Timo's Blog

Stardate 2024-02-03, Saturday: Captain’s Log

by Timo Böwing posted at 2024-02-03 14:35:00 +0000 UTC

So after some twenty years of not really having a web site and being a hobbyist and professional software developer… I think it is time again to actually run a site again. I mean - isn’t it a question of “pride”? ;)

So, as of now I do not know what will come here in the future. Maybe just a blog, maybe I will provide information about my current and future projects here.

To be honest, my first idea to have a website again was not to have a website again, but I wanted to develop one. From scratch, just for the fun of it and for learning.

Well, currently, I am just rendering markdown based text here - dynamically rendered each time you visit this page. There are much smarter ways of achieving the goal…

I could have done this instead:

• build a site with Github Pages
• use some other hosted CMS such as Wordpress, Joomla…
• using a platform such as Squarespace, Wix, IONOS etc.
• use a professional static page generator such as Hugo
• just create some static HTML files and throw them on a VM in some datacenter
• spin up a Raspberry Pi with or without runnung Docker, doing dynamic DNS routing to that box and run the pages using e.g.
  • JVM with Quarkus, Spring Boot, Micronaut, Apache Tomcat, or just plain Jetty (JVM was and is my go-to stack for the past 22 years)
  • doing similar but natively, such as building my Quarkus app using GraalVM
  • spin up some Ruby, PHP, Django, LAMP, Sinatra, Node.js etc.
• doing the above in some datacenter or even cloud provider
• …

Instead - honestly - on the one hand I was tired of the operations part. I did not want to get my VM up to date, maintain and patch OS and middleware, play around with firewalls. Tons of other stuff I am forgetting right now.

So, I decided to go to the dark side and host my site with a cloud provider. The serverless way. So, no dedicated Kubernetes cluster or VM, just plain Google Cloud Run. This is basically a Kubernetes Knative deployment, running on an anonymous Kubernetes Cluster that Google operates and I am not aware of.

You develop something, make a Dockerfile, and deploy it with some terminal command (in a pipleine or not).

That’s for the ops part, I think more on that later.

OK, so I decided to program my own stuff - knowing it would be inferior to anything else but it is just fun. I decided to leave my feeling-at-home stack (JVM, Quarkus, Kotlin) and use something different. Something I was aware of and being one of the few stack I intentionally ignored: Go (golang).

Why? I mean there are other great programming languages, runtimes and frameworks - but come on… Go uses capitals for functions! In Go you have func DoSomething(arg string) instead of fun doSomething(arg: String) like in most other languages.

Verbs that start with uppercase letters! I had to ignore Go. Go uses upper and lower case to define the visibility scope of something. While other languages use reserved words like public and private for that, Go does this using case.

I could have accepted all kind of styles differing from Java or Kotlin such as writing in Kebap case, snake case etc. I get along with doing OO or functional… but this?

Well, here we are, this page is presented employing Go. But that is up for future entries here…