Welcome to my new site! It’s built on top of Gatsby, a static site generator. It uses React, GraphQL, and a special version of markdown called MDX to render the pages you’re reading.
MDX is a neat way of mixing React (JSX) and Markdown. I enjoy Markdown for it’s brevity when writing notes or documentation. I enjoy React for managing my views. I’ve used a custom combination of the two in the past to create technical documentation but ran into limitations for one reason or another. With MDX, everything just works. MDX opens things up for prototyping within my post and let’s me keep my options open.
Moving on to the hosting side of things. This site is running on AWS because it’s cost effective and I get to reuse a lot of the concepts I learned during my time at Rackspace where I helped build a micro frontend platform powered by AWS. Back then I used Terraform to manage the infrastructure via code and this time is no different. I’m using S3 for object storage (static web assets), Cloudfront and Lambda@Edge for my CDN and edge computing needs, Route53 for DNS and Certificate Manager for SSL.
Technically this static site is using a DynamoDB (NoSQL database) table but it’s just there to manage state locking for the rare event when I’m running multiple instances of terraform apply (like in CI builds).
Why go through all of this for a small blog?
Million dollar question. I’m interested in leveraging what I’ve learned in the past to support organizations and non profits scale using these well architected infrastructure and platform services.
Last but not least, this is practice and helps sharpen my skillset.
If you’re still here, thanks! This got nerdy fast.
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