Yet Another Blog Rewrite

It seems I have an addiction with rewriting my blog. The first step is acknowledging I have a problem.

Again, my motivations are financial. With Microsoft not releasing Partner Program coupons any more my Azure subscription is about to run out, and keeping my existing blog running under an App Service Plan was going to be too expensive longer term.

I have however been building some new projects with Firebase, and realised I could make some form of SPA and deploy it to Firebase to utilise their free hosting tier. And so here it is, in all it’s firebasey glory.

I started to write something in React to deploy here, but it was taking too much of my time, and handling conversions of markdown and dealing with the storage of the files in firestore was getting tricky, so I instead looked around and found Hexo - a JS-based tool that generates static sites from markdown, and is effectively the same as what I wrote in .NET but supercharged. It even uses front-matter in front of the markdown.

Fixing up the files was relatively straightforward (my front-matter format wasn’t really a standard way of setting it up), although I’ve noticed there’s odd behaviour with some of the headings on the pages, which I’ll need to resolve (perhaps it’s just this theme…).

I did notice too that it’s been more than a year since I last published an article here. I drafted a few but couldn’t finish them. The last 18 months has been chaotic with the establishment of a new company with a friend of mine, chasing various sales leads, and building new products. And that’s just what I’ve been doing in my free time. I’m hoping to start publishing more articles soon on what I’ve learnt & built with these new products, but for now they’re still somewhat “tented”.

I am now a far more proficient developer in .NET Core, React, Java, JavaScript and Electron. I’ve been building products utilising GCP, AWS, and Azure, and gotten more acquainted with the establishment of companies and the hurdles that throws in the path.

But, more on that soon.