I started Andrew because I don't know html, css or javascript. I thought writing an old school, frameworkless, website was the way to go to solve this. It's a decent strategy so far.

There are ideas coming out of its design constraints, and my naivete.

Website Migration from AKS to DigitalOcean

Andrew's getting new releases again, yes! I had always run it on kubernetes, because I had a little cluster in my old flat and I knew how to set up cert-manager to generate SSL certificates inside a kubernetes cluster.

When I moved, I wanted the site to stay up, so I rented a cluster from Azure, thinking I could probably keep its costs inside a dollar or so a day. It turned out I could not; I was puzzled that my server costs were low as I used spot instances everywhere in the cluster, but storage costs were high inside an otherwise stateless cluster.

I brushed it off; after all, I was actually hosting argo-cd, cert-manager, nginx and my website so I needed a couple of spot instances to make it work. Cost manager, though, showed

It took me a month to figure out that the spot instances were coming with premium SSD storage. The default view of a VM in the azure portal doesn't show the GUID for a disk, so I was asserting that this showed that I had mystery premium SSD disks in my subscription

az graph query -q "Resources | where tolower(properties.resourceGuid) == 'disk guid from azure cost explorer'"
{
    "count": 0,
    "data": [],
    "skip_token": null,
    "total_records": 0
}        
    

The azure support team agreed, and escalated me three or four times in three weeks. The they sent me screenshots of a disk that does not show the GUID anywhere and said, case closed we found it!

So, I wanted to move the site but I was also moving into a new place, and running a new team at work, and learning about manufacturing automation according to ISA-95 and designing a roadmap for five people, and I was just beat. So for two months I paid 200 a month for a website that has maybe 10 people visit it on a good week, while trying to financially recuperate from moving home. It was aggravating!

I don't have long enough ethernet cabling to set up my in-house k8s cluster outside of the living room, so I wanted to rehost to digital ocean. Last weekend I woke up feeling fresh, migrated Andrew and was reminded that I'd need to (a) figure out how to run cert-manager on a droplet and (b) host nginx to deal with SSL termination if I wanted to migrate my website.

Instead of those things, I spent a trivial amount on namecheap for an SSL certificate that's good for 5 years, then spent a day adding SSL support directly to Andrew. I had feared this would be a hard task, but the go http server's excellent and it was actually super easy, barely an inconvenience.

I love these sorts of chores out of nowhere when they're easy to resolve.

What's next?

So what comes next?

Andrew's got a slew of features I want. Support for templatised headers and footers provided by users would be great, for example. So would an RSS feed.

I really want to get back to jinx, and adding tests to templ, and writing a logging library. I really want to write a compiler, too, to establish my basic computer science knowledge.

So many projects! Life is a glorious time sink!