The redesign of my website

9/7/2018

I put up my original website a little over 3 years ago. I had used it as an exercise to learn more about linux server administration, and about the Apache HTTP Server (you can read more about my goals for that original project in my old blog post). Fast forward a couple of years, and my new obsession is cloud native technologies. I decided it was time for a facelift for my old website, and a new backend architecture. I have also decided to dedicate more time to blogging, and plan to make regular (at least biweekly) posts.

The New Goals

I wanted to keep a lot of goals around HTTPS and security, but I have made some sacrifices for usability. First, I have included content that comes from servers outside of my control. Most notably, I have made the decision to include Disqus comments on all blog posts. As part of their service, they do collect data on users, and you should read their privacy policy if interested.

I like to try to align some of my hobbies with my professional life, and so I added a few new goals for this iteration that I think will really benefit some of my work. For this new release, I had the following main goals:

• I wanted to design and code the UI from scratch. I've really come to enjoy front end development after completing much of freeCodeCamp's curriculum, and wanted to push the limits of my skills.
• Other than load-balancing, I wanted the entire site running on Kubernetes. This has been the core of my latest obsession, and the part of this I have been most excited about learning.
• I wanted extensive collection and monitoring of diagnostics for the full stack. I've implemented this mostly using Fluentd/Fluentbit pushing logs to Elasticsearch and visualized using Grafana. This is a very different stack than I use as part of my day job, but this was a very important part to me (I'd lose some AIOps street cred if I didn't monitor my own systems).
• I wanted to have more of a performance focus. I've made heavy use of caching at both the load balancer level and also the app level using Redis. I've also made use of a CDN for much of the content on the site.
• I wanted the blog architected in a more modern way, with pages dynamically rendered after pulling the post information from a database

The Results

I hope you find this version of my site more aesthetically pleasing, faster loading, and, eventually, more filled with useful content on this blog. I would love to get feedback on this redesign, so feel free to leave comments on this page or contact me using the form on the homepage.