Continuous integration and deployment practices, pipelines, and automation workflows
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I was having a conversation recently and Vercel came up. The organisation I am currently working with has been exploring it as it seems to offer a lot of benefits for developers who have been let down by the promises of cloud. I have to admit that I had not really looked at Vercel before, so I decided to take a look and while I was at it ended up building and deploying a simple web application that has been on the bottom of my to-do list for a while.
I have tried to move to exclusively using Mermaid for diagrams in my blog posts and documentation. It is a great tool for creating diagrams in a text based format that can be version controlled and easily edited. One of the limitations I have found is the lack of custom icons. This has been addressed by using the Iconify library which has a large collection of open source icons. Combined with the architecture-beta diagram type in Mermaid it is possible to create some great looking diagrams that go beyond the basic flow diagrams I have been using until now.
I've always had a lingering fear that I'll break my site due to the somewhat precise nature of Docusaurus. It's a concern that's grown since I opened up the site for others to submit pull requests. While I run live rendering during my own updates, I can't guarantee others will do the same. So I've added a simple action on top of my existing GitHub Action which is triggered when a pull request is created. This new action builds the site and captures the output from npm run build --verbose, then adds it as a comment to the pull request.
I've now extended the GitHub action for those of us who want to create sites in Docusaurus and then have our committed and pushed changes automatically built and synced to an S3 bucket. Static S3 sites are a great way to host static content, and Docusaurus is a brilliant tool for rendering sites out of simple markdown content.
I used to run a hosted Linux web server, which was great for stuff like all those weird little scripts and things I wanted to run 'always on'. After a while I put a few websites on it, and some websites for friends, and my little brother, and the local residents association, and next thing I knew I was running a load of instances of WordPress. I was also constantly fending off the advances of hackers who were forever finding exploits in the famously insecure blogging platform.