Editor’s Note

• The platform description below described my previous setup between 2017 and 2021- check out the original 2017 guide for more in-depth details on this tech stack, or checkout the 4-year 2021 tech stack retro.

Intro

Hey there! My name is Jason, and for some reason you’ve stumbled onto my site. Whether it was to laugh at/with me on my rants, geeking out over playing games (currently Overwatch is my drug of choice), or because a technical guide sparked your interest, I hope you derive some enjoyment from this site.

This is actually the 5th or 6th time I’ve tried to get a blog going. I kept building and rebuilding prior versions on different platforms, and ended up learning five or six different ways to deploy blog platforms instead of just writing posts.

Platform Overview

Technically speaking, I am proud that I managed to get everything to this point, because:

1.) I get to be lazy

• There is no maintenance required for the site, just content updates. Since hosting is taken care of by Github Pages, and deployment taken care of by Cloudflare’s CDN, all I have to do to update content is push to the github repo.
• In this fashion the site also becomes distributed among the CDN’s edge nodes, becoming fault-tolerant in the process (barring catastrophic failure), all while minimizing latency globally.

2.) I get free stuff until the heat death of the universe, or until they run out of business, whichever comes first

• Free automatic optimization of static assets and TLS provided by Cloudflare
• Free sending/receiving of emails from a custom email address via Mailgun *

3.) This site has an extremely strong foundation

• By fully leveraging Jekyll’s liquid templating, this site can generate multiple output files from a single source
• Has proper 404 error code handling
• Has automatic redirects to the www. subdomain for better SEO
• Automatically leverages Opengraph for all pages, making any sharing on Facebook look good.
• Automatically adds metadata to all blog posts and projects via Schema.org markup
• Is mobile-friendly

* Up to 10k emails a month, which is overkill for my purposes.

Existential Crisis Question

If you play Genji in Overwatch, are you supposed to spam “I NEED HEALING” when you get a kill, or emote over the enemy’s corpse?

My Answer

I think I would uninstall the game and re-evaluate my life for picking trash heroes. At least it isn’t as bad as instalocking Hanzo.

Future Steps

There’s a couple projects that I’ll be adding to the site over time, along with the writing of technical articles and other blog posts.

Blog Posts & Technical Articles

• The first planned article will be on AWS and dev-ops in general
• The second planned article will be on a specific clever trick to build in a programmatic circuit breaker into AWS
• The third planned post will be something different, and be a rant about NYC’s terrible housing market for renters
• A fourth planned post fawning over the Hamilton Musical, since I only just saw it recently and was completely blown away and need to vent.