diff --git a/.vscode/settings.json b/.vscode/settings.json index 33f4e47..bb2a987 100644 --- a/.vscode/settings.json +++ b/.vscode/settings.json @@ -2,5 +2,11 @@ "cSpell.words": [ "frontmatter", "slsw" + ], + "grammarly.selectors": [ + { + "language": "markdown", + "scheme": "file" + } ] } diff --git a/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/index.md b/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/index.md index 624e66b..b586bc5 100644 --- a/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/index.md +++ b/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/index.md @@ -1,28 +1,130 @@ --- title: My blog hasn't gotten an update in 5 years, here's why. -date: "2022-10-15" +date: "2022-10-30" template: "post" category: "blog" tags: - "software development" - "architecture" - "writing" -description: "Good software design practices and a few perfectionistic tendencies lead to almost 5 years without any writing. This blog is a deep dive into a few of the struggles of the past 5 years" +description: "Good software design practices and a few perfectionistic tendencies lead to almost 5 years without any writing. This post is a deep dive into a few of the struggles of the past 5 years" --- -Wanting to perfect a site ... -lots of theming issues +I've been rebuilding the old "[rickvanlieshout.com](https://rickvanlieshout.com)" for over 5 years now... +But the website isn't that big. It could be done way faster and it has been done way faster. +The thing is, I rewrote it several times, each time with a different design and updated packages. -## Things I've changed +## Changing the theme (round #1) -- Darkmode + switch -- Header on blogs -- prism.js darkmode + themes -- tables -- quotes -- image zoom +Shortly after finishing the original website its design already felt stale. +Sure, it had some nice colors and I really liked the mobile view (it read beautifully on a smartphone), but it still felt off. +Nothing on the website gave me a wow effect, most of it was "ok" and some of it was not to my liking. +I never quite put my finger on the why, but it just didn't feel right. -### The posts query bug +I did put a lot of time into optimizing and designing the bits I found important, the biggest time sinks were multi-language support and print mode. +In the end, I even ended up making a compromise on the multi-language support because I didn't want to blog in Dutch. +One of the things I'm glad I did, however, was working on styling print mode. +It wasn't because I expect many people to print my website or articles, it's because I expect some of them to use "read-focus" extensions or apps like pocket as I do so often myself. I also suspect the occasional pdf download, most of which I probably did myself on my resume page though. -My website has a lot more pages than the official example on Github. -Their postsQuery retrieves everything with a slug +One of the biggest annoyances that I tried solving with a new theme was dark mode. +Hell, I swung completely in the opposite direction and bought the all-dark [Hikma theme](https://themeforest.net/item/hikma-portfolio-html-template/23366729). I rebuilt the entire site in that theme, but never published. The next chapter will explain why. + +## Moving to Gatsby + +Right around the time I started thinking about uploading the new theme I also found GatsbyJS. +Gatsby was in its infancy back then, barely out of beta and a little rough around the edges. +Considering I like to live on the edge, software-wise anyway, I decided to go for it. +`rickvanlieshout.com-hikma-gatsby` was born and I worked on it for a few short weeks. + +In the end, that also burned out because, again, the theme felt stale. + +## Upgrading to Gatsby 3 and back to the old theme + +I'd had enough! I needed to finish my website and I needed to do it quickly. +I picked up the new Gatsby V3, my old theme, and a renewed mental vigor and started coding away. +The first prototypes came into existence very quickly and looked fine. + +Alas, I burnt out on the project almost as quickly as I had started. +One of the reasons was the theme... but there was a more serious reason this time as well. + +## Server-side rendering, the old theme, and a stubborn software architect + +During the rewrite to Gatsby V3 I encountered various SSR issues. +The most notable of them all was not being able to save and apply the color scheme without annoying flashes on page loads. +I chalked it up to a CSS issue and left it for what it was at first, but I simply couldn't go live like this. + +We just discovered my other biggest flaw. Perfectionism. +Because I am responsible for code and product quality at my job and have also heavily emphasized that part of my contributions in any of the open-source projects I've worked on, I felt that I couldn't release something that wasn't perfect. +And as most of you will know, you can chase perfection forever. There is always a flaw, always something to improve. + +In my mind, I could fix the quality issues, but I'd still be left with the theme. +I also realized I'd end up at the same point I started... Same design, and the same missing features, just a bunch of time later. +This wasn't working either. + +## Finding a new design and a new starting point + +One day I found myself procrastinating on a whole bunch of things by looking at fancy CSS themes. +I hadn't really thought about it, but I'd ended up looking at new portfolios and blog designs. +I'd found a few good candidates but didn't really make a choice yet. + +Was I embarking on the journey once again? Or would I give up before I started? +Eventually, I decided to organize my thoughts and figure out why things failed before, it roughly came down to: + +- I can't go about and make it perfect on the first try + - No translations + - Print mode for all the important pages + - Dark mode can come later +- I didn't like the design, I wanted something black and white which could be reversed for dark mode +- I didn't like the previous efforts of using Gatsby for just the posts and not the static pages +- I needed a starting point, no matter how "good" it was, I needed a place to start writing again. +- I needed a new website fast because the old one was breaking down (PHP updates caused the API to break) + +Eventually, I stumbled upon "[lumen](https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen)". A beautiful blog project with amazing typography and a relatively modern Gatsby setup. It wasn't perfect, it missed a few bells and whistles, but it did tick off a lot of boxes. +I decided to fork the project and try it out, adding bits and bobs of content to see how my writing style would look with the new theme. + +I liked it. + +## Not all was perfect however + +As with all things in life, this project would need some work. I found a few things that were lacking which I wanted to fix before releasing a new website. I was determined not to fall into the same trap as before however and structured the work better than I ever had before. + +### Things I changed + +Below you'll find a list of some of the biggest things I've changed. + +- I added a Dark mode with a little [react-toggle](https://github.com/aaronshaf/react-toggle) to switch between light/dark. +- Blog posts now show a header that includes the "back to articles" button and my name. +- Added code block theming for both light and dark mode +!["A block of code in both the dark and light themes"](/media/prism_styles.png) +- I added support for tables with a bit of styling around them (slight indent and row styling) +![a table](/media/table.png) +- I added the ability to quote others in a beautiful way +![a quote](/media/quote.png) +- Medium like image zooming (click any of the images above) + +#### The posts query bug + +Here and there I also encountered some bugs. Most of them got fixed in my copy but one of them was big enough that I felt a need to contribute to the project. The "posts query" bug. + +Before the fix, there was a bug in the `post-query` file that simply looked through all markdown files to find pages with a slug. +This, however, is troublesome if you have more than the 3 example pages because the default page sizing will fail. +You see, the code that fetches the blogs does so by filtering out real "posts", but the pagination queries do not. +This meant that, given enough pages, the pagination would overflow and tell the user that there were more posts available than there were. +If a user were to click on "next" they would be presented with an empty page. + +In the end, it was a tiny bug, but I [submitted a PR](https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen/pull/1125) to fix it in the upstream repository. + +## making it my own + +Though the original codebase gave me a great starting point I have decided not to follow the upstream contributions but instead forge my own future. +Doing so allows me to keep my codebase clean and allows me to deviate from the choices made by Alexander. + +Alexander is slowly introducing more features than I need. +One of the newer feature commits (a dark mode) even included his own state management library "diesel" for which I see absolutely no fit in the project. + +As such, I have decided to simply skip pulling from upstream and maintain the website myself. + +## The future is bright + +Now that I have this new blog it should be easier for me to write some articles. +Let's hope I will find time to write more than I have in the past 5 years! diff --git a/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/prism_styles.png b/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/prism_styles.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6f5e7bf Binary files /dev/null and b/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/prism_styles.png differ diff --git a/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/quote.png b/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/quote.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..026346f Binary files /dev/null and b/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/quote.png differ diff --git a/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/table.png b/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/table.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b43b64 Binary files /dev/null and b/content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/media/table.png differ diff --git a/package-lock.json b/package-lock.json index 785ae88..72134f1 100644 --- a/package-lock.json +++ b/package-lock.json @@ -19,7 +19,6 @@ "gatsby-plugin-catch-links": "^4.24.0", "gatsby-plugin-feed": "^4.24.0", "gatsby-plugin-google-gtag": "^4.24.0", - 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-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0,0,0,0); + -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; touch-action: pan-x;