re:Launching my Blog

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blog • re-launch

Today I decided to re-launch my blog! More than three years have passed since the last time I gave some love to it. To celebrate it, I’m going to dive into the motivations, the chosen platform and the next challenges.

Motivation

Since my last blog post, a lot of things have changed in my life. My second child was born, a girl this time :smile:. I changed jobs twice! I quited from GuestCentric to join Uniplaces in 2014 and in 2016 I quited from Uniplaces to join Talkdesk. Between that time I learned a lot of new things and I still do and that’s the main reason for this re-launch, to share my new learnings and my experiences.

Choosing the Platform

After I decided to re-launch my blog I needed to choose the platform. The old one served me very well but there was a couple of reasons that led me to change to another one, which are:

  • The design was too heavy, dark and had too much things.
  • Too much technology to manage - html, javascript, css, php, mysql.
  • Server-side.
  • Deployment was not that funny.
  • No more multi-language. Only english this time!

The next step was to define the requirements:

  • Generate static files from Markdown.
  • No CMS or server-side solution.
  • Import all my blog posts from the old blog and kept the same links.
  • Easy to customize.
  • Self hosted to be hosted in AWS S3 and served via CloudFront.
  • Faster and easier to deploy.

So I started my research to find the solution. It was quite fast. I stumble at Jekyll and while reading it’s documentation it was very clear to me it was the right candidate!

In a few hours I had:

  • The new blog up and running and fully customized.
  • A new lighter and fresh look, credits to Minimal Mistakes.
  • Served via AWS CloudFront and S3 = faster content delivery worldwide!
  • All old blog posts were kept - also fixed some broken links. :smile:
  • Now I can write in Markdown and serve it in HTML :smile: !

Next Challenges

I always liked the DevOps world and right now there are plenty of amazing tools and platforms. I have been working with some - AWS, Packer, Terraform, Vagrant, Docker, Ansible and Puppet - but there are much more that I intend to learn. Saying that, one of my goals is to regular write here, so I will have certainly some experiences and examples to share here.

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