Launching my new homepage with Amazon Q Developer
This post introduces you to my new homepage and blog that is launched with this post!
Virtual Servers and different flavours
Those that have known me for multiple years might also know the different flavours of “my online presence” that have evolved and changed throughout the years.
From starting my journey with plain HTML through learning AJAX #reklame #affiliatelink in 2006 to building my own “custom” CMS because I didn’t like the existing Open Source Tools… until a few years ago when I migrated the blog to Wordpress…
All of these tries had something in common: they very running on a virtual server, a vserver, a “real thing” that I used to host, deploy and publish the website. In the last few years with the company Netcup GmbH. They had more in common: Most of the years I’ve used SFTP to upload files and most of the things where not stored in Git ;)
Some parts of the pages where always dynamic and the data was stored in databases (mainly MySQL).
I think I had a few “everything is lost” situations when either the database of the website was lost completely :-)
And when using Wordpress, I actually needed to log in to the Admin UI to write a new blogpost of update a page!
Moving on to something new, with help from Amazon Q Developer
So, what you are looking at here is now the complete oposite. :-)
It uses a web framework (Astro) that renders the pages on the server side and then publishes it. This also means, that I’ve finally moved the hosting on to AWS - using the traditional “CloudFront + S3” approach.
The website was already 40% done when Salih showed me Astro and, after reading a bit I decided to give it a go - using Amazon Q Developer :-)
I asked Q Developer to do “everything”: from the required infrastructure as code, to creating the dark and light theme to importing existing blog posts from the old page.
I’m especially proud of the About page and the Talks pages - they looked really bad when migrating them in, but when I asked Q Developer to make them pretty, it all worked out well :-)
He was also able to implement the RSS feed for me!
Adding an API and a backend
I was nearly done, all blog posts had been migrated, the relevant pages had been included and links had been created when I thought, I should potentially offer a possibility to reach out to me with the contact form and the possibility to sign up for a newsletter. Both required a backend and an API - which I also got Q Developer to implement for me ;)
Observability is done with CloudWatch and especially RUM, a pretty simple way to collect a few information about your users.
I am now writing my blog posts in Markdown, pushing them to Git and minutes later my website is updated. :-)
What’s next?
I have a few more ideas on what I would like to do next - aiming to get close to what Allen has built with readysetcloud.io.
What do you think I should invest in next?
Let me know on socials or in the contact form. :-)