A New Website, A New Job, and A New Cup of Coffee

New Website

Welcome internet travelers, to the new edition of my public website. For the 2019 edition, I decided to go as minimal as possible, as a way to fight back against the endless noise that the majority of the internet has become. Videos and advertisements attack us at every click, endless scroll refuses to let us leave, but here in this small corner of the web, I thought it might be nice to give readers a break from all that activity. A return to basics and normalcy.

The previous version of this website was running on a simple Wordpress installation, hosted on GCP (Google Compute Platform) with Cloudflare acting as a CDN (Content Distribution Network), SSL via Let's Encrypt. Fun, and neat, but it was costing me Big Money like $5 a month for the smallest sliver of a micro server GCP would provide, and as time went on it became clear that I did not need all these extra Wordpress features. The site was nothing more than text and some fancy menus. With AWS's free tiers and getting outside of the traditional LAMP Stack/everything-must-run-on-a-machine mindset, I was able to setup this website using Terraform to do the following things; host files out of AWS S3 , then leveraged CloudFront for SSL termination and act as CDN. If I've done my math right everything should be FREE for a year and after that pennies in total cost. For heavier use websites, this might not be the way to go, but for me and this website, this setup is perfect, giving me total control over code and infrastructure, cats and dogs, cost and speed.

All of the code for both the website and deploying the technologies via terraform are available on this github repo. So if you want, you can build your own digital resume or personal website following this as an example.

New Job

In a few days, August 6th, I will start a new job with KCF Technology and I am really looking forward to the new gig. I think it's going to be a place that pushes me to work better and get my hands on a very diverse range of exiting technologies, plus from all accounts, this might be the first professional position with a growing company and not one that is shrinking (YaY!)

New Cup of Coffee

As also hinted in the title, I brewed a fresh carafe full of coffee, and will begin partaking after publishing this page. I've been told by many folks on the internet, that people like to know these things, and this is in no way a waste of your time.

Let me know on twitter @twstewart42, if you like the new look of the website or if you have any other comments.