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Static site (part 2)
In part 1, I talked about a new website infrastructure that I set up and compared the experience between old school managing my own server versus using a serverless PaaS (platform as a service).
After a few short months, I am surprised that I do not mind (lightly) managing my own server. I guess because so far I have not run into any issue, yet. And that is why I am surprised. It has been running well without a fuss.
At the same time, with another website on the serverless platform, occasionally, I ran into some hiccup. On Cloudflare Pages, depending on the time of day, their build step could take very long, although normally it would take only a handful of minutes. And a few days ago, it failed and failed. I could not push my content update at all.
Not good.
I am on the free tier, so there is no recourse to have it solved immediately. I accept that risk. I have no qualms about it.
But even if I am on the paid tier, at that specific incident, it would be rather tough to get it resolved right away, unless if I have an enterprise SLA (service level agreement).
I do not have active website on Deno. I have toyed with it and it is fast. But I do not know if it is worth migrating, since that will involve some rethink on the website authoring process. I used Vercel and Render also in the past.
For now, just one bad day is not strong enough reason to migrate out.
If my own server has a major issue, I may not be able to resolve it fast either without an enterprise SLA. But the simplicity of the deployment process means the risk is rather low. If the static website runs on my laptop, then it will run on the server.
The cost of the server is still lower than if I upgrade my account to the paid tier in the PaaS vendor. Yeah it costs more than free tier. And it does not have auto-scaling and what-not. But this has been a worthwhile experiment.
This is one of those “how hard can it be” question that ends better than expected.
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Misleading preview
I used Flutter in the past to develop an iOS app. But I want to try SwiftUI for a new project, so I am now learning SwiftUI development with XCode.
XCode has this nice Preview feature. It is slower than I expected given I have an M2 processor in my laptop. (Okay it is a complex and powerful IDE, so maybe as fast as Sublime Text is not realistic. But it should not feel slower than VS Code.)
The Preview helps give useful feedback loop. Most of the time.
Today, I spent a lot of time trying to debug a “Preview Crashed” error and went nowhere. Out of ideas, I decided to just build it and run the app on the Simulator. I wanted to know if I would get a different error message than the one I got in XCode.
Guess what? It runs without any problem in the Simulator. 🤔
Oh well, I will take any small win I can.
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Medium launched a Mastodon instance
I accidentally ran into a recent Medium announcement about their launch of a Mastodon instance https://me.dm over at their blog.
Neat. 👍🏼
I moved from Medium to Write.As for personal blog a few years ago and last year I tried Substack for a new project. I wonder if Substack will also support Mastodon. Not that I am active there; I have not been active in my Mastodon timeline in ages.
I just think it is neat to have major internet properties supporting non-corporate social media like Mastodon.
