Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
This is a bit of a rant. Maybe my eyes are not as good as they used to be. When I read an article that has pictures on them, I like to zoom in to see the details. You might think this makes no sense, I just have to pinch the screen to zoom in. You would be right, but some websites intentionally prevent you from zooming in.
I love the idea of microservices. When there's a problem on your website, you don't need to fix and redeploy your entire codebase. If the issue only affects your authentication service, you can deploy just that one component and call it a day. You've isolated the authentication feature into an independent microservice that can be managed and maintained on its own.
Here is something that makes me proud of my blog. The redirect rule I wrote for my very first article 12 years ago still works! This blog was an experiment. When I designed it, my intention was to try everything possible and not care if it broke. In fact, I often said that if anything broke, it would be an opportunity for me to face a new challenge and learn. What I didn't take into account was that some things are much harder to fix than others. More specifically: URLs.
There are several reasons for Google to downrank a website from their search results. My first experience with downranking was on my very first day at a job in 2011. The day I walked into the building, Google released their first Panda update. My new employer, being a "content creator," disappeared from search results. This was a multi-million dollar company that had teams of writers and a portfolio of websites. They depended on Google, and not appearing in search meant we went on code red that first day.
There is an RSS reader that I often used in the past and have become very reliant on. I would share the name with you, but as they grew more popular, they have decided to follow the enshittification route. They've changed their UI, hidden several popular links behind multilayered menus, and they have revamped their API. Features that I used to rely on have disappeared, and the API is close to useless.
As a developer, bugs consume me. When I discover one, it's all I can think about. I can't focus on other work. I can't relax. I dream about it. The urge to fix it is overwhelming. I'll keep working until midnight even when my day should have ended at 6pm. I simply cannot leave a bug unfixed.
For a moment in my life, you couldn't see me without a book in hand. A self-help book to be precise. I felt like the world was moving, changing, and I was being left behind. Being raised to look at the mirror before I blame others, I decided if there was something to improve, it was my very own self.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped talking about servers. The word felt clunky, industrial, too tied to physical reality. Instead, we started saying "the cloud". It sounds weightless, infinite, almost magical. Your photos live in the cloud. Your documents sync through the cloud. Your company's entire infrastructure runs in the cloud.
After making one of the largest refactor of our application, one that took several months in the making, where we tackled some of our biggest challenges. We tackled technical debt, upgraded legacy software, fortified security, and even made the application faster. After all that, we deployed the application, and held our breath, waiting for the user feedback to roll in.
It's been over a year and I didn't receive a single notification email from my web-server. It could either mean that my $6 VPS is amazing and hasn't gone down once this past year. Or it could mean that my health check service has gone down. Well this year, I have received emails from readers to tell me my website was down. So after doing some digging, I discovered that my health checker works just fine, but all emails it sends are being rejected by gmail. Unless you use a third party service, you have little to no chance of sending an email that gets delivered.
