I want to write some articles about using Aws serverless services. Part of that is trying them out and deploying changes from a local machine. There are a number of ways to do that, but the one I want to focus on is using the Serverless Application Model CLI with secure credentials. This article will show you how to follow along with this setup. Create an Aws account The first thing you’ll need is an Aws account. You can create one for free, but you will have to provide a credit card. For more information, see the official documentation. ...
Aws Serverless
Serverless technology isn’t something I’ve covered much in previous articles. As a reader of this blog would recognize, I love tech that scales to zero because it enables for easy experimentation with little or zero cost. In this article, I’m going to give an overview of what I’ve been looking at lately and a few articles I’d like to write in the near future. This will not be an authoritative piece, it’s meant to be an editorial - meaning these are my opinions. ...
Removing Jquery
As I mentioned in my last post, one of my older Rails apps has been out in production for two years now. When I wrote it back in 2019, I used jQuery and Bootstrap, along with a few other older technologies. Reviewing it recently, I updated to the latest version of Rails 5, removed CoffeeScript, and did some more cleaning and updates. As that work came to a close, I lamented the fact that for all the improvements, the real slow spot in this app is that it still loads the jQuery and Bootstrap assets which are relatively large given the simplicity of the front end. ...
Legacy Already
The other night I was looking over an old app of mine, the Chore Scheduler. It started as a desire to rip out references to unused Rails engines, such as ActionCable and ActionMailer. Since these are not used by the app, but were included by the basic rails new command. Off we go on another adventure. You can take a look at the repo as it’s open on Github. Runtime Dependencies I started out by ripping out the require rails/all in my application.rb. This all file requires a bunch of pieces, such as ActiveRecord, ActiveStorage, ActionCable, etc. So by removing it, and manually adding each engine that I actually want to use, I can reduce the amount of code loaded at runtime. Not a huge win, but why not? ...
Using Hugo
After the experience with tag pages, I finally had some motivation to try another static site generator - Hugo. I chose Hugo because it’s One of the post popular options Written in Go - a language I’ve been trying to work with more Unboxing I followed the quick start page and used HomeBrew to install Hugo as a binary, then installed the PaperMod theme after taking a look at the gallery of options. With that, I was off and running with a site that ...
Adventures with Typescript
The latest adventure I’ve been on is one with Typescript. The technology was developed by Microsoft as a way to add typing to Javascript. It’s popularity has been increasing over the past few years. I had some experience with it working on Angular 2 projects during my time at Snag. Having gone from that environment to my current job and projects written with more pure Javascript, it’s been very interesting to come back to it and have the experience anew. ...
Creating Tag Pages
At the top of posts on this site, you can see the tags for each post. This was a somewhat “out-of-the-box” feature of the Jekyll theme that I chose to use and I always liked the look of them, but it bugged me that they were just text without a link to anywhere. It made sense to me that they would be a link to a page that included the posts that also used this tag. ...
Adding Svelte
Wait, wasn’t the last post about Vue? How have we switched to Svelte already?!? Let me explain. Svelte is a fantastic front-end component library developed originally by Rich Harris of the New York Times. It doesn’t have the widespread popularity that Vue, React and Angular have, but it is growing in notoriety, especially since the release of version 3 in 2019. In my limited world view (of the front-end), it stands out because it has always focused on pre-compilation to provide a … svelte … javascript file rather than including a “run-time” library of javascript code that manipulates the virtual DOM. This is a feature that has since been developed into many frameworks/libraries, but it is what makes Svelte unique. ...
Adding Vue
It’s been a while. I plan on writing more posts on all the things I’ve been up to in the last six months. One of them was finally experimenting with VueJS. I’ll cover my thoughts more in a future post. For now I want to introduce my first Vue component (on this blog). I plan on expanding my playground by using VueJS on this very blog. This will have two benefits, ...
New Colors
A small note that I’ve changed the site color from the default theme blue to NC State Wolfpack red. Hopefully I’ve gotten everything and there isn’t some stray blue out there. After watching enough college basketball on ESPN, the chevron pattern really grew on me so I’ve included that, using only CSS, in the top header. It took me a bit of playing around with, but I really like this example on Codepen (thanks to Megan McKinnon for that). It uses gradients that are very thin and sharp, thus more like lines, that are calculated to be the right angle for a given width to height ratio to make a repeating pattern. ...