This site is not only a personal website, it is also a software development and DevOps exercise. I am, after all, first and foremost a software developer and wanted to have 100% control over the website's architecture, easy-to-setup local, staging and production environments, proper version control, CI/CD with automated testing and automatic publishing.

The Code

For the actual coding framework I chose Gatsby. It enabled me to focus on frontend only and use tools I was already somewhat familiar with, namely, React and MUI. For a developer it offers a really nice way of building a website and completely fulfilled my requirements regarding control and testability. Most of the code written by me is quite blunt page-specific code but I did end up refactoring some of it into reusable components with automated tests.

For the Articles I use MDX.

code and tests

The CI/CD

Automatic building, testing and deployment is done with GitHub Actions. They serve my limited needs perfectly and I do not have to add separate CI/CD service to my project.

CI/CD with Github Workflows

The Server - Staging & Production

The public site (at the time of writing, a public staging version) is run at Fly.io. Gatsby itself offers hosting too and - as my site is purely a frontend - I could have chosen surge.sh as well but for some reason I like the idea of having control over the container the service is running from and I like Fly.io's user interface and scalability options.

code and tests
code and tests

The Monitoring

Although I run the site from Fly.io and really do not have to worry about servers or infrastructure I do want to have basic monitoring set up. For that purpose I picked Better Uptime. Their free tier seems to offer a really nice bang for the (0) $.

code and tests

Credits

A huge part of software development nowadays relies on open source software and utilities created and maintained by a crowd of individuals and companies.

Here I especially want to acknowledge people creating high quality graphics and icons for us to use.

Photographs

I have used my own photograps and my profile photographs were taken by Mari @ Studio SightHound but I also use images from talented people in Unsplash .

I do my best to keep these lists up to date :)

Copyright Mäkinen Management Oy

Interested in the technologies running this site? Check out the Tech page.
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