The Tech Stack

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.

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.

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.

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) $.