and justify them.
This site
Infrastructure
I rent a small droplet from DigitalOcean to host this site. It’s extremely cost effective (around £2.50/mnth) and very convenient. I’ve got access to daily backups and I can break back into the server through the DO web ui if I ever lose SSH access (for whatever reason).
The domain judah.sh I’ve purchased from Cloudflare (who sell domains at wholesale price), and the SSL cert is provided generously, for free, by Let’s Encrypt.
I take daily backups of some specific folders on the server to my mac via rsync.
SSH to the server is configured to be allowed over my Tailnet, generously provided for free via Tailscale. The firewall is very much active and set to block all incoming connections of any variety, by default.
Software Stack
This site is a static site built with Jekyll (using my own custom theme) which is quite popular, free and open source.
I keep a repo of this site in Github, and once I push from my local machine to the repo Github Actions does the CI work of turning the .md file into a page. From there a very simple Nginx server responds to requests and serves them.
I’ve got some very limited monitoring with healthchecks.io and a couple of shell scripts that ping some endpoints I’ve exposed for different services. If I develop this blog into something more serious I can see myself implementing Prometheus/Grafana for more detailed monitoring.
A note on open source
I’ve not spent anything on software to get this site up and running which is a testament to the amazing hard work open source software contributors do all over the world. I’d like to inaugurate this site with that in mind.